Picturing Frederick Douglass

John Stauffer is professor of English, American studies, and African American studies at Harvard University. Zoe Trodd is professor and chair of American literature in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Celeste-Marie Bernier is professor of African American studies in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513–2008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer, producer, and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com. Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. is descended from two of the most important names in American history: he is the great-great-great grandson of Frederick Douglass and the great-great grandson of Booker T. Washington. He is also the Founder and President of the public charity, Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, which uses education in schools across the U.S. to address and prevent contemporary forms of slavery or human trafficking in communities.

"With 160 photographs, many never before seen, this book provides a strong visual history of Douglass and his era. Douglass believed that photography had extraordinary social power, and the inclusion of previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics show him to be an important theorist of the new art form." -- Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal "Picturing Frederick Douglass marries all of my present interests: legacies of slavery; beautiful images of a beautiful man; and the first theory of photography as a democratic medium capable of social change. Stunningly original and elegantly written and designed, it will inspire anyone interested in the links between the visual and the verbal." -- Sally Mann, author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs "Douglass emerges here out of photographic technology"s earliest years, with majestic beauty, and through the power of his own self-creations. The book is the result of intrepid research and brilliant analysis; it charts Douglass"s life visually, allowing him to look back at us wryly, wistfully, wrathfully." -- David W. Blight, Yale University, and author of the forthcoming Frederick Douglass: A Life "In Picturing Frederick Douglass, Stauffer, Trodd, and Bernier offer exhilarating scholarship and our idea of Douglass and our sense of photography in nineteenth-century America are deepened. This is brilliant and very moving work." -- Darryl Pinckney, author of High Cotton, Out There and Black Balled: The Black Vote and U.S. Democracy "Picturing Frederick Douglass marks a significant turn in the long history of Douglass's reception. Both as a subject for photography and as a critical theorist who reflected on the democratic, humane, and truth-telling powers of the medium, Douglass emerges in this beautiful volume in a completely new light." -- W. J. T. Mitchell, author of Seeing Through Race "Nothing less than a masterpiece in the fields of biography, African-American history, and not least of all the neglected area of iconography...A riveting instant classic and a pure pleasure to behold." -- Harold Holzer, winner of the Lincoln Prize and author of Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion "Picturing Frederick Douglass is to be shared, studied, read and repeated every six months, not only in the classroom but in our living rooms...Beautifully researched and storied...A true treasure!" -- Deborah Willis, author of Reflections in Black and the acclaimed documentary, Through a Lens Darkly