Picturing Frederick Douglass

Commemorating the bicentennial of Frederick Douglasss birthday and featuring images discovered since its original publication in 2015, this tour de force (Library Journal, starred review) reintroduced Frederick Douglass to a twenty-first-century audience. From these pageswhich include over 160 photographs of Douglass, as well as his previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aestheticswe learn that neither Custer nor Twain, nor even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it was Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave-turned-abolitionist, eloquent orator, and seminal writer, who is canonized here as a leading pioneer in photography and a prescient theorist who believed in the explosive social power of what was then just an emerging art form. Featuring: Contributions from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kenneth B. Morris, Jr. (a direct Douglass descendent) 160 separate photographs of Douglassmany of which have never been publicly seen and were long lost to history A collection of contemporaneous artwork that shows how powerful Douglasss photographic legacy remains today, over a century after his death All Douglasss previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics