during the beginning of reconstruction and throughout reconstruction about how much they're going to make ending victory mean something. how are they going to make the badges of dishonor, if if you will, how much are you going to make those stick on former confederates? when the confederates elect people to congress in 1865 and the fact that they -- they say we're not going to recognize these new members of congress. how much are you going to make the responsibility for the war rest upon southerners' soldiers? if you think about the burdens placed upon southerners by the 14th amendment and by military reconstruction i think some of that is in large part, an effort -- part of this debate and the outcome of a debate about how much you all want to dishonor former confederates and how difficult that's going to make reintegration of the

country. thank you. [ applause ] >> american history tv airs on c-span 3 every weekend telling the american story through events, interviews, and visits to historic locations. this month american history tv is in primetime to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on c-span 3. our features include lectures in history, visits to college classrooms to hear lectures by top history professors. american artifacts takes a look at the treasures as u.s.'s historic sites and artifacts. revealing the 20th century through archival films and newsreels. the civil war where you hear about the people who shape the civil war and reconstruction, and the presidency focuses on u.s. presidents and first ladies to learn about their politics, policies, and legacies. all this month in primetime and

every weekend on american history tv on c-span 3. >> when american history tv continues during this congressional break special, photos of emancipation during the civil war. that's followed by a discussion of the politics behind reconstruction after the war and how the end of the civil war was being explained and redefined at the time. >> thursday on american history tv primetime the 40th anniversary of the national air and space museum. the celebration took place in july with the current museum director retired general jack daley and a look at exhibits on the start of aviation and into space exploration. it begins tomorrow night at 8:00 eastern. next university of massachusetts amherst professor of history barbara krauthamer

talks about using photography to chart the history of slavery both before and after emancipation. she skuz tdiscusses the legacy emancipation and how freed african-americans used photography as a means of independence and self-expression. in addition, she goes over the change in depictions of african-americans through photography and its relationship to the perception of african-americans in the post-war united states. her talk is about 50 minutes. good evening. i'm peter carmichael, professor of history here at gettysburg college. it's my pleasure to introduce barbara krauthamer. she's associate professor of history at the university of massachusetts at amherst where she teaches courses on

antebellum u.s. history, epans pags, a -- emancipation, native american history. her first book black slaves, slavery, emancipation and citizenship in the native american south. that's quite a title. published by the university of north carolina press. this book details the untold story of the enslavement of indians in the 18th and 19th centuries. barbara has also co-authored a photographic history of slavery emancipation and freedom publ h published in 2013, published by temple university press, and it is also for sale in our bookstore. tonight she will be speaking about her recent work and the talk is entitled envisioning emancipation, black americans, and the end of slavery. please welcome barbara.

hello. good evening. thank you for staying this late into the night. thank you for staying awake. thank you, peter, for the invitation and the introduction. allison, who has made sure that everything happened seamlessly from massachusetts to gettysburg. tonight i want to talk to you about the book that i co-authored with debra willis. debra willis, if you don't know who she is the leading scholar and the history of african-american photography, mcarthur award winner. just a brilliant woman and a dear friend of mine, and she and i were colleagues for many years, and over the years had

many conversations about photographs of enslaved people that we came across in the course of doing other research projects. i would say to her, you know, you're the photography scholar. explain to me why i have never read anything about the history of the photography of slavery and emancipation? she would say to me, i don't know, you're the historian of slavery and emancipation. you tell me. and so for truly ae decade she and i would go out to lunch, go out it dinner, have a drink and show each other these photographs and then one day we said, you know, there may actually be a book project here. the book, indeed, turned out to be envisioning emancipation. our question in this project and in one that we're just starting to get to work on in the upcoming months was what did freedom look like, right? we know a lot about the legal history and the political history of the debates over slavery, of the civil war and of reconstruction, but we wanted to

really take this question to a visual perspective and ask sort of how is freedom emancipation represented, and how did african-americans represent themselves? really the heart of our project was a history of african-americans through their own eyes, right? how they saw themselves and represented themselves. on a more scholarly level, we were curious about using photographs and seeing them, right, and reading the visual text as it were of both artifacts right as both sort of the relic of the past, but also as historical sources on emancipation and its legacies, and obviously the most lasting and important legacy for our purpose this weekend is the history of reconstruction. so we were curious to see what we could do with these photographs to understand that history, how it was nar arated d preserved and how

african-americans were represented in a visual telling of that history of emancipation and its legacies. so what i'm going to do tonight, right -- there's an illuminated copy of the emancipation proclamation. i'll take you through some of the images that we discuss and write about in the book. there's some that i'll show you quickly and will linger on. i should say as we were putting this book together, we looked through thousands and thousands of images from archives both in the united states and abroad, and early on our editor said you can include 75 images. we thought, well, that's just never ever going to work. since we came to the editor with about 250 they said, you know, you can do 75. we went back to the pile of 250, and we got it down to 200, go like that, and we went back to the editor, and we said 75 is not going to work. they said, okay, 100. we said 200. we went back and forth. finally we got to the point where we just didn't tell them how many we submitted.

we were sort of hoping that they wouldn't count, and clearly no one counted too carefully because the book came out. some of the images i'll show you tonight are in the book, and some are not in the book. when we started and we were thinking about what does freedom look like, we thought it was important to think about what does slavery look like in the history of photography? much of the scholarship on the history of photography, especially in the u.s. context, argues that photography when it arrived in the united states from france in the late 1840s, early 1850s had a really profound democratizing affect on american culture? right? the technology became relatively affordable relatively quickly and that many americans, great and modest, could afford to have their pictures made. as we thought about it, we thought this line of argument and interpretation didn't fit at all with what we were seeing in the photographs of enslaved people. we begin the book by thinking about slavery and photography and really arguing quite str

strenuously that the history of photography for african-americans was not one about this democratic expansion of american culture. in the 1850s, which is an interesting year that we'll get back to, of enslaved africans and their american-born children, photos that were made in south carolina under the direction of a harvard scientist who wanted to try to document his theories of polygenesis. that there were separate orders of human beings and there were separate creations of separate species. we have a series of these degariotypes made. i don't have a laser pointer. you can see on the left-hand side of the screen there that there are these handwritten labels where, this one says jack driver, guinea, plantation from

south carolina. there are a number of pictures like that that show both african enslaved people and then their american born prodigy with the attempt of using photography to present a visual image of human difference and human hierarchy. there are others that have women with their breasts exposed. many scholars have argued, right, that this is really part of the scientific project and wasn't intended as sort of pornographic endeavor, and i would suggest that, in fact, the two are very closely intertwined, right? that forcing black women to strip and reveal their breasts for the camera was both part of this "scientific" endeavor, but that in and of itself was very much based in ideas about black women's hypersexuality, lack of morality, lack of dignity, and lack of respectability. this image is actually the one that really got us thinking we need to pull all of these pictures together and do a book.

this is an image that's a wanted notice for a runaway slave. a woman named dolly. one of the first things that caught our attention, of course, was that there is a photograph attached to the top of this handwritten notice. automatically it raised a number of questions for us of why did this woman's master have her picture? right? why -- what prompted him to have a photograph of this enslaved woman made? we still don't know the answer, though we have some theories. in the text of the notice he announces that dolly has run away from the yard behind his house in augusta. it's important to note the date of dolly's escape. she escapes april 7th, 1863, right? so after the emancipation proclamation, but clearly, she is liberating herself, right? her master surmises -- i do love this. he describes her body. in this way in both his written words and his presentation of

her photograph really conveys that power to own and control and look at and proclaim who she is. he says she's shy and she hesitates when spoken to, but that she has very nice teeth. he says that she must have been enticed away by a white man because she has never changed owners and is a stranger to the city. so, of course, he tells this narrative, right, where never changed owners as if that would have been her choice, right? we know, of course, it would not have been her choice. so her master, this very prominent south carolinan creates this narrative of domestic harmony and bliss. when you delve into the manigal papers, the overseer reports upon investigation of dolly's appearance -- i should note of the hundreds of slaves that lewis manigalt owned, many of them, dozens of them, escaped over the years, both men and women, and of all of those who

escaped, dolly was the only one who was never captured. she was the only one who was never returned to his possession. when manigalt's overseer interrogated the other enslaved people in the household. they told a different story that did not involve a white man enticing her away. they told a story of a free black man that worked at a hotel across the street who had been coming around the yard late at night to court dolly and that said the two of them had run off together. dolly for us was really the first image of what freedom looks like, but also what those legacies of emancipation look like, right? of autonomy and self-control and self-determination, but interestingly, also, of a certain kind of post-reconstruction nostalgia on the part of former slave holders. the reason the document in the photograph survived is that lewis manigalt built a tremendous scrapbook, right, to

the -- what in his mind were the glory days of slavery in which he pasted the bills of sale, right, the advertisements for auctions where he purchased people, the receipts for the money he paid to buy people, and he included this. right? he writes this sort of heart felt lament that he never saw her again. it raised some questions about, again, why he had her photograph made in the first place. one of the things we found out that we had not known before doing this research was that some slave holders had photographs made of the enslaved people they owned to prevent -- present a positive defense of slavery. to present slavery as a benign institution. to present themselves as benevolent masters who clothed and fed other human beings, if that's the mark of humanity. then often there were images, right, such as this one by thomas easterly where white families would pose with an enslaved woman usually.

we've seen some poses with enslaved boys. not so many with men. it was a way of showing off your wealth and status and prestige and presenting the enslaved person as a favorite pet or valuable object. we suspect that if the photograph of dolly was not one of perhaps a love interest for manigalt, that he wanted a photograph of a woman that he desired, we suspect that it was probably a photograph more like this one where dolly is holding a manigalt baby on her lap, and we've looked at the timing of her is scape and the timing of the birth of the manigalt children, and there would have been an older infant in the household at this time. it's entirely possible -- that would explain then -- excuse me while i go back -- why the photograph is cropped, right, and why you can't see the bottom two-thirds of that image. right? if she is holding the child. we spent a fair amount of time then after sort of establishing this foundation for ways in

which african-americans were represented, the way in which that history of slavery was told by other people. to looking at how both african-americans and white americans involved in the anti-slavery movement rem represented their appeal and made their anti-slavery cause. they wrote extensively about photography and about wrote about the power for african-americans to be able to present themselves as they saw themselves. and each other. for douglas, then, it was really important to be able to control his own image. douglas was terribly dismayed, as many of you probably know, when the early additions of his narratives were published, he was terribly dismayed at the

artist's renderings of him in those early additions because they felt the artist had represented him as a beast and not as a dignified intellectual man. for douglas posing for these portraits in a very classical style was a way not only of representing himself, but about making a larger political argument about african-american humanity. for african-americans being able to create their own images and for free african-americans being able to purchase and acquire the images of prominent african-americans in the antebellum era was terrifically important both politically and personally. so another well-known abolitionist and woman's rights activist who like douglas embraced the power of the photograph to not only represent herself, right, to present herself as a refined and dignified older woman, not as a battered former slave, right, so she curls her hand.

you can't see her hand that's been injured. but she also, of course, sold her photograph to support herself. as we were doing the research for the book, one of the things we came across were letters written by free black women from places like brooklyn asking to purchase a copy of her photograph and saying how tremendously important it was and how meaningful it was to be able to support the anti-slavery cause on the wages of a domestic servant by purchasing this photograph. in one letter a woman writes to truth and says i wish i had enough money to buy a copy of your picture for every woman in my family, but i don't, so i'm going to buy one and i'm going to share it with every woman if my family so that you know and that we know that we're bound together in this fight. >> we thought it was important to include -- we included a series of photographs by the

photographer, augustus, washington, an african-american man from new jersey. this, of course, is john brown. we wanted to spend some time back to this freedom question of thinking about what freedom looked like for free african-americans. you heard in the previous talk how northern states eventually stripped free african-americans of the state right to vote in their states. freedom eroded in many instances for free african-americans and for some, like urias mcgill, freedom looked like exile. mcgill left the united states under duress, under protest. i don't think he wanted to leave necessarily, but he was part of a group, right, that moved to liberia believing that he could never achieve full freedom and full humanity in the country of his birth, and so after the passage of the fugitive slave law, after 1850, freedom looked like exile, right, like another wave of dislocation.

this is another photograph by augustus washington of sarah mcgill russworm. her husband, of course, was john russworm, the famous newspaper man who started the first african-american newspaper in the united states. the masthead of freedom journal said if we don't speak for ourselves, who will speak for us? right? again, that sense of autonomy and self-determination. one of our favorite pictures of thinking what freedom looks like is that we know that for many people, for many african-americans, freedom looked like that self-liberation moment. this is an image from a conference protesting the fugitive slave law from the late summer of 1850. it might be hotter in here than it was there in august. this was an event organized by the tall man in the center standing behind douglas. they anticipated 50 people would show up. over 200 people showed up. they moved outside to the

orchards. the photograph is also historically important because it's one of the earliest examples of outdoor photography, right, where you can see the crowd in the foreground and then the panel of speakers in the background. the photograph is also important to us because it showcases two women who had attempted to escape from slavery, mary and emily edmonson. they were captured. their father, paul edmonson made his way from washington to brooklyn to meet with the reverend henry ward beecher to plead with him and say, you know,if these were your daughters and the slave trading firm price and birch was bragging about taking mary and emily edmonson to north carolina to sell them as fancy girls. paul edmonson makes his way to brooklyn and says how would you feel if these were your daughters that someone was bragging about selling as concubines, as sex slaves? the edmonson sisters are then

redeemed. they're purchased and given their freedom, which is really a concept that i think we all should stop and think about, what that meant, right, to be given your freedom as opposed to simply being able to possess yourself and possess your freedom. the accounts of this, this convention in upstate new york describe how beautifully and powerfully the edmonson sisters spoke to the crowd as part of their speeches and their songs that really move the crowd and tears in many instances and we thought it was important to include them to really highlight the role of everyday people and particularly everyday black women in that fight against slavery. the bulk of our study looked at the civil war and that moment of emancipation and the legacies of emancipation. i'll go quickly through some of these images, which i'm sure are familiar to you. we wanted to include this one

because it shows an african-american man dragging the wagon of a civil war photographer. one of the things we know is that photography boomed as an industry during the civil war, and then after the civil war the number of african-american photographers proliferated as well. one of the things we suspect happened is that many african-americans learned the trade, learned the skill and the art of photography by training on the ground quite literally with civil war photographers during the war. so we have a number of portraits that are familiar to you. here's an image of price and birch of in a slave trading firm. one of the things that we were interested in is how these photographs were received by northerners. how this idea of black freedom was represented individuavisual then presented a northern viewing audience. for the most part what we found is that freedom, the idea of emancipation, was represented as a nonevent. right? that black people would remain at work on plantations.

i will come back to this one in a sec. oh, these are -- hmm. we'll go with this one then. that black men -- this is an interesting one. this is a picture made by a new hampshire photographer of contra bans, those runaway slaves on the u.s.-vermont in port royal in the sea islands. when you look at this photograph, thinking about it from the perspective of the formerly enslaved men and boys on this, it's hard not to think about the middle passage, about these men clustered together on the deck of a ship. one of the things we know from reading the letters of african-americans who made trans-atlantic voyages during the antebell dum period and aft is that the ocean voyages were steepd in history that they couldn't escape. the history that was really embedded in them. there's a companion image that i don't have that shows the

officers of the u.s. vermont, and, you know, in that image they're all wearing their uniforms and they're standing. right? they're very dignified. there's distance between each man. it creates a very distant image of who were the officers and who were the crew and laborers. it creates a different image then of what free black men represent, right, in it the context of thinking about the future of the nation. this is a picture of contra band yard that depicts women and children. one of the things as we look at these photographs of contrabands which are often reproduced in history texts is that we thought it was important to ask who is not pictured? who didn't make it to the camps? who was sold away? in the previous talk we saw those advertisements in the newspapers that people placed looking for lost relatives that have been sold away. so in this moment of jubilee, in these early moments of emancipation of reconfiguring what the nation looks like at

the individual level, at the family level, at the community level for african-americans that jubilee of freedom was also tinged with a sense of loss. right? of family members who were gone. the foreground is blurry because children were playing. children don't stand still for the pictures. this is another image about sort of how emancipation and the future of the nation, right, in the wake of black freedom, what it would look like. you'll notice here that the african-americans on this plantation are literally anchored on a bed of cotton. clearly it's a staged photograph, right? the photographer has arranged this tarp on the ground, piled it with raw cotton, and then former slaves are seated in the cotton. right? again, emancipation comes across

visually as a nonevent, right? black people remain on the plantation, remain anchored and tied to that plantation labor. i'm sure you're all familiar with this image, right, and the power of so many of these images. one of the things that we sought to do with our research, though, was on the one hand to really recognize and respect the history that the image tells us, but to also offer some alternative thoughts. if you look at the harper's weekly in which this is reproduced as an etching, there's a companion piece. has anyone seen it? it's part of a triptic. you know what it is. it's how he comes into the camp in tatters. it's this picture of the scarred back. then what's the third picture? the third picture is him in his union uniform. that is not the image that circulates today in our popular culture. right? it's not the image of a

dignified soldier, right? it's the image of a battered body. there's something about the currency of these battered bodies that we thought was powerful, but we also thought it was worth taking a moment to ask why are the images of battered black bodies so compelling in ways that images of beautiful refined intellectual dignified african-americans are not perceived as so compelling? so this is the image that circulates. we have a number of other familiar pictures, portraits of slaves. i'm sorry. of soldiers. some of whom were formerly enslaved. again, showcasing that idea of patriotism, dignity, and manhood. we, again, really wanted to showcase the role of women in that fight for freedom, so this is sus y -- suzy king-taylor. this is one of many people's favorites.

it tells a different story, and it will get me then to this question about legacies. it suggests the importance of families in african-american communities. right? that soldiers are fighting not just for themselves or their country, but really quite literally in many cases for their families and for their communities. it's also a picture that tells us a lot about people's perceptions of their beauty and of their dignity. likewise, this is a marriage portrait of two former slaves from maryland, and this is their wedding portrait. again, that idea of the importance of marriage and of legalizing what could not be legal under the laws of slavery as a really critical mark, a very personal assertion of one's freedom. thinking about the legacies of emancipation, not reconstruction politics so much, but how the idea and the experience of emancipation stayed with

americans, stayed with african-american communities and culture long after the moment of emancipation. one of the things that wepd to do was sort of move beyond the twin poles of reconstruction's promise, right, of this moment of political participation or this moment of the unfinished revolution. right? this is benjamin singleton who would lead the exodus out of the deep south to the midwest to places like kansas in the face of so much domestic violence and terrorism directed against former slaves and free african-americans. we wanted to think about what were some of the other legacies? in some cases the legacies were continued military service for african-american men, and in that ironic fight for freedom of opening the west, as it were, to u.s. settlement which necessarily then pitted african-americans against native americans in those wars in the west. right? freedom, again, being this

incredibly complicated and contested idea in the u.s. context. this is a great one from richmond. it's a photograph of an emancipation day celebration. i think we need to pause for a second, and i will say, again, the location, and you can think about why this is such a powerful image. it's an emancipation day celebration 1888 in richmond, virginia. right? the heart of the confederacy. it's in richmond, virginia. it's three generations of one family. generations that span those born into slavery and those born into freedom. if you look in the center towards the back, there's a woman holding a baby. a young infant. a child that was obviously born in 1888. right? this new generation of african-americans born into freedom, and, of course, can you see the banner with lincoln hanging from the center. this real recognition of lincoln, but also this

recognition of black families, black property owners. they're standing in front of the store that they own. people who had been property becoming property owners is one of the most important legacies of emancipation. this is an emancipation day celebration. also in richmond, virginia. this time in 1905 in the previous talk we heard a lot about lynching and violence during and after reconstruction. sort of 1905. this period that's the height of lynching of african-americans. not just men, but also women. right? this height of violence and terror directed specifically at those african-americans in particular who were politically active, politically engaged, economically successful, outspoken, and here is the african-american community of richmond, right, having an

emancipation day celebration in richmond in 1905. claiming that public space to celebrate not just their emancipation, but their right to take public space, to celebrate the end of slavery, their right to assert african-american political culture and social culture with dignity and pride in public. emancipation day celebrations, aas you know, were common across the country. this is a picture from austin, texas, from 1900. again, i think really showcasing formerly enslaved people as beautiful and as dignified and as refined individuals. in this case also as landowners who purchased the land where the celebrations occurred. one of the things we write about in this book and have continued to write about is thinking about how the experiences of slavery and emancipation, the experiences of reconstruction

violence were really carried in people's bodies, right, and so as we look at these photographs as historical documents, it one of the questions we kept coming back to in terms of thinking about what is freedom looking like is who is not in the picture? who is not pictured? right? what was the loss that accompanied that moment of freedom, right? what was the loss of family members who were never found again? this is a picture from 1916 of a woman named elizabeth birkly and a woman named sadie thompson, and, again, that sense of graceful refinement but that doesn't tell us about the conditions that brought them together. it doesn't tell us about how they carried their memories or their experiences in their bodies, but it does tell us how they went into 1916 into a reunion of former slaves. this was an event in washington d.c. that was designed to bring together people who had been enslaved basically to celebrate

their survival, right, in 1916, and newspapers up and downtown east coast wrote about this event, woet about how local members in washington d.c. donated their cars so the elderly wouldn't have to walk but could drive to the event. again, this sense that that moment of emancipation continued through reconstruction and well after. the sense of people carrying those memories with them and wanting to really have those memories and that experience of enslavement and emancipation be part of the political culture in which they lived. we have a number of images, again, in the -- i know i'm standing between you and the ice cream at this point. these are later emancipation images. you can see the american flag here on this younger couple's horse. this is an image, again, from virginia of an older woman selling ice cream at

emancipation celebration. these are the fisk jubilee singers. in all of these images, one of the things that's tremendously important to note is that as african-americans are crafting their own visual legacies of emancipation, the emphasis is really on refinement and dignity. it's not on their battered bodies. it's not on the abuse and dehumanization that they suffered, but it's on their sense of self, right, their sense of themselves as achieving intellectuals and sophisticated individuals. this is mary mcleod bathune, and the children at her school. this is booker t. washington, whose school included a photography department, right, well into the 20th century that trained people in the art of photography. i want to end now with some reflections on how this story is told in a more modern period. this, of course, is an image by

dorthea lange. for those of us interested in this history, titles and naming are tremendously important. we know in the african-american community our names are terribly important. right? having that power to name yourself and name your children was tremendously important in marking people's freedom. this image is titled mississippi negris holding cotton. she was born a slave. right? we don't -- we are not given through the title from library of congress any personal information about this woman. i'm going to jump ahead here. there we go. likewise, this image comes from the archives in missouri, and the title that the archives gave this image is portrait of a well dressed woman believed to be a house servant. i'm going to pause for a second and ask you to look at the picture carefully and ask yourselves is this a woman who

defines herself as somebody's servant? no. right? it's so clearly not. here is a young woman who has gone to the studio. she's put on her best clothes. if you look at it closely, she's wearing some gold jewelry. she's picked this sort of romantic fuzzy, ghazi baauzegau background to stand in front. her sense of self bears no relation to the title that her image was given when it was archived, when it was saved. i think for all of us that go into the libraries, go into the archives, that that's a question we need to ask ourselves. right? who has titled this document? who has named this person? with that in mind, i want to end with a couple of family portraits. this is a portrait from montana of a woman named emma smith. we know in montana african-americans photographers proliferated during the late

19th and early 20th century. here she is a free woman posing with her own children. those are some more children. here we go. this is mrs. minerva graves, a former slave posing with her three free grandchildren. it's a studio portrait. she paid to have this picture made. i would remind you of that first picture i showed you of dolly and the idea of having to hold someone else's child on your lap and pose for the picture of your owner as sort of the human chair for their child and what that experience must have been like for somebody like dolly and then contrast it with what this experience of having her own portrait made of mrs. graves going to the photograph's studio with her grandchildren, her free-born grandchildren. this woman that had survived slavery, right, to go to the studio and pause with her grandchildren on her lap and have that be the story that she told to her grandchildren and to

her family about who she was and what freedom looked like for her. >> it's about what freedom and emancipation's legacy looks like. thank you. [ applause ] >> ask the questions quickly. there will probably still be some sprinkles left. >> we're good. >> if you make your way to the microphone, i'm happy to tell you whatever i can. >> one of the photos that you showed brings become to mind a famous pair of photos of a young escaped slave. he shows up in my picture in

tattered clothes and the other one he is a in a crisp uniform. jackson i think was his name. >> yep. >> can you explain the context of this? was this taken as a public relations effort? >> that's a good question. so like that picture that i showed you of gordon with the wh whip-scarred back, there's a sense of many sympathetic viewers that circulating these images is good -- is good p.r. for the union cause. there's also a sense that it will arouse sympathy, right? that -- part of the thinking was this is the way of presenting former slaves as people, right, as human beings with their own histories, with their own lives, with their own identities. i don't disagree with that. what i find sort of troubling at a larger sort of philosophical level is somebody recently said to me if you think about sort of all of those red cross

fundraising, it's not fair to put the red cross on the line here -- all of those humanitarian fundraising photographs, right, it's always a poor child from africa with a fly on their -- it's always a picture of a battered body, right? it's not a picture of a resi resillent person. i know that pair that you're talking about, and i think it's in that same vein of sort of showing the before and after of the potential. yes. we will alternate. >> paul seidel, cleveland, ohio. the day when they discovered the fate of any of these pictures that were discovered in your photos. >> that's a good question. we looked for dolly strenuously and could not find her and i know a couple of jeanologists continue to insist to me that they can find her, and i'm willing to issue the challenge to anyone if they want to find her. there's some people whose fate is known, and we write a little bit about them. there's some, you know, who are just lost to us as far as we

know, and, you know, in fact, that's what made the image of dolly so captivated and it was really haunting that the reason we know about her and about her story of self-liberation is because her former master really couldn't let go, right? couldn't even let go of that picture, right? had to save it. >> matt robins from new york city. i'm wondering a lot of these photos seem to sort of reflect, like, a portrait style, the sort of like you were talking about refinement before and it's sort of like reflecting that -- the way that white people would almost. take a photograph before the war. i was wondering if there was, like, a development of a unique style among african-american photographers, and also -- was there african-american photography used as art as a sense of refinement or familial portraiture? >> certainly during that civil war era, right, the style of the photographs is very common,

right? sort of ubiquitous. i think it develops that idea of where art and culture are at that time. i think there's also a very clear political undercurrent to some of that. somebody like douglas would have said. the period where you see a big sort of aesthetic shift doesn't come until the era of the harlem renaissance and really with people like van der zee who are then steeped in really showcasing african-american culture in all of its richness and diversity in a way that i think the political circumstances are so different. >> the early photographs the

black ladies with white children, i think it's been pretty well documented that a lot of those ladies stayed with those families for a long time. some of them even after the war because they had no other option. are you suggesting that all of those photographs were staged and those women actually had no affection for those little kids? >> sir, that's a couple of different questions. let me try to pull this apart a little bit. certainly in terms of economic opgs, right, we know that many former slaves did not have a wealth of opportunity and resources ahead of them. we also know that until the 1960s domestic service was the number one occupation for african-american women in this country. the photographs certainly are staged. i think the different question to ask is would those women have preferred to be in a photograph with their own family members? right? would they -- if they had the opportunity to create a

photograph, would it have included their family members rather than, you know, in which case they wouldn't be presented as the servant, right, but as the -- i think the question of affection is a different one, right, and i mean, i will say, you know, they're human beings. how could you -- just as anybody else. >> i was looking for data to support the fact that you feel that they were all staged. >> well, the portraits are stabled, right? you have to go into the photographer's studio. >> correct. >> right? you're going to choose your clothes. you're going to choose your back drop. you're going to choose the composition of who is sitting where. they're staged in that sense. >> correct. >> and by including your slave or servant, right, you're creating a particular kind of image about how you want to present yourself. right? if these are images you want to share with family and friends, right, you put on your best clothes, right? you don't put on your work pants. right? even though everybody knows you

have work pants, right? you put on your best clothes because you are creating a certain kind of story about yourself and your family. >> okay. >> that includes your servants. >> thank you. >> hi. >> hi. >> you mentioned with great power images from emancipation celebrations and united states ct troops. where do you -- what are good archives to find those pictures to present, say, in classrooms or in public history places? >> thank you. that's a great question. the best resource is library of congress. library of congress has an amazing photo archive. you can download on to your own computer for free and use them in the classroom. there are some archive that is will then ask you to pay a $10,000 fee to reproduce them. that's a different story. >> hi. my name is -- i'm from richmond,

new jersey. as a student much a high school art history class, i was kind of taught to interpret photos in a context but also as a high school student modern photographer is really nothing like 19th century photography so i was just wonder if in making this book did you develop a sort of eye for this portrait of the period? is there a difference? how does one acquire that taste? >> so there's a lot of terrific scholarship on photographic photography, the culture of photography, and sort of the norms and context, right? again, sort of why people pose certain ways in those studio portraits in that mid 19th century moment. for douglas that picture of douglas, he is looking off to the side. he is not looking directly at the camera because he is posing as a classical statesman. you don't stare at the camera and smile when we pop out our phones like we do now. it's a totally different

context, totally different culture, totally different meaning about what that image was supposed to do. >> thank you so much. >> hi. i'm lee -- from ohio. just to sort of support what you were saying about photographs being staged, there was an equipment limitation in those days that we don't have now. you can't move. you got to sit straight. nothing else is going to move. i think that kind of goes along with what you were saying. >> and that's why there are all those blurry patches, right, because the children in all those emancipation day celebrations, there's always a blur at the front of the picture. the children don't stand still. >> my kids never stand still. >> thank you. >> last one. yeah. i know, sprinkles are calling us. >> everybody can get to the ice cream. just quickly. you talked about frederick douglas recognizing the importance of photographs and booker t. washington offering courses on photography. >> yeah. >> martin luther king also recognized the importance of getting things on film.