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Rev. of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, edited by MAURICE O. WALLACE & SHAWN MICHELLE SMITH

The title of this collection comes from a lecture on photography and society that Frederick Douglass first delivered in December 1861 on the eve of the US Civil War. In “Pictures and Progress,” Douglass announced, “This picture-making faculty is flung out into the world—like all others—subject to a wild scramble between contending interests and forces. It is a mighty power—and the side to which it goes has achieved a wondrous conquest” (41). With his lecture’s startlingly new connections between images and reform, Douglass foresaw that behind the nation’s love affair with pictures lies a latent political power. The eleven essays and four “snapshots” of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity take up Douglass’s injunction and present a cohesive portrait of African American engagements with the “picturemaking faculty” from the antebellum period to the turn of the century. As editors, Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith write in their introduction to the collection that “Pictures and Progress examines the ways in which African American men and women variously used this new technology of representation to perform identities and to shape a dynamic visual culture” (3). The point made over and again in this collection is that photography “helped to adjudicate the meaning of freedom” in the period of emancipation by making material (and therefore, perhaps, mutable or portable) the ongoing dialectic between vision and racial thought. The editors maintain that photographic self-representation promised to condition US audiences in a new way—a modern way—of envisioning people. The editors surmise that “for many African Americans, photography served not only as a means of self-representation but also as a political tool with which to claim a place in public and private spheres circumscribed by race and racialized sight lines. The photograph became a key site through which a new identity could be produced and promulgated” (5). For these reasons, the focus in this collection is on the use and practice of photography, as “African Americans viewed, conceptualized, and most importantly used the new technology of photography to chart and change and enjoy new social positions and political identities” (4). With this focus, this book deliberately participates in an ongoing shift in visual culture studies to include, alongside photographers, producers of all kinds, “who think, write about, and use images in ways that transform their possible purpose and meaning” (5). Pictures and Progress reconsiders writers such as Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Louisa Picquet, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, among others, as