Description

Commemorating the bicentennial of Frederick Douglass's 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 From these pages--which include over 160 photographs of Douglass, as well as his previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics--we learn that neither Custer nor Twain, nor even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of the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 Douglass--many of which have never been publicly seen and were long lost to history
A collection of contemporaneous artwork that shows how powerful Douglass's photographic legacy remains today, over a century after his death
All Douglass's previously unpublished writings and speeches on visual aesthetics