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Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds. Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. 387 pp. ISBN 978-0822350859, $27.95.
Elizabeth Abel's Signs of the Times (U of California P, 2010) analyzes photographs of signs demarking segregation according to skin color. They function as visual proof of a system of oppression. Towards the end of the book are photographs of young people defying segregation signs, and those pictures are recordings of not only the system but also reaction to it. In the new anthology Pictures and Progress, articles from eleven scholars discuss the role of photography in constructs of African American identity from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The photographs of the African Americans are also reactive recordings, because they capture African Americans in response to their enslavement, sexism, segregation, or other problems. The articles are well-written and provide a thorough discussion of how the first half-century of American photography shaped African American identity.
Editors Maurice O. Wallace of Duke University and Shawn Michelle Smith of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have put together writings that relate to the ideas that the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass expressed in the 1860s about photography. The first two of the eleven
articles are specifically about Douglass. Laura Wexler's "A More Perfect Likeness" documents the activist's promotion of the concept of photography as a necessary means to correct gross distortions of...