medievalpoc:

medievalpoc:

Frederick Douglass Was the Most Photographed American of the 19th Century

Do you know who the most photographed American of the 19th century
was? It’s not George Custer (155 photos) or Walt Whitman or Abraham
Lincoln (130 each). The person with the most portraits made of them in
the 1800s was Frederick Douglass, the African-American abolitionist, speaker, writer, and statesman.

That’s the finding that has just been published in a new book titled “Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American.”

Extensive research revealed that Douglass was a leading pioneer in
photography who sat for as many portraits as he could in order to combat
blackface caricatures and to assert the humanity of African Americans
in place of slavery.

Douglass believed that photographs were a powerful means of “moral
and social” influence, allowing the poor and oppressed to find
self-confidence.

“The humblest servant girl may now possess a picture of herself such
as the wealth of kings could not purchase 50 years ago,” he wrote.

There are 160 surviving portraits of Douglass, created between 1841
to 1895, and the collection represents a powerful timeline of his legacy
as a man, artist, and leader. Many of the photos were found by scouring
hundreds of libraries, museums, schools, societies, archives, and
auction houses in the US and in Europe. Some of the original photos were
previously sold for over $10,000 each.

Read More

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0871404680/

I noticed a lot of people reblogging this post today, perhaps due to Google’s main page celebrating Frederick Douglass:

In honor of that, here’s a link to his diary whilst touring Europe and Africa in 1886, which you can read in his own handwriting, digitized here.

Pity the camera technology of time didn’t allow for easy selfies (though I guess he could have done mirror selfies.)