"These portraits [ . . . ] show sitters who have attained something like middle-class respectability."

True Pictures
Gregory Fried

Part I | II | III | IV | V
Early Photographic Techniques

Fig. 3. Photographer unknown: Frederick Douglass, sixth plate daguerreotype, c. 1845. Collection of Greg French.

Douglass was photographed often. One of the very earliest known portraits of him was taken in the mid-1840s, probably just around the time that the publication in 1845 of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself made Douglass a national and then an international celebrity. This austere portrait of the still youthful Douglass, who meets our gaze so forcefully, epitomizes his hope and expectation that photography might bestow a public dignity upon African Americans that would provide a pictorial argument for their inclusion in the promise of the Declaration of Independence: that the only legitimate government is one that gives support to the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

Many other portraits make the same visual argument, such as this one of an unnamed self-confident horn-player (fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Photographer unknown: subject unknown, sixth plate daguerreotype, c. 1845-49. Collection of Greg French.

With his complicated instrument and sheet music, his portrait proclaims the capacity for refinement and self-cultivation. Or consider this portrait of an unidentified African American woman whose strength and resilience break through the stiff pose of conventional portraiture (fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Photographer unknown: subject unknown, sixth plate daguerreotype, c. 1847-52. Collection of Greg French.

These portraits, and others such as this one of a man holding a book, show sitters who have attained something like middle-class respectability (fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Hooke and Co. (Francis Hooke, proprietor): subject unknown, sixth plate daguerreotype, 1850. Collection of Greg French.