When I first received Black Chronicles (edited by Renée Mussai) in the mail, and ever since, I have been wondering what those depicted therein had been thinking or feeling. It’s an impossible task, of course: we have no way of knowing. Photography has always allowed for that kind of speculation, and the temptation has always been to tie the clarity of the photographic picture to the presumed clarity of whatever results one arrives at as a viewer.
As I’ve said before, photography has been invented the wrong way around. Its earliest pictures were laden with artifice and restrictions, which has resulted in many misunderstandings of what a photograph is (or does) and what it might look like.
In this particular case, though, the fact that the photographs in the book were taken with the earliest available photographic materials and techniques is a huge gift: There is so much clarity and detail in the photographs that those portrayed appear to almost jump out from its pages.
And yet, one must resist the temptation to assume. So instead of coming to my own conclusions, I looked for the input of a man who shared a few crucial characteristics with those portrayed in Black Chronicles. Frederick Douglass had been born into slavery, escaped from it, and became one of the most important national figures the United States produced during the 19th Century.
We know what Douglass thought because we have his words (he was an orator and writer). But we also have incredibly detailed knowledge of what he looked like: He was the most photographed man of his time. Douglass had himself photographed around 160 times, because he grasped the importance of photography. He grasped the role photography could play for a society.
And he gave speeches about photography. The third speech in Picturing Frederick Douglass provides the clearest picture of his views. “A friend of mine,” he wrote, “once took my arm in New York, saying as he did so — ‘Frederick, I’m not ashamed to walk with you down Broadway.’ It never once occurred to him that I might for any reason be ashamed to walk with him down Broadway. He managed to remind me that mine was a despised and hated color — and his the orthodox and constitutional one” (p. 153).
We have no way of knowing whether those portrayed in Black Chronicles shared similar experiences with Douglass, whether, in other words, they were told such words by people (perhaps by some of those who commissioned the photographs). But we know that they found themselves in Britain at around the time Douglass lived in the US. And Britain was a powerful colonial empire, with its colonialism intimately tied to racism.
The difference between their experiences was that they were being photographed, whereas Douglass had himself photographed. These kinds of differences matter in many ways. And yet, it actually is not as straightforward to tie down photography to the extent that people believe it is. Photographs can serve different functions across the ages (or even at the very same time), and their meanings can shift decisively.
Douglass grasped that one truth of a photograph would not shift: as a human being, you’re made to face another human being when you look at a portrait (or rather you’re facing their likeness, but photography’s power is to make us forget about this fact). “Men of all conditions and classes can now see themselves as others see them,” he wrote, “and as they will be seen by those [who] shall come after them.” (p. 155)
For Douglass, this fact tied to the greater value of art, which separates human beings from animals: “The rudest and remotest tribes of men manifest this great human power — and thus vindicate the brotherhood of man.” (p. 157) Photography, in other words, serves as a tool for equality — even under circumstances where it might have arisen out of completely different circumstances.
“It is the picture of life,” he noted a little later in his essay, “contrasted with the fact of life, the idea contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible. Where there is no criticism there is no progress, for the want of progress is not felt where such want is not made visible by criticism.” (p. 160; which, by the way, also is a blistering indictment of today’s newspaper and magazines that have largely done away with criticism)
Black Chronicles includes ample text, most prominently a long essay by curator Renée Mussai. There is much to learn from the various contributions, especially since they give a reader crucial insight into how the exhibition the book is based on was made and how contemporary curators and thinkers approach the photographs of these colonial subjects (some of them snatched from their home countries in the most gruesome fashion) in today’s Britain (a country in which, like in most other Western countries, the far right is openly racist).
The book is richly illustrated with many, many photographs. At times, it’s almost a bit much. I’m not one to decry the active role of graphic design; and yet, the prominent use of pull quotes (which mirrored how the photographs were shown in their exhibition setting) had me on edge: I did not really want to be distracted from the photographs. At times, I felt that the book’s maker did not trust that the photographs would do their own job.
Photographs pull a viewer in to encounter another human being — in the sense that photographs can do that, the sense that Frederick Douglass understood so well. Of course, it is impossible to imagine another person’s life and experiences, regardless of how close or how distant that person in a photograph might be to a viewer.
But that’s photography’s power — we see another person, and we imagine what they must experience or feel, even if we have no realistic basis for doing so. Victorian Britain was a radically different world than ours. And yet, to pick a different medium, when as a viewer you find yourself in front of a Roman bust, made to resemble the person as closely as possible, with all their bodily faults and characteristics, it is an encounter with that person across the aeons.
Whatever one might put on a photograph — whether it’s used to denigrate the person portrayed or to present them as some strange and possibly primitive other or to pull them out of their photographic otherness to lift them into equal status with a viewer, it will always speak for itself and, by extension, for the person portrayed.
The other day, I was reminded of one of the most searing protest photographs to arise from the United States. It was taken by Ernest C. Withers in 1968, during a strike by African American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. The photograph shows a wall of men, almost all of them holding a simple sign that says “I am a man”.
A photographic portrait very much does the same thing: of the person portrayed, it says “I am a man”, “I am a woman”, “I am a person” — “I am a human being”. Even as this might not have been the intention of those who commissioned and/or made the photographs in Black Chronicles, this is the searing, important message behind the photographs.
As Frederick Douglass already noted about 160 years ago, that is the power of photography; and given our extremely troubled times, we might as well pay good attention to it — if, that is, we want to remain committed to building a better world once the fascists have been booted out of power.
Recommended.
Black Chronicles — Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain; Edited by Renée Mussai; texts by Renée Mussai, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Caroline Bressey, Lola Jaye, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Mark Sealy, Val Wilmer; 304 pages; Autograph/Thames & Hudson; 2025