Photography and Slavery in America and Brazil

Abstract

This chapter provides a comparative aesthetic and historic discussion of the large range of photographic material recording slavery generated across Brazil and North America from the invention of the form, up until the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. It opens with a detailed survey of the technical and formal evolution of photographic forms and genres in terms of how they related to the recording of the two greatest slave systems of the Americas. North American photographic representation of slavery is shown to be heavily dominated by the archive generated by the Civil War. The photographic vision of photographers representing slaves and slave life is revealed in both Brazil and North America to be heavily inflected by much older European visual codes for recording slave life, which include academic painting, sculpture, and the tradition of the ‘Street Cries’. The chapter ends with a discussion of North American lynching photography in relation to the inheritance of slavery.