Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Abstract

The Journal of American History the history of communications can potentially become a foundation for the study of commu- nications in history. Menahem Blondheim Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem, Israel doi: 10.1093/jahist/jau361 Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Ed. by Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. viii, 387 pp. Cloth, $99.95. Paper, In the introduction to their edited volume Pictures and Progress Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith note that previous scholarly studies of photography and race have overwhelmingly focused on the “imagery of racism” (p. 4). This emphasis is understand- able. Concerned with addressing the damag- ing legacy of racialized representations in the United States, scholars have worked to explain how the visual form and use of photography have disadvantaged people of color (and, more recently, how they have advantaged whites). This approach has focused attention on how society’s most privileged members have used photography to consolidate their racial power. As the editors point out, however, a focus on the imagery of racism tends to ignore the ef- forts of people of color to intervene in period debates about race and representation, mar- ginalizing the groups whose history modern scholars seek to rewrite. Pictures and Progress rectifies this scholarly imbalance by attending to how African Amer- icans made strategic use of photographs to advance their interests in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The volume’s actors are the black men and women who commis- sioned, created, circulated, spoke about, and wrote about photographs. Some of the nota- ble figures discussed are Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois, but readers also learn about the work of less prominent figures, such as the photographers Augustus Washington, Thomas Askew, A. P. Bedou, and Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of California, Santa Cruz on November 30, 2014 Yet Hochfelder’s focus on the later telegraph has a lot to recommend it. There are much bet- ter archival sources for the post–Civil War pe- riod, much less secondary research into it, and therefore glaring lacunae in our knowledge and understanding that need to be addressed. In fact, the canvass of the earlier period of te- legraphy included in the first three chapters does not provide very much that is new. The first chapter retells the story of the telegraph in the Civil War, primarily from an institution- al perspective, rightly emphasizing the signifi- cance of the civilian nature of the military tele- graph. The second chapter retraces the saga of attempted government control. Its most useful part brings the story to its conclusive end af- ter World War I. In contrast, the third chap- ter is hardly conclusive, foraying with a rather modest theoretical toolbox into the realm of technology and language, a field recently vi- talized by our encounters with email, texting, and tweeting. The same chapter also attempts to recount the key interinstitutional nexus of telegraphy and journalism. The final two chapters stand out. In the study of quotation-reporting technologies and services, and their effects on the performance and structure of American financial markets, Hochfelder masterfully untangles and crisp- ly tells the story of this important branch of the telegraph business. He combines the in- stitutional perspective on the development of the business applications of telegraphy with a fascinating analysis of changes in the perfor- mance of financial markets, the emergence of the modern, “democratic” brokerage industry, and the way these developments redefined the interface between markets and participants, the local and the national. The final chapter, on the emergence of the telephone and the contrariety of telegra- phy and telephony, provides a much-needed, thoughtful, and detailed institutional account, with a fresh look at the regulatory dimension. Like most of the previous chapters it does not attempt to apply insight and theory emerg- ing from a subsequent century of major trans- formations in America’s media environment. Rather, it competently provides a detailed, re- sponsible, and well-written institutional narra- tive. In this chapter, one can clearly see how September 2014