Pictures and Progress

Abstract

ABSTRACT This attractive gift book is “a steal” at its very affordable price, but it also presents the results of outstanding investigative scholarship and analytic bibliography. The editors assert that Frederick Douglass “became the most photographed American of the nineteenth century” and that he “wrote more extensively on photography than any other American” during the four years of the Civil War. They have identified 160 separate photographs of him that are not copies from the same negative, and his closest competitors seem to be General George Armstrong Custer, Red Cloud, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and Ulysses S. Grant. The volume celebrates and illustrates the amazing career of Frederick Douglass through several visual media and brings together his essays on photography, which were often vehicles for his ideas on a wide range of subjects, ranging from literature, to popular science, to “philosophy of Progress,” to American politics.