Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland around 1818. In September 1838 he escaped, disguised as a sailor, and made his way north. Within a few years he had become one of the most powerful voices against slavery in America as a speaker and writer.
But in his time, most pictures of Black Americans were cruel. Cartoons, prints and posters showed Black people as jokes, made to mock them.
Douglass decided to fight those images with the camera. From his earliest known photograph in 1841 until his death in 1895, he sat for his portrait whenever he could. More than 160 times. Each portrait showed the dignity that slavery had tried to deny him and that the cartoons refused to show.
He did not just pose. He thought deeply about photography, and he wrote lectures on the power of pictures to change how people see one another.
By the end of his life, Frederick Douglass was the most photographed American of the nineteenth century. More photographed than Abraham Lincoln.
They tried to turn Black Americans into cartoons. He answered with his own face.
