The Camera and the Press

At the conclusion of The Camera and the Press Marcy J. Dinius provocatively suggests that the humanities are “currently being remediated as media studies” (p. 238). As part of this scholarly trend, Dinius's book focuses on the way that various printed texts mediated nineteenth-century experiences of the daguerreotype, the earliest form of photography. Dinius counters the recent scholarly interest in oral culture, particularly in the study of African American literary and cultural history, by repeatedly showing that nineteenth-century texts encompass various visual tableaus that either re-create daguerreotypes in words—a process of ekphrastic representation—or that draw on certain qualities associated with their material form to achieve particular narrative, social, and political ends. Dinius builds on the work of a number of critics who have traced the representation of the daguerreotype in the nineteenth-century popular press as well as in fictional works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. At the same time, she adds to these representations in two particular ways: by including in her book more readings of actual daguerreotypes and by giving extended attention to the ways Augustus Washington and Frederick Douglass used the daguerreotype—as material object and as symbol—to advance their very different abolitionist agendas. Washington, a practicing African American daguerreotypist, was interested in representing Liberia as a viable alternative nation for former slaves in the United States; Douglass worked against colonization to promote the importance of asserting the rights of African Americans as U.S. citizens. A highlight of Dinius's book is that she reprints a number of Washington's daguerreotypes of Liberian senators and other politicians, as well as all of the known daguerreotypes of Douglass. As she repeatedly states, such reprints can never capture the multidimensionality of the original images since daguerreotypes consist of positive images on silver iodized plates that cause their subjects to flicker in and out of sight while also allowing viewers to see mirror images of themselves. The images that she reprints, however, provide a striking cumulative effect, both because of their individual differences (she provides a particularly fine analysis of a profile view of Douglass) and because of the subjects' frequent similarity of pose. This similarity is due in part to the constraints of the medium but is also part of a strategic effort to show how “the slave has become a man” (p. 205

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• I Go to Liberia”

  Open Access•Marcy J Dinius•Journal of Transnational American…•2020

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