Jasmine Nichole Cobb. Picture Freedom

Much of what we know about nineteenth-century black experience comes from scholarship on slavery and slaveholders. Those topics, when expressed visually for white audiences, included caricatures of minstrelsy, prints and photographs cataloguing distinctive features of black bodies, drawings of shackles, and diagrams of slave ships. Jasmine Nichole Cobb focuses on the visually expressed experience of free blacks before 1850, particularly in Philadelphia. She describes her work as “a study in Black feminist visual theory” in which “free Black women’s bodies are not simply passive victims of dominant scopic regimes but are also disruptive vessels that Black women manipulated to evidence a female gaze.” Her particular focus is visuality, “the act of picturing as a tactile reference to diminished visual encounters” (8). Instead of concentrating on the pictured individual as the object of others’ gaze, she emphasizes “the ways in which the racialized object, in fact, has eyes, casts a gaze, and consciously construes a way of being visible” (9). Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century, though at times densely packed with the specialized language of visual analysis theory, illuminates a previously obscure area of nineteenth-century American culture.

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