M atthew F ox -A mato . Exposing Slavery

Matthew Fox-Amato’s analysis of photographic depictions of slaves and slavery, from the introduction of daguerreotypes to the United States in 1839 through the end of the Civil War, examines an important but previously understudied array of images. Paintings, photographs, drawings, and prints of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras have attracted some of the most provocative, pathbreaking scholarship in recent studies of nineteenth-century America. Fox-Amato contextualizes his work within this universe. Referencing paintings, images in the popular press, and the postwar lynching postcards examined by such scholars as Joshua Brown and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Fox-Amato’s topic also requires a thorough analysis of the handwritten and published documents that undergird his visual discoveries. Few of the photographs that slaves and former slaves painstakingly posed and paid for have survived. Fox-Amato has been able to reconstruct these vanished images, at least in part, by unearthing ekphrastic descriptions and other...

Archaeology · Art · Art history · Painting · Photography · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Spanish Civil War · Visual arts · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies