Alston scott householder biography of michael jackson

by Laura Coyle, with Mirasol Estrada and Allan McLeod

The focus of this DAH project is an album of turn-of-the-twentieth-century commercial portrait photographs of African Americans in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The author shows how the album enacts Frederick Douglass’s ideas about photography, how the people in the album used photography to construct images of racial uplift, and how the compiler used the album to create a composite image of Black respectability and community. Photographs and photograph albums gave African American sitters an opportunity to be visible and resist erasure, even as they participated in mainstream American society. The practice of sharing photograph albums also facilitated transmission of Black individual, family, community, and national history and values though a powerful combination of images and storytelling, which capitalized on the strength of African American oral traditions. Ultimately, photographs like those in the album helped sitters and viewers im