I sell the shadow to support the substance – Vintage Wall Art
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: I sell the shadow to support the substance, preserved in this historic photograph. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
Framed, it is ready for the wall; unframed, it is ready for the frame you choose. Perfect for a home, office, library or classroom wall, and a gift with a story behind it. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Since 2001, Snapshots of the Past has shipped historic prints to tens of thousands of customers around the world.
I sell the shadow to support the substance
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Here the sitter is Sojourner Truth herself, and the caption is a wry line that makes the photograph a kind of income: she sold cartes de visite like this one to support herself, so the picture is the shadow that sustained the substance, her life and work as a speaker and abolitionist. Born into slavery in New York around 1797, she escaped in 1826 and became one of the best-known Black women public speakers of her era, remembered for her "Ain't I a Woman?" address. Around 1864 she was working in Washington with freedpeople and had met President Lincoln, and small portraits like this one carried her face and her message far beyond the lecture hall.
| Created / published | c1864. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 photographic print on carte de visite mount : albumen. |
| Genre | Portrait photographs 1860-1870.Albumen prints 1860-1870.Cartes de visite 1860-1870. |
| Notes | Gladstone collection (Library of Congress). Copyright by Sojourner Truth. Exhibited: African American Odyssey, Library of Congress, 1998. Exhibited: Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, and other venues, 2006. Exhibited: Gay Icons, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2009. |
| Subjects | Truth, Sojourner,--d. 1883. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 3,313 × 4,096 px · prints to 11 × 14 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-219767 |
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