Snapshots of the Past

[Frederick Douglass, full length, seated beside grandson, facing front] – Historic Reproduction

[Frederick Douglass, full length, seated beside grandson, facing front] — historic photograph
[Frederick Douglass, full length, seated beside grandson, facing front]. Historic photograph from the Historic Print Archive collection.

(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

This rare historic photograph captures [Frederick Douglass, full length, seated beside grandson, facing front] in remarkable detail. The original is held by the Library of Congress, so what you hang is a true record of its time.

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[Frederick Douglass, full length, seated beside grandson, facing front]

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Seated at full length beside a grandson, Frederick Douglass looks directly at the camera, a more informal family setting than many of the formal studio portraits made of him. The caption card gives no date, but the presence of a grandson suggests the later decades of his life, when he was one of the most photographed Americans of his day. Douglass understood the power of his own image. In his 1861 essay "Pictures and Progress," he argued that honest, dignified portraits of Black Americans could challenge the demeaning caricatures common in print. Read in that light, the picture shows a man presenting his family as deliberately as he presented himself.

Medium1 photographic print.
Notes[no date recorded on caption card]
SourceLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Original scan1,220 × 1,536 px · prints to 4 × 5 in at 300 dpi
ReferenceAMZ-SOTP-HPA-127847

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