Picture Freedom

In the decades leading up to the end of U.S. slavery, many free Blacks sat for daguerreotypes decorated in fine garments to document their self-possession. People pictured in these early photographs used portraiture to seize control over representation of the free Black body and reimagine Black visuality divorced from the cultural logics of slavery. In Picture Freedom, Jasmine Nichole Cobb analyzes the ways in which the circulation of various images prepared free Blacks and free Whites for the emancipation of formerly unfree people of African descent. She traces the emergence of Black freedom as both an idea and as an image during the early nineteenth century. Through an analysis of popular culture of the period—including amateur portraits, racial caricatures, joke books, antislavery newspapers, abolitionist materials, runaway advertisements, ladies’ magazines, and scrapbooks, as well as scenic wallpaper—Cobb explores the earliest illustrations of free Blacks and reveals the complicated route through visual culture toward a vision of African American citizenship. 

Jasmine Nichole Cobb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and (by courtesy) the Department of African American Studies, at Northwestern University. She earned a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (2009). Cobb is the recipient of numerous awards, and presently, an American Fellow of the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She is the author of Picture Freedom:  Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century (NYUP 2015), which explores the role of visual culture within processes of abolition and the emergence of African American emancipation.