Visualizing Freedom

Abstract

This essay is the first study of the formerly enslaved woman Ellen Craft’s nineteenth-century photograph album and its contents, and the first study linking Craft’s album to one owned by another nineteenth-century African American woman, Arabella Chapman. Examining Craft’s album and its connections offers an opportunity to consider how African American women employed domestic photograph albums to record their experience of freedom. Past scholarship on photographs of famous formerly enslaved men and women has emphasized how these “self-made” individuals used photography to assert their autonomy in freedom. And, Craft herself participated in this convention when posing for her famous portrait disguised as the White man “William Johnson,” whose identity she passed through in order to obtain her freedom. Yet, this scholarship has not yet engaged the issue of family in photographs of the famous formerly enslaved. My study introduces Craft’s album as visualizing freedom differently through the linkage of photographs of family and friends across pages and under an album’s tight bindings. The book joins photographs together as material representations of Black familial and community bonds that had faced ever-present threats of violation and rupture under slavery. It visualizes freedom not so much in autonomous identity, but via cultivated connections between family and friends in respectable domestic space. Today, the mnemonic notations, fingerprints and smudges on its pages from the hands of four generations of female descendants after Craft reveal the album’s long legacy of preserving affirmative, embodied memories of attachment amongst African American women.