Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America

The invention of the camera transformed the visual culture of the world; in essence it opened up a brand-new window onto the soul. Contemporary scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson have explored this new visual rhetoric, suggesting that the positionality of subject and object, and the impact of the gaze, have created a startling new social environment where all of the traditional ideas associated with visual judgement are now in flux or in question. In Exposing Slavery, Matthew Fox-Amato confirms this from a historical perspective, showing readers with actual photographs and through a narration on visual politics the surprising power of that new rhetoric in shaping American race-based slavery