Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery
This arresting book will initially attract readers with its album’s worth of photographs of black men and women in posed and unposed situations, taken between the 1850s and the 1930s. Questions will automatically arise. What is the story behind each photograph? Who is the person? What exactly was the occasion for taking the photograph? Once the viewer goes back to the book’s beginning and reads the text by a photography historian and a historian of slavery from start to finish, answers become apparent. Willis and Krauthamer, with knowledge and a discerning eye, place the photos in a new and greatly informative context, all in their successful effort to demonstrate the emancipation process through photographs. Their very learned analysis brings to the reader many significant glimpses into the true nature of black people’s evolving status during the late slavery period, during emancipation itself, and during the often confusing days of their first taste of freedom. --Brad Hooper