ABSTRACT
Frederick Douglass as an early historian and theorist of photography. Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative famously begins with the former slave's experience of his deliberately frustrated beginnings: he was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland. He has no accurate knowledge of the author's age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. Specifically, it focuses on Douglass's insistence on daguerreotypy as the starting point not only for photography, but also for his philosophical discussion of the universal human capacity for what he calls "picture making". This term referred to the production of the visual arts, the mind's capacity for self-reflection, as well as the imagination of a more egalitarian future. He took up these subjects repeatedly, writing, revising, and delivering a series of lectures on pictures in the 1860s. In each instance, Douglass presented photography as beginning with daguerreotypy and its originator Louis Jacque Mande Daguerre.
