Enduring Truths
Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance
Enduring Truths
Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance
Featuring the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published, Enduring Truths is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby establishes a range of important contexts for Truth’s portraits, including the strategic role of photography and copyright for an illiterate former slave; the shared politics of Truth’s cartes de visite and federal banknotes, which were both created to fund the Union cause; and the ways that photochemical limitations complicated the portrayal of different skin tones. Insightful and powerful, Enduring Truths shows how Truth made her photographic portrait worth money in order to end slavery—and also became the strategic author of her public self.
224 pages | 131 color plates, 27 halftones | 11 x 8 1/2 | © 2015
Art: Photography
History: American History
Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I Early Cartes de Visite1 Truth in Indiana (1861)
2 Truth as Libyan Sibyl
3 Truth in Michigan (1863)
Part II Shadows and Substance
4 Truth’s Captioned Cartes de Visite (after 1864)
5 Shadows and Chemistry
Part III Texts and Circulating Paper
6 Truth’s Illiteracy
7 Truth’s Copyright
8 Money and the Civil War
Part IV Collecting and the Late Photographs
9 Album Politics
10 Truth’s Last Portraits (1881–82)
Notes
Index
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