Tag: photography

The Past in Color: A Short History of Hand-Colored Photos During the Civil War Era

The Past in Color: A Short History of Hand-Colored Photos During the Civil War Era

The American Civil War was one of the most photographed events of the nineteenth century. Powerful images of battlefield carnage, life in the camp, and studio portraits of soldiers in uniform stimulate an emotional response that reminds us of the human cost of war. Likewise, touching photos of grandparents, parents, ...
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Multi-screen images of actor portraying Frederick Douglass in a dark exhibition space.

Isaac Julien’s “Lessons of the Hour” and the Many Visions of Frederick Douglass

Hired out to the brutal Edward Covey, a young Frederick Douglass worked to exhaustion during the week and spent Sundays “in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree,” alternating between flashes of “energetic freedom” and “mourning,” he wrote in his Narrative. Beyond the woods, ...
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A Long Retreat: Episodes 3 and 4 of <i>Reconstruction: America After the Civil War</i>

A Long Retreat: Episodes 3 and 4 of Reconstruction: America After the Civil War

To catch up, you'll find Millington Bergeson-Lockwood's review of Episodes 1 and 2 here. No matter how “bitter the chastening rod,” to borrow from the Black National Anthem, the second part of the Henry Louis Gates’s documentary on Reconstruction shows how African Americans kept fighting well after the Compromise of ...
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Six Degrees of the Civil War:  Tintype Photographs in the Digital Age

Six Degrees of the Civil War: Tintype Photographs in the Digital Age

In December of 2015, Philly.com’s staff writer Jeff Gammage caught on to a photography trend taking the urban hipster world by storm: the revival of 1860s tintypes. Tintype pictures of average people, well-known folk singers, and even Kevin Bacon from cutting edge dark rooms are fetching high prices. Gammage referred ...
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