Doc Chat Fifty-Two: Friendship & Masculinity Through the Lens of a 19th-century Black Photographer

On April 14, Doc Chat examined themes of race, intimacy, and entrepreneurship by examining one 19th-century photographic portrait.

A weekly series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs an NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode Fifty-Two, Schomburg Center curator Dalila Scruggs and literary scholar Travis M. Foster focused on a daguerreotype of two unidentified white men by African American photographer, abolitionist, and businessman Augustus Washington. Scruggs and Foster discussed Washington's studio practice and examined the gender dynamics behind the tender intimacy exhibited by the men in this 150-year-old photograph.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode.

Augustus Washington, Portrait of two men seated (and holding hands) wearing large bow ties, gilded with nautical symbols, circa 1850. Sixth-Plate Daguerreotype. Photographs and Prints Division. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Accession number: NYPLx2021.14.1

Explore the finding aid for the Daguerreotype collection in the Photographs and Prints Division of the Schomburg Center. 

More daguerreotypes in the Photographs and Prints Division are being digitized, and can be studied on NYPL Digital Collections. Check back regularly as we add more. 

On Masculinity in 19th Century

Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (BasicBooks, 1993).

Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men's Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (Duke University Press, 2002).

On Augustus Washington

Carol Johnson, “Faces of Freedom: Portraits from the American Colonization Society Collection,” The Daguerreian Annual (1996), 265–279.

Ann Shumard, A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1999).

"A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist," online exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2000.

Dalila Scruggs, “‘Photographs to Serve Our Purposes’: Shaping the Image of Liberia in Colonization Print Culture,” in Early African American Print Culture, eds. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 203-230.

Marcy. J. Dinius, The Camera and the Press: American Visual Culture and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen (Duke University Press, 2013).

Christraud M. Geary, “Roots and Routes of African Photographic Practices: From Modern to Vernacular Photography in West and Central Africa (1850–1980)” in A Companion to Modern African Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 74-95.  

Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Doc Chat has wrapped its Spring 2022 season.  You can catch up on past episodes and explore helpful resources on the Doc Chat Channel of the NYPL blog. We'll kick off another lively and thought-provoking season this fall. Make sure you don't miss an episode by signing up for NYPL's Research newsletter.