Frederick Douglass was the most photographed American man of the nineteenth century, with more than 160 pictures of him existing today. Should it therefore surprise us that his image is now emblazoned on mugs, websites, T-shirts, tote bags, and, most ignominiously, thongs? As Marcus Wood points out in his essay in Pictures and Power: Imaging and Imagining Frederick Douglass (1818–2018), on the Web there is an explosive marketplace in which Douglass exists as “maimed fragments” while his myth is reduced to a soundbite (279). But should this startle scholars? Throughout his lifetime Douglass was a striking visual phenomenon – one of the most attractive men of the nineteenth century who knew how to curate and perform his image. The explosion of interest in what we might call the “visual Frederick Douglass” on the Web is part of a larger cultural moment in which scholars have come to understand, as Shawn Michelle Smith astutely notes in this volume, that the objectification of Douglass via photography (as his image was bought and sold) might either enhance or diminish the claiming of a full human identity. Douglass carefully curated his public image to further his status as a man, and the status of African Americans. That he sometimes failed in this endeavour should not surprise us, but it does denote his astute understanding of the power of the visual within culture.

It is vital, then, that the volume under consideration analyses illustrations of Douglass from his lifetime and visual materials that reach into the present. Much has been written about Douglass and photography (see, for example, the brilliant essays by Laura Wexler and Ginger Hill in Pictures and Progress (2012)), so this innovative focus on past and present works exceptionally well. The strongest essays forge new theories concerning Douglass's investment in photography and have far-reaching implications for the representation of race in culture.

After a thoughtful introductory essay by the editors which argues that Douglass stages himself in multiple ways, performing as a trickster at times (31), the first part of the collection contains five essays concerning images of Douglass in his lifetime. This section begins with a reprint of an essay by Donna Wells which argues that Douglass had an early grasp of photography's ability to persuade, enlighten, and foster progress. The next essay – by Zoe Trodd – powerfully expands on Wells's points, demonstrating that Douglass uses his half-century of photography to make a visual argument for social equality; in contrast to the beaten bodies so common in abolitionist discourse, his minimalistic photographs make him “inaccessible, hidden in plain sight” (63). An unusual emphasis manifests itself in the next essay, by Earnestine Jenkins: Anna Murray Douglass, Douglass's first wife. Contemplating two existent images of her, Jenkins explores how black women use photographs as modes of liberation, manipulating them to resist stereotypes and tell their own stories. In the next essay, the focus returns to Frederick Douglass: Celeste-Marie Bernier shows how he created “sorrow images” (109) that foreground the pained memory of his former life in slavery, but she also (more broadly) analyses drawings, sculpture, paintings, and sketches created by or about Douglass in the pre-Civil War period. This section ends fittingly with Fionnghuala Sweeney's powerful contribution on postmortem images of Douglass, such as his death mask and two photographs taken after his demise. These images of de-composition stand in contrast to the images of composition and resurrection that Douglass crafted throughout his life, but they also allow for the possibility of “the flawed, the fallible, the controversial and the transgressive as part of the constitution of the heroic” (162).

The next six essays concern Douglass's presence in today's world. Alan Rice skilfully places Douglass's imagistic legacy within the context of Lubaina Himid's 2014 cover artwork created for the volume Douglass Lapels, arguing that Himid's “abstract, feminist, ideas-rich, radical illustration of Douglass” sets him free from his iconic image (186) and is the latest in a series of historical and contemporary artistic images inspired by Douglass and his “liberating sojourn” in the United Kingdom. Shawn Michelle Smith also explores Douglass's presence in contemporary art via Rashid Johnson's portraits incorporating him. Smith brilliantly argues that Douglass understood how to use the technology of photography to “perform subjectivity and claim a place in public and political spheres” (269). Smith demonstrates as well that Johnson's reenactment of Douglas presents “the fugitive time of photography” (272) as it looks forward and backward. Turning to material culture, Jeffrey Stewart, in a thoughtful essay, analyses Douglass's house at Cedar Hill (in Washington, DC) as a performative space; Douglass emerges as an artist “who created beauty out of the ashes of the American experience” (225). Stewart's essay is followed by Hannah Durkin's on the absence of Douglass in film, which stands in contrast to Wood's chapter on Douglass on the Web; Wood worries that Douglass's legacy is “in danger of going under for the last time, drowned in the semiotic toxic waste” (282) of his proliferating virtual image. A final chapter by Bill Lawson and Maria Brincker expertly examines Douglass's theory of aesthetics and the transformative potential of photography to combat racist attitudes.

Most of the essays are persuasive and some – especially those by Trodd, Rice, Smith, Bernier, and Sweeney – have far-reaching implications for conceptualization of race, photography, and visuality. Reading these essays as a whole, it is evident that Douglass was never exactly in control of his image. Even within the first US edition of his Life and Times (1881), Douglass lamented that the rough woodcuts (which he had not authorized) provided only “a caricature of my own face” (31). Would Douglass, then, have been surprised to find his noble visage emblazoned on underwear? Nowadays one can purchase thongs with the image of Susan B. Anthony, Che Guevara, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or even Margaret Thatcher. Why should Douglass be left out of this throng of thongs? Douglass consciously curated his image in his lifetime, yet he was aware that he often failed to retain power over it. His iconicity today is a fact – and one that speaks to the ways in which visual culture as a whole tends towards appropriation and objectification, but also can be used in specific moments to image a fully human subject who resists this debasement.