In her pioneering work as an archivist, theorist, curator and cultural historian, Deborah Willis has recovered and analyzed countless photographs by and of black Americans, chronicling the lives of those who have often been marginalized or excluded from the historical record. The beautifully illustrated general history of African American photography, Reflections in Black (2000), encapsulates this approach: it pays detailed attention to “the context of production, reception, and recollection,”Footnote ¹ offering “a history of black photographers that is shaped by visual evidence – diaries, images, newspapers.”Footnote ² One dimension of Willis's scholarly project has involved interpreting American history through the lens of photography, assembling a rich, extensive collection of images ranging from nineteenth-century commercial portraits that “conveyed a sense of self and self-worth” to twentieth-century documentary and artistic photographs that provide a “visual record of not only the social concerns of the majority of black Americans but also the reflexive experiences of both the photographers and their communities.”Footnote ³ At the same time, she has examined African American vernacular photography through which, as Robin D. G. Kelley puts it, viewers

If Willis's work is guided by an archivist's imperative to document the social, political and creative lives of black Americans, it is also underpinned by an acute sensitivity to the expressive power of photography, a medium that is always caught between the immediacy of capturing a specific moment in time and a sense of loss or precariousness. As Susan Sontag explains, “Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”Footnote ⁵ In the introduction to Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, Willis pursues this link between photography and emotion to different effect, describing the “intensity” of her encounter with “the first book she had ever seen with ‘colored’ people in it.”Footnote ⁶ Even before she could read with fluency, she was beguiled by Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava's The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a phototext that combines images of a distressed urban environment with intimate portraits of family and community life in Harlem. Anticipating her lifelong fascination with the haunting, arresting qualities of black photography, it opened up new ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding the world: “I read the book visually, ‘reading’ the pictures and relating to the experiences.”Footnote ⁷

Willis's enduring preoccupation with exploring American history through the prism of photography, while taking seriously its expressive power, is central to “The Black Civil War Soldier: Conflict and Citizenship.” The essay assembles an extraordinary array of photographs of black Civil War soldiers and later images that reflect upon racialized memorialization of the war in order to “engage the reader in the expressive act of portrait making and how dreams of freedom and emancipation could be both imagined and made possible through a photographer's lens.” By combining this gallery of photographs with full transcriptions of soldiers’ letters and detailed accounts of the experiences of individual soldiers, she invites readers to imagine the Civil War from the perspective of black soldiers and to recognize the “black troops who were defending the Union and fighting for freedom.” Many of the letters reprinted in the essay echo Frederick Douglass's assessment of the Union cause as an opportunity to resist slavery and to stake a claim to citizenship. These letters capture the difficulties faced by black soldiers, including unequal pay, discrimination, illness and separation from family members who were still enslaved, but they also testify to the courage of “activists against slavery” who recognized “how vital it was that African Americans be engaged fully as citizens.” Such resistance is recorded in an eloquent letter that James Henry Gooding, a corporal of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, wrote to Abraham Lincoln in 1863, which protests the unequal pay and conditions endured by black soldiers. Describing his fellow soldiers in Morris Island as “[o]bedient and patient and solid as a wall,” he called upon Lincoln to recognize the soldiers’ contribution to the war effort by awarding them full pay: “we have done a Soldier's duty. Why can't we have a Soldier's pay?” The forgotten voices that speak to us through these letters, which provide vivid, immediate and nuanced accounts of their war experiences, enrich our interpretation of the individual and group portraits of black American soldiers by supplying a fuller, more intimate picture of the motivations and concerns of such men. Interpreted alongside letters that characterize fighting for the Union as “a choice of freedom,” portraits of armed black soldiers posing in their uniforms in front of illustrated battlegrounds “engage the viewer in ideas of citizenship and self-representation.”

Complicating any simplistic account of “the quest for freedom among free and enslaved black Americans,” Willis focuses on aspects of the war that have slipped out of view, including soldiers’ family relationships, black women in combat and the “conflicted loyalty” of newly freed black men towards their former owners. As part of a sustained focus upon the emotional costs and sacrifices of black heroism, Willis reprints a poignant letter written by Spotswood Rice, a soldier in Missouri, to his enslaved children. He seeks, with tenderness and sensitivity, to reassure them of his love and his commitment to securing their freedom – “Dont be uneasy my children,” he writes, “I expect to have you” – but the letter also registers a significant shift in his attitude towards slavery, which is not unconnected to his experience as a soldier. Commenting on the manipulation of religion to justify slavery, he notes wearily, “my respects is worn out and have no sympathy for Slaveholders.” In this context, one of the most intriguing photographs is a family portrait of a Union soldier with his wife and two young daughters. The portrait is replete with telling details, which expand notions of emancipation and freedom to encompass the whole family, a sharp break with the emphasis upon individual self-definition in the slave narratives. Indeed, the sitters’ clothing and poses identify the portrait as an attempt to “envision emancipation.”Footnote ⁸ Although dressed in uniform, the Union soldier's unbuttoned coat indicates that he is off duty, at ease and in control, while the girls’ matching hats and coats signal respectability and comfort. At the same time, the photograph serves a comparable purpose to Spotswood Rice's loving letter to his children: it bears witness to the strength of family bonds, offering comfort and solace in the face of the uncertainties of war. Consequently, any celebration of freedom and independence is tempered by concern about life's precariousness, worries registered in the sitters’ grave expressions and the younger daughter's tight, anxious grip on her mother's skirt.

The associations generated by such dynamic interplay between word and image have always been central to Willis's scholarship. In her discussion of black soldiers, pairing letters and photographs encourages readers to engage with the material, supplying emotions and ideas. To take just one example, Willis enriches interpretation of individual portraits of Lewis Douglass (one of Frederick Douglass's sons) and his fiancée Helen “Amelia” Loguen by supplying a full transcription of a letter written by Douglass to his future wife on 20 July 1863, two days after the Fort Wagner attack. Douglass's letter not only provides a fascinating firsthand account of bravery on the battlefield, where “not a man flinched, though it was a trying time,” but also underlines his willingness to “die in a good cause.” In his thoughtful, courageous letter, Douglass comforts his fiancée while maintaining an unstinting commitment to black freedom: first he offers reassurance about his good health and then he breaks the news about those men from Loguen's hometown who have been wounded or killed. Such insights into the beliefs and emotional lives of individual soldiers breathe new life into the photographs, which might otherwise seem rather formal: read alongside his brave, principled private letter, the heroic resolve and aspiration embodied in Douglass's serious, clear-sighted gaze and upright posture come into sharp relief. Taken together, the photos and letters “combine to offer the viewer or reader a dynamic visual history of the war and the importance of emancipation,” reaching beyond the realm of historical documentation to shed light on the emotional dimensions of black men's participation in the war.

Elsewhere the interplay of text and image generates fuller understanding of the complexity of the transition from slavery to freedom. Particularly intriguing is a set of cartes de visite from an album assembled by a white officer, Lieutenant T. F. Wright, which show “how black soldiers in his regiment were viewed, assessed, and admired.” The photographs capture the soldiers’ diverse poses and individual styles of dress (including hats worn at rakish angles), and are accompanied by Wright's notes, which list information about the soldiers’ lives, family, physical characteristics, personal qualities and skills. What is striking about Willis's presentation of this extraordinary material is her privileging of primary sources over detailed analysis. Rather than discussing specific photographs in detail, Willis insists that readers and viewers must become active interpreters, filling in silences and fleshing out suggestions. Willis's analysis of Wright's collection is implied only through understated, indirect clues, as when she notes that his “most telling and illuminating” comment is the description of James Roberts as “a freeman, hard to manage … stubborn and reckless.” Given this, it is difficult to miss the extent to which Wright's notes are inflected by the asymmetrical power dynamics of slavery. Although he acknowledges the commitment and heroism of individual soldiers, Wright makes it clear, pace Toni Morrison, that “definitions belonged to the definers – not the defined”: he assumes the power to judge and describe black soldiers, even reinscribing stereotypes about miscegenation and free black Americans.Footnote ⁹ By contrast, the active interpretive role that Willis assigns to readers through her sustained focus upon historical documents encourages emotional and political engagement, not least by creating space for viewers to imagine alternative perspectives to those supplied by Wright. What did fighting mean to the men pictured in the photographs? What would they have to say about their participation in the war?

In the second half of the essay, Willis turns to the politics of memory, exploring the efforts of black intellectuals and artists to “fill the gaps in history” by commemorating black soldiers’ contribution to the Civil War. Focussing on the period from 1890 to the present, Willis traces an enduring cultural and political tradition of honouring the memory of black soldiers “in the collective work of exhibitions, displays, news stories, and organized campaigns to build monuments to this memory.” At the turn of the century, photographs of black Union soldiers occupied a prominent position in W. E. B. Du Bois's Exhibit of American Negroes at the Universalle de Paris exposition in 1900, functioning, in the context of Jim Crow, as a powerful reminder of black patriotism. Concepts of memorialization, resistance and recovery are also intertwined in the works of contemporary photographers like Carrie Mae Weems and William Williams, who grapple with the legacies of the Civil War and emancipation. In her analysis of Restless after the Longest Winter You Marched & Marched & Marched (1995), Willis connects Weems's deployment of formal techniques of layering and fragmentation, especially her cropping of Richard Benson's photograph of Saint-Gaudens's monument and the addition of a caption to “remind us about the heavy toll of war and the lives lost,” with the artist's challenge to official narratives of American history that, in Alan Trachtenberg's words, erase “the role of blacks in determining their own future.” In contrast to any straightforward alignment of documentary photography with transparent truth-telling, such techniques makes visible the constructedness of historical narratives, a move that at once underlines the necessity for creative reconstruction of fragments of the past and active, questioning interpretation.

Taken as a whole, Willis's essay, with its carefully constructed patchwork of letters, photographs and commentary, undertakes an activist project of historical recovery comparable to Weems's haunting evocation of “the lived experience of black soldiers.” Much of the force of Willis's overarching argument, with its clarion call for a reassessment of settled assumptions about the Civil War, derives from its emphasis upon historical documents and processes rather than close analysis. By incorporating so many photographs and letters into the essay's fabric, Willis resists simplification, focussing upon compromises, conflicts and struggle as well as heroism.

More broadly, the formal structure of Willis's essay, with its productive juxtaposition of word and image and its practice of assembling fragments from the past, is suggestive of a longer tradition of African American phototexts that contest dominant or official narratives of American history. There are, for example, striking parallels with James Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson and Camille Billops's The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978). This phototext, which features funerary photographs by the Harlem Renaissance photographer Van Der Zee, poetry by Dodson and interviews with Van Der Zee conducted by Billops, is best known for the “photograph of a pretty girl in a coffin, and … the photographer's recollection of how she got there,” which inspired Toni Morrison's Jazz.Footnote ¹⁰ But the volume also includes a section entitled “Soldiers,” which commemorates the heroism of black American soldiers in World War I.Footnote ¹¹ The photographs in this section, which might be read as images of remembrance and grace, employ formal techniques reminiscent of photomontage: Van Der Zee adds pictorial inserts of soldiers in combat and in mourning, as well as religious images and poems, “to create a narrative or at least a split temporality,” which, as Mark Whalan explains, “construct a story of mourning that is intimate, heroic, and antimonumental.”Footnote ¹² As in Willis's essay, a thematic preoccupation with memory, race and national belonging is foregrounded through formal techniques that generate temporal rupture and complexity. The political implications of such temporal layering are taken further through the juxtaposition of Van Der Zee's photographs with a poem by Owen Dodson entitled “War Games,” which employs a fragmented, collage-like form to establish connections between African American soldiers’ sacrifice in Vietnam and the segregation, discrimination and persecution experienced by black soldiers in World War I. In short, Dodson and Billops draw inspiration from Van Der Zee's artistic experimentation to create a heterogeneous aesthetic form that encourages readers not only to challenge historical amnesia about black heroism, but also to recognize continuing exclusion of black Americans from narratives of national belonging.

Another interesting counterpoint for Willis's essay is June Jordan's Dry Victories, a phototext for children published in 1972. This pocket-sized book is presented in the form of a conversation between Jerome and Kenny, two teenaged friends who are about to deliver a talk to their community about Reconstruction and civil rights, moments of possibility that failed to deliver all that they promised. In a wide-ranging conversation, the boys diagnose the successes and failures of “two times … that still be hanging us up,” noting that black resistance was, to a certain extent, hampered by a lack of economic redistribution.Footnote ¹³ The heroism of black soldiers in the Civil War is given prominence in their well-informed commentary: not only does Jerome supply facts and figures about black Union soldiers, but the narrative is also intercut with facsimiles of historical documents and photographs of black soldiers.Footnote ¹⁴ As well as countering amnesia about black heroism, Jordan undermines any reductive or consoling chronological narrative of progress. To take just one example, photographs of casualties at Gettysburg appear alongside images of black soldiers in Vietnam in such a way as to invite readers to make connections and to identify historical trends. As in Willis's essay, Jordan refuses didacticism or easy answers, cultivating instead a questioning, politically engaged readership. In an “Author's Note” that resonates with Willis's essay, she contends that “History is the business of choose and show.”Footnote ¹⁵ With this in mind, historians must give readers the tools, or the “ammunition,” to dismantle the assumptions or choices that underpin accounts of American history: “Kids may want more of the same ammunition, and teachers may want different points of view,” she notes, “That's the idea, go and find out for yourself.”Footnote ¹⁶ Just as in Willis's important essay, Jordan's subversive, unflinching reassessment of “how what we won was not nearly enough” not only involves scrupulous archival research, “taking the facts up front,” but also insists upon active engagement with a complex, living history.Footnote ¹⁷