Critical Analysis
Title
Critical Analysis
Collection Items
A Spirit Photograph
An analysis of a “spirit photograph,” a form of photography thought to bridge this world and the next.
A White Slave Girl: “Mulatto Raised by Charles Sumner”
A narrative of discovery about one of the first photographs used to promote the abolitionist cause.
Fair Women and Transformed into Negresses
A meditation on writing about oppressed individuals photographed for scientific purposes, and whether it is possible to liberate such people through an act of imagination.
Louis Agassiz: Full Face and Profile
A biographical approach to photographs of slaves, considering the images in relation to the personal and professional attitudes of the naturalist who commissioned them.
Black Civil War Portraiture in Context
An investigation into the kinds of meanings that photographic portraits of black Civil War soldiers had at the time of their making as well as some of the challenges that such a recovery poses for historians today.
Work and the Poetry of Sterling Brown: Reclaiming Forced Labor
Juxtaposing an 1850 daguerreotype portrait of a slave, a painting by Jean-François Millet, a photograph by Lewis Hine, and a poem by Sterling Brown, this essay seeks to understand how, and under what conditions, even forced labor may be reclaimed and…
On Seeing and Writing Together: An introduction to a multimedia, collaborative writing project
This collaborative essay by a professor and her students in a college writing course demonstrates how the images in the Mirror of Race exhibition may be used to teach research and reflection on the meaning of race in American…
As White as Their Masters: Visualizing the Color Line
A discussion of the ambiguity of the color line in nineteenth-century visual representations of race.
A Freakish Whiteness: The Circassian Lady and the Caucasian Fantasy
What is the meaning of mid-nineteenth-century portraits of white women with strange names, exotic costumes, and wildly frizzed hair?