1800’s message media Essay Example for Free

1800’s message media Essay Prior to photographys debut, only the wealthy and the powerful could afford the services of an artist to paint their portrait. Photography provided an affordable means for many to obtain likenesses. In an 1864 speech on pictures, Frederick Douglass discusses the impact that the early photographic formats made on society. First, Douglass views photography as the great equalizer of race and class in that a servant girl could now afford to have a likeness made of herself. Second, the observation illustrates the impact that images had on society more than 150 years ago. The access to such an affordable product encouraged many free blacks to have their portraits taken. Third, the speech is important because it represents an African American perspective on photography. The daguerreotype was the earliest commercial photographic format and was named for its inventor, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre. It was popular from its invention in 1839 until around 1860. Daguerreotypes are unique and fragile and images of non-whites are somewhat rare. The daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass is one of the earliest known images of him and is unusual because of the profile pose said to symbolize nobility of character. The Douglass image represents the control that free blacks had over how they wished to be perceived by the public. In many of his early photographs, Douglass appears poised, cultured and sometimes defiant as in the engraving of Douglass taken from the frontispiece of his second autobiography My Bondage My Freedom. A comparison of the first two photographs of Douglass with a later drawing of him shows a startling difference, a difference which was noted by Douglass in a book review in the North Star. Douglass commented on this drawing of him by Wilson Armistead. Douglass comment is based on his on-going criticism of the portrayal of African Americans by white artists. Possibly, Douglass did not pose for the Armistead drawing but in the photographic portraits, he had much more control over how he wished to be portrayed. Douglass was one of the most photographed individuals of the 19th century. (Wells, 1996) Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, the portrayal of the Black image in American painting and in the larger context of art remained somewhat elusive and descriptively narrow. The problem of interpretation is seldom a simple one. Thus, with a subject as controversial as the depiction of race and how it should be rendered in the name of honest imagery, artists often were at the mercy of clients who were not objective in their description of race. The actual observations of subjects from within the Black race had little impact on the making of Black images in painting. Much of what emerged from white artists as a sympathetic statement about the Black race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came largely from the imagination of the artists. Often, they willfully stereotyped Black subjects by carrying out the wishes of clients who wanted a portrait of their favorite Black servant recorded along with themselves. The results of such a practice were Black images in the art of painting that covered a gamut of visual responses, from the more positive sophisticated imagery of John Singleton Copleys Watson and the Shark, in which a Black man is shown as an equal, awestruck spectator in the boat, to the tattered-torn destitute Black people in the paintings of William Aiken Walker in which field hands are seen picking cotton on southern plantations. By contrast, from 1700 to 1900, very few images of Blacks appeared in sculpture other than in folk items. Those which have survived were often made to show subjects with exaggerated features highlighting what most would describe as unfavorable stereotypic characterizations of the Black race. Some of these grotesque characterizations of Blacks have survived into the twentieth century. One could all but characterize the subjects which occur in the first four time periods listed by citing the recurring themes which white American artists chose to depict in which Blacks were the principal subjects. Blacks are depicted as servants and slaves, noble savages, or servant/war heroes; a few are seen as gentlemen of color. As early as 1838, Blacks were seen as entertainers of whites, serving as musicians and comic capers. Among the visual documentation found are slave sales and slave market scenes, field scenes depicting work experiences as well as those sharing the laziness of the race, and Blacks who serve to promote the sale of food. These are among the constant images that recur in the work of American artists from 1840 until the end of the Civil War. Artistry toward Articulating Personal Characteristics A cursory study of Blacks in American painting reveals that they were virtually ignored as primary figures. When depicted, they were presented more often as servants in the employ of wealthy householders or in scenic settings in which they provide music as entertainment and on occasion singing and dancing for self-entertainment ( Epstein 1). As time passed, such images have come to be looked upon as stereotypic and only partially accurate in showing the full range of the lifestyle and activities of Blacks in colonial and post-Revolutionary America. Dimension is not a term which can readily describe the treatment that Blacks received from the hands of artists of the majority culture prior to the latter half of the nineteenth century. In all ways of visual description, Blacks were depicted with contempt. What is seen today as an appreciable change among mainstream artists in their portrayal of the Black subject is a trend which began to change with the imagery of William Sidney Mount ( 1807-1868) and Winslow Homer ( 1836-1910), both of whom depicted Black subjects with reasonable likeness in their time in history. Of the two, Mount showed limited sensibilities to the plight of the race. Homer directed his artistry toward articulating personal characteristics of the race, painting distinct individuals who lived separate lives devoid of the stereotypic cast placed on previous Black sitters. Homer avoided placing Black figures into a cramped space devoid of compositional clarity. While one tends to look favorably on those images created by William Sidney Mount and on those still-unknown artists of the period that show Blacks as musicians, farmers, and members of their own households, in the main, those images were most often rendered in a manner that singled out Black Americans as being happy with their fate and destitute state in life. More often, they appeared untutored in the cultural ways of white society and visually represented a helpless people without civilized roots and a distinct ethnic history. (Smith, 1988).