"Picturing Frederick Douglass is a work that promises to revolutionize our knowledge of race and photography in nineteenth-century America. Teeming with historical detail, it is filled with surprises, chief among them the fact that neither George Custer nor Walt Whitman, and not even Abraham Lincoln, was the most photographed American of that century. In fact, it was Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) the ex-slave turned leading abolitionist, eloquent orator, and seminal writer whose fiery speeches transformed him into one of the most renowned and popular agitators of his age,"--NoveList.

Part I. The photographs -- Part II. Contemporaneous artwork -- Part III. The photographic legacy -- Part IV. Douglass's writings on photography -- Part V. Catalogue raisonné.