Volume 23, Issue 2 | Autumn 2024

The focus of this DAH project is an album of turn-of-the-twentieth-century commercial portrait photographs of African Americans in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The author shows how the album enacts Frederick Douglass’s ideas about photography, how the people in the album used photography to construct images of racial uplift, and how the compiler used the album to create a composite image of Black respectability and community. Photographs and photograph albums gave African American sitters an opportunity to be visible and resist erasure, even as they participated in mainstream American society. The practice of sharing photograph albums also facilitated transmission of Black individual, family, community, and national history and values though a powerful combination of images and storytelling, which capitalized on the strength of African American oral traditions. Ultimately, photographs like those in the album helped sitters and viewers imagine, and even achieve, a better life in the decades after Reconstruction (1863–77).

This article examines the public and private portrayals of the British aristocratic officer Robert James Lindsay, whose reported actions in the first major conflict of the Crimean War, the Battle of the Alma, became the subject of national acclaim in Victorian Britain. Through an analysis of the family’s unpublished correspondence, the author argues that their engagement with the war’s visual materials, including sketches, illustrated newspapers, panoramas, color lithographs, photographs, and popular shows, was integral to their collective effort to manage their own anxieties and maintain the priorities of their social class during their son’s two-year campaign. The family’s affective responses to visual and material culture promoted their collective aristocratic agency as interlocutors of the war’s representations.

The eleven exhibitions of the Society of French Artists (SFA) held in London between 1870 and 1875 were of great consequence for the formation of a taste for Barbizon School painting in Britain. This article explores their significance and examines the central role of the French dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in orchestrating these exhibitions, at which nearly 350 Barbizon paintings were shown, including such seminal works as Millet’s The Angelus, today in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. In addition to reconstructing the SFA exhibitions, the article surveys the network of British collectors and dealers who acquired the Barbizon paintings featured at the exhibitions.