Visualizing Equality by Gonzalez Aston;

Author:Gonzalez, Aston;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

PORTRAITS OF A LIBERIAN PEOPLE

Washington’s peripatetic photographic business in and around Monrovia enabled him to establish and strengthen networks with some of the most powerful families in the area. Although most of his daguerreotypes have not been found or survived, Washington’s prolific business generated revenues of more than a thousand dollars in little more than a year. With the most affordable size of daguerreotype costing three dollars, he likely created hundreds of portraits in his first year in Liberia alone. Surviving portraits of Urias Africanus McGill, a wealthy merchant, and a woman likely of the McGill family, represent the wealth that several Liberian emigrants and their families accumulated. Furthermore, within his first few years in Liberia, Washington sent images of President Stephen Allen Benson to the ACS, which allowed Rufus Anson in New York City to copy the daguerreotype and the NYCS to transform the portrait into an engraving and publish it in its monthly periodical. The unattributed Benson portrait appeared opposite the page from the engraving of Washington’s View of Monrovia and the Mesurado River with a favorable biography of President Benson. The editor proposed that the “wood-cut likeness … will witness to all who see it, that whatever honor may be reflected upon Liberia by this administration, will redound to the African race.”54 Emigrationists, therefore, used Washington’s portrait as a symbol of intrinsic intellectual and moral qualities of people of African descent.

Washington’s interest in depicting the past and future achievements of Liberian emigrants included numerous portraits of Liberian officials. In late 1856 or early 1857, Washington captured the likenesses of at least eleven Liberian officials: the vice president, six senators, and the chaplain, secretary, clerk, and sergeant at arms of the legislature. Arranged in poses that signaled their role in the Liberian government, these portraits embodied Washington’s beliefs about the political success possible for men in the black Liberian republic. The images demonstrate the composure and attainments of African American men that, in Washington’s eyes, exemplified the highest achievements of civilization. Several of these men had been formerly enslaved in the United States, and their images of political success and educational achievement communicated the possibilities of racial uplift ideology.

The portraits of Liberian officials drew on details that made those pictured recognizable as respectable citizens. Donning formal clothing, including suits, neckties, pressed and collared shirts, satin vests, and the occasional pair of glasses, the men pictured in the portraits reflected assumptions of respectability in fashion. That many of them sat at desks with pen or paper in hand signaled their education, literacy, and mental capacity during an era when many regarded people of African descent possessing all three with suspicion, doubt, or denial. These individuals had acquired the physical and intangible markers of respectability that their daguerreotypes made visible. Physical markers of respectability, coupled with the knowledge of their positions within Liberian society, visually substantiated their fitness to be citizens fully vested with Liberian rights. As officials of the state, they both represented and belonged to the national polity, which relied on them for its continued existence and growth.

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