Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture joins two trends broadening art history’s scope: exposing racial ideologies and analyzing popular art. While others have focused on antislavery imagery, Stephens opens new pathways by illuminating art that supported slavery in the United States, gaining access to unseen works, and researching manuscripts to understand the artists and their clients. For art historians, the book offers greater context for interpreting Southern art; for historians of slavery, it offers visual analysis often missing from studies of political culture. It provides a lay of the land and establishes key waypoints. At the same time, it highlights the risks of this interdisciplinary work, which requires attending simultaneously to art history, formal analysis, and historical and cultural approaches to the study of race.

The book’s first half offers a sweeping overview of images of slavery across half a century (1790s–1860s) and a wide range of media, including paintings, silhouettes, sketches, engravings, photographs, lithographs, illustrated envelopes, currency, and newspaper illustrations. It argues that proslavery artists obscured, obfuscated, and distorted the true image of slavery in response to abolitionist polemics. Where abolitionists exposed enslavers’ violence, proslavery artists depicted Black people as violent “savages.” Where antislavery cartoonists mocked Southern “chivalry,” proslavery artists portrayed enslavers as benevolent caretakers. Landscape paintings, for example, took part in the “rhetoric of slavery defense” (66) by minimizing and marginalizing African Americans or figuring them as healthy and happy.

The final three chapters each examine a single medium or artist and time period. Chapter four focuses on 1850s portrait photographs of African American women, often included in enslavers’ family sittings either as literal props for white infants or as symbolic members of the enslaver’s “family, black and white” (142). Stephens argues that these photographs “participated in the politics of slavery justification” (142) by responding to abolitionist claims of violence and exploitation. Chapter five traces the fascinating career of Adalbert Volck, a Confederate etcher, lithographer, and printer operating underground in Union-controlled Baltimore to counter Republican cartoonist Thomas Nast. Chapter six follows the development of postwar “Lost Cause” imagery in the denial of slavery’s horrors, arguing that William Washington’s oil, The Burial of Latané, with its figure of “the loyal slave,” was in part a response to antislavery Eastman Johnson’s Negro Life at the South. Postwar racist romanticism perhaps reached its peak (or nadir) with Edward Valentine’s popular sculptures, including Uncle Henry: Ancien Régime (1879) and The Nation’s Ward (1868), both examples of the grotesquely smiling “typical darkey”—in the white supremacist term—happy and faithful in slavery, hapless and helpless outside slavery (267).

Stephens’s argument that images formed proslavery rhetoric is seen most clearly in her treatment of political cartoons and popular prints, especially within local contexts, where proslavery and antislavery antagonists sparred before an attentive print consumer audience. Stephens walks us through a fascinating cycle of prints chronicling the brief history of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia, erected by abolitionists in 1838 and immediately destroyed by an incendiary mob. The inaugural self-congratulatory print depicted its gleaming classical façade towering over genteel white pedestrians. Signed “Zip Coon,” an antiabolitionist spoof lithograph “converted [the hall] into an interracial brothel” populated by racist caricatures (87). Postdestruction prints were ambivalent; Casper Wild’s lively lithograph animated the fiery spectacle and might have appealed to partisans on either side, while John Sartain’s mournful mezzotint, richly dark, marked the arsonists’ act as “shameful” (84). Stephens’s close attention to visual rhetoric here is enriching, as she shows each side lifting compositional details from the other and modifying them for ideological effect—and to garner print sales.

Her chapter on Volck offers a more extended analysis of visual discourse. Working secretly in Baltimore, Volck felt compelled to counter Thomas Nast, the Republicans’ most famous and prolific illustrator, with works he thought of as “free from falsehood and vulgarity.” Volck’s style ranged from the realistic reportage of Smuggling Medicines into the South to racist caricature, as in Broder Beecher, depicting white abolitionist Rev. Henry Ward Beecher as African American and misspelling “brother” to create a racist double entendre. Stephens’s visual analysis is most acute in this chapter, showing how Volck’s realism laid claim to patriotism by lifting compositional elements from well-known American works. Crossing the Potomac to Join the Southern Army, for example, borrowed from Emmanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, visually confirming Confederate viewers’ belief in the rightness of their cause. Stephens shows Volck’s prints coopting and countering all forms of American visual culture. His caricatures of Lincoln punned popular photographs and celebratory lithographs, demonstrating not only Volck’s visual literacy but also his expectation of it from his audience. 

This kind of visual political discourse is difficult to see in much of the rest of the book, however. The organization is generally thematic rather than chronological, with discussion jumping across time, suggesting that all the images were responding to the same political and cultural moment. Most of the abolitionist images are contained in chapter three, for example, making it difficult to see exactly how proslavery works engaged them. Imagery of slavery evolved significantly over these sixty years, especially after Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and the Civil War itself was a major turning point, arguably deserving its own chapter. Closer attention to shifting political contexts as they unfolded would produce greater insight into the roles different images played, or to understanding the evolution of a single genre or a single creator’s ideology or practice, especially across the massively disruptive processes of war and emancipation.

Moreover, the book would benefit greatly from a framework for understanding what exactly “politics,” “rhetoric,” and even “proslavery” mean in these images. A daguerreotype cradled in the hand did different cultural work than a landscape painting admired in an exhibition, and neither functioned as a political print tacked up on a tavern wall. What kind of power was at stake in each set of images, and how did these particular images negotiate that power? If enslavers’ family photographs made an argument, for example, it was not to northern abolitionists, but rather to local white friends and visitors, or perhaps to the Black women included in the photographs, or even only to themselves. Matthew Fox-Amato’s analysis characterizes these photographs as acts of “sentimental possession,” the products of patriarchal slavery’s perverse psychological entanglements and assertions of personal power. The poses comprised not “proslavery” argumentation per se, but rather enslavers’ hegemonic assumption of the naturalness or rightness of slavery, serving as a premise for the particular rhetorical acts each photograph performed in its own household context. Stephens highlights the fact that African American women often returned the camera’s gaze, engaging viewers directly and thereby asserting their humanity. Here we might see slavery’s infrapolitics—struggles over identity and domestic power taking place beneath the surface of political rhetoric.

Stephens often uses archival material to interpret individual photographs, but the analysis remains constrained by its generalizing of them as “proslavery.” For example, regarding the expression of the unidentified Black woman posing alone in Mobile, Alabama, viewers may or may not see “insubordination” to an assumed enslaver (144). Exhaustion, perhaps—or a life of labor—might be read in her dark eye circles. But while her style of dress may indicate domestic labor, it does not necessarily signify enslavement. It is neatly pleated and arranged on her lap, where she cradles a slightly splayed fan, a symbol of refinement. Her hoop earrings and carefully parted and plaited hair suggest that she took great care in preparing to sit for this photograph. Perhaps she even commissioned it herself. In fact, Stephens declares self-commission “likely” in another case, the dual portrait of Juddy Telfair Jackson and her granddaughter Lavinia, who despite their documented enslavement “sit almost proudly before the camera” (153). Both or neither of these photographs may have been commissioned by their Black sitters, but we cannot determine that, or their legal status, from what we might see in the sitters’ expressions and clothing alone.

In addition to the ambiguity around political terms like “proslavery,” the book’s claims are, at times, compromised by insufficient attention to visual considerations, including instances where specific elements are misidentified. For example, the statue of Liberty in Volck’s 1864 Emancipation Proclamation is not, in fact, “wear[ing] a baboon’s head” (202), but rather is shrouded with a “Scotch cap,” the type of hat Lincoln was falsely accused of wearing as a disguise while changing trains in Baltimore on his inaugural journey to Washington. Further, the book’s format itself raises questions. Its full-color quarto-sized pages are especially useful for enlarging daguerreotypes and examining political prints packed with detail. But in light of recent conversations around the potentially problematic practice of recirculating racist and violent images, especially images of torture, reproducing them in a beautiful, large format art book requires more care and consideration than is provided.

Hidden in Plain Sight lays new ground for the study of images of slavery, and Stephens has exposed sources and visual discourses long ignored. The work invites much new research and many new questions. Why, for example, did the caretaker/child trope seem to appear with the advent of photography? How did diverse Christian ideologies regarding slavery manifest themselves in images? How did African Americans themselves regard white-produced images and engage in visual communication and expression? Scholars moving into this field have their work cut out for them. The sources are there, and fully understanding them will take careful attention to their visual details, their material and historical contexts, and to our own frameworks and approaches.