Performing Liberation: Ellen Craft and Photography

Recent scholarship into 19^th century American photography has addressed photograph albums as fruitful objects of study, often around issues of identity and femininity. Yet, this scholarship has very rarely addressed albums made by African-American women. My paper studies Ellen Craft’s 1860s family photograph album to offer a new look at an exceptional American woman of color who used her carte-de-visite album to express her identity as an mixed-race, transnational mother and abolitionist. Craft and her husband William became famous after their successful escape from slavery with the light-skinned Ellen masquerading as an ailing Georgia planter and William as her loyal slave. Abolitionists at the time used a very different image of Ellen, as a cross-dressing trickster, in their publications.

Analyzing the structure of the album and the people pictured, I argue that Ellen employed her album to not only document her success at growing an educated, empowered family but to also record her extensive social connections among prominent abolitionists and political figures who supported emancipation and reconstruction. Additionally, her album offers interesting insight into her nuanced understanding of race in 19^th c. America as a light skinned woman who strongly identified as black. Her album, I believe, offers a visual presentation of the complex, networked, and cross-race identifications of a savvy mid-19th century woman of color whose album continues to memorialize her as a matriarch for future American generations.