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Scholars exploring the “slave portrait” in early modern Europe and colonial America have revealed it to be more paradox than oxymoron, occupying vexed territory shaped not only by convention and stereotype, but also idiosyncratic interactions among artists, sitters, and audiences. This panel extends that inquiry into the nineteenth and early twentieth century Americas. The explosion of print culture and genre painting brought many marginalized groups into the visual arts for the first time, but also promulgated a suite of tropes delimiting the depiction of race, gender, class, religion, and sexuality. Could socially and politically vulnerable individuals break through those representational constraints and emerge as pictorial subjects in their own right? These papers explore this question along the spectrum from portrait to type, a broad cultural space blurring the idiosyncratic and the generic. How could portraitists’ use of conventions empower or undermine the signaling of individual sitters’ subjectivity? How did artists, illustrators, and publishers exploit portraiture’s realistic gestures to produce stereotypes authenticating social prejudice? Could image makers instead work through or against generic types to invoke the subjectivity of real persons? When and how did subjects actively participate in this process, revealing an awareness of how they might be perceived as individuals or as representatives of a group? In what ways did they use or respond to finished works, whether commissioned by themselves or others? Four case studies pursue these questions in paintings, prints, drawings, illustrations, and photographs produced or circulated in North and Central America between 1840 and 1920.