Image: Library of Congress
Editor’s Note: As we celebrate Black History Month, this article is a reminder that there is an incredible import of photography when printed words do not exist to tell a story.
Cross-posted from smithsonianmag.com
[by Isis Davis-Marks]
When Deborah Willis was growing up, her teachers seldom mentioned the black soldiers who’d fought in the American Civil War.
Years later, when the Philadelphia native became a curator—working first at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and then at the Smithsonian Institution—she found herself intrigued by photographs of these individuals, whose stories are still so often overlooked.
Speaking with Vogue’s Marley Marius, Willis explains, “I was fascinated because we rarely see images of soldiering, basically, with the backdrop of portraits.”
As Nadja Sayej reports for the Guardian, the scholar and artist’s latest book, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, commemorates the conflict’s military men and women through more than 70 photographs, handwritten letters, personal belongings, army recruitment posters, journal entries and other artifacts.
Posing for portraits allowed black men who’d long been “told that they were second-class citizens, that they were subhuman,” to assert their newfound identity and freedom as soldiers, Willis tells Vogue.