Black Chronicles: Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain [Hardcover]

A collection of extraordinarynineteenth-century portraitsthat radically shifts ourunderstanding of the presenceand identities of the Blacksubject in Victorian Britain. The culmination of an expansive research project, initiated by Autograph, a London-based institution focused on photographys relation to race and social justice, that reveals Black lives in nineteenth-century Britain through an astonishing array of studio portraits& The design privileges the intensity of gazes between photographers and subjects through outstanding reproduction, which also allows for clothing, jewelry, and hairstyles, and the writing on cartes-de-visite and album pages to be visible with a startling clarity of detail& Mussais meticulous biographical notes on numerous sitters are an immense and compelling resource. A carefully composed act of recovery and an archive brought back to life through curatorial obsession, intellectual rigor and a deep ethic of care. What unfolds across its more than 300 pages is not just an exploration of race and photography in Victorian Britain, but a sustained meditation on presence, erasure and the politics of looking... Mussais analysis renders these photographs far more than anthropological artifacts. She reads them as active sites of meaning: images that expose not only the aesthetic codes of the period, but the shifting registers of self-fashioning, resistance and diasporic presence&? Groundbreaking& Challenges the historical erasure of Black British subjects and reframes narratives of race, identity, and colonialism in 19th-century visual culture& The curated images are striking. A deeply researched volume containing the most extensive gathering of images of Black people in 19th Century England [and] a noble enterprise&