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Dec 4, 2019 · by Sabrina Imbler December 4, 2019. The daguerreotype within its original leather frame. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The image is simple and haunting. Ten enslaved African-American people...
- Sabrina Imbler
Feb 20, 2019 · Douglass is the most photographed man of the 19th century, having sat for more than 150 portraits [see page 25]. Recognizing the import of images, he took the opportunity as frequently as possible to document his own image as a dignified, self-determined black man. Left: Ambrotype of Frederick Douglass, 1855-1865.
- Buzzfeed News Photo Essay Editor
IN SLAVERY. PHOTOGRAPHS: 1847-1863 *. AFRICAN-BORN ENSLAVED MEN, named Renty and Fassena by their slaveholders, near Columbia, South Carolina, March 1850. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. 2. LUCY, HOLDING CHARLOTTE, A WHITE CHILD, ca. 1845. Kentucky Gateway Museum Center, Maysville, Kentucky / Library of Congress. 3.
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- Women Move Bricks
- These People Work 17 Hour Days, Without Breaks, Without Water
- Children Work in Unbearable Heat
- A Powerless Photographer Documenting Powerless People
- Children Carry Stones Down Mountains
- A Family Portrait in Toxic Color
- The Currency of Lake Volta: Fish
- Children Taken, Trafficked, Vanished
- Meet Kofi, Who Survived Slavery
- Into The Mines
Kristine spent months photographing the brick kilns of India and Nepal. Here, in India, women balance stacks of bricks on their head in order to carry them to nearby trucks.
“Deadened by monotony and exhaustion, they work silently, doing this task over and over for 16 or 17 hours a day,” Kristine says of the unreal conditions of these workers in Nepal. “There were no breaks for food, no water breaks, and the severe dehydration made urinating pretty much inconsequential.”
Children are put to work, too; here, a child stands in a kiln in Nepal. “So pervasive was the heat and the dust that my camera became too hot to even touch and ceased working,” Kristine said of her experience there. “Every 20 minutes, I’d have to run back to our cruiser to clean out my gear and run it under an air conditioner to revive it, and as I...
While photographing in the kilns, Kristine says she often wanted to break down and cry, but was instructed firmly by one of the abolitionists she was there with to do no such thing. “He very clearly explained to me that emotional displays are very dangerous in a place like this, not just for me, but for them,” she recalls. “I couldn’t offer them an...
“In the Himalayas, I found children carrying stone for miles down mountainous terrain to trucks waiting at roads below,” says Kristine. “The big sheets of slate were heavier than the children carrying them, and the kids hoisted them from their heads using these handmade harnesses of sticks and rope and torn cloth.”
“This is a family portrait,” says Kristine of a picture she took at a textile factory in India. “The dyed black hands are the father, while the blue and red hands are his sons. They mix dye in these big barrels, and they submerge the silk into the liquid up to their elbows, but the dye is toxic.”
Lake Volta, in Ghana, is the largest man-made lake in the world. There, fish are a form of currency; a recent estimate figured that more than 4,000 children are enslaved and at work fishing on the lake.
When Kristine first arrived at Lake Volta, she saw what she thought was a family fishing trip. Wrong. “They were all enslaved. Children are taken from their families and trafficked and vanished, and they’re forced to work endless hours on these boats on the lake, even though they do not know how to swim,” she says.
This is Kofi, who was rescued by Free the Slaves from one of these fishing villages. “Kofi is the embodiment of possibility,” says Kristine. “Who will he become because someone took a stand and made a difference in his life?”
“These miners are enslaved in a mine shaft in another part of Ghana,” says Kristine. “The shafts are up to 300 feet deep, and they carry out heavy bags of stone that later will be transported to another area where the stone will be pounded so that they can extract the gold.”
- Antique colorized photo of the United States: Picking cotton.
- Antique black and white photograph: Sugar cane field, Cuba.
- Antique black and white photo of the United States: Picking cotton.
- Freedom: breaking chains African american hands and arms.
The images in Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora have been selected from a wide range of sources, most of them dating from the period of slavery before c. 1900. Our growing collection currently has over 1,200 images.
Feb 17, 2020 · Historian uncovers gynecology’s brutal roots in slavery. Q&A with Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor in the history of medicine, who will speak at Berkeley on Friday, Feb. 21 at noon. Many enslaved women recovered in slave sick houses or hospitals, like this one on a former plantation in Melrose, Louisiana, after giving birth.
