The opening title sequence in the movie Emancipation, now streaming on Apple TV+ after a brief theatrical release, tells us that the film is based on a true story. That is, in part, the case. Inspired by an iconic image of an enslaved man’s whip-scarred back, the movie tells the story of a man named Peter (played by Will Smith) who escapes from the Confederate camp where he has been forced to work laying railroad tracks during the Civil War. The film, like the historical photograph that inspired it, creates a heroic narrative that reveals Peter’s suffering in slavery and charts his escape from bondage to his enlistment in the Union Army.
The movie, unlike the photograph, offers a story from Peter’s perspective, centering him as a thinking and feeling man with a beloved family and strong religious faith. It draws on documented history to imagine a narrative that fills in the gaps of what was not recorded of the life of the historical “Peter,” in word or picture, in 1863. One striking effect of director Antoine Fuqua’s choice to present Emancipation in desaturated colors is the way the movie’s scenes of enslaved people working in cotton fields and newly emancipated people gathering in crowds become evocative of 19th-century photographs. In selecting one such photograph for source material, Fuqua and Smith have tapped into a part of American visual history that still holds immense power. Did Emancipation do that history justice? Could any film, made in 2022?
By the time of the Civil War, Americans across the country had become familiar with the emerging technology of photography. In the 1860s, the technology had advanced enough so that albumen prints, called cartes de visite, could be made and reproduced quickly and cheaply. Commercial photographers set up studios where customers might select a backdrop and props and pose for a portrait. Measuring about 2 ½ by 4 inches, cartes became popular items to exchange among friends and collect in albums.
During the Civil War, photographic images of the war—soldiers, sailors, battlefields, camps, forts, and ships—proliferated. Photographers documented Black people’s lives, often depicting women and children in “contraband camps” and men serving as laborers and soldiers in Union forces. They conveyed the horror of war, with images of corpses on blood-soaked battlefields, and they envisioned a future in which Black people were no longer enslaved but remained at work on farms and plantations. The technology at the time did not allow for candid or live action images. Instead, images were staged, with people and objects arranged in a tableau designed to present a visual narrative about the war.
The iconic image of Peter’s whip-scarred back falls into this category of wartime photography. According to historians David Silkenat and Bruce Laurie, the picture of Peter was made in the spring of 1863, shortly after Peter arrived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Laurie and Silkenat have researched the origins of the photograph and the subsequent newspaper accounts of Peter’s life that appeared in Harper’s Weekly and other publications. While many of the details about the picture’s creation remain murky, it is clear that Union officers and abolitionists circulated the picture of Peter’s battered body with the goal of arousing sympathy for the enslaved and support for the Union war effort.
Evidently, two other photographs of Peter were also made, one of him in tattered clothes and a third in his Union army uniform. Together, the three images, which were reproduced as drawings in Harper’s, created a triptych, charting Peter’s liberation from bondage, a transition from slave to man and soldier. This visual narrative was underscored by newspaper accounts of Peter’s heroic and death-defying escape from slavery. Silkenat questions the veracity of these accounts, suggesting that newspapers likely drew on multiple sources to craft a dramatic story that would capture widespread attention and generate attention for the abolitionist cause.
The image was made for a white, Northern audience. Black people, free and enslaved, of course already knew the horrors of slavery and racism first-hand and would not have looked to the photographs or newspaper accounts for insight or inspiration. By focusing on his scarred back, the image effectively reduces Peter’s life story to his suffering. It emphasizes to the viewer that a vicious overseer or owner is as much at the center of the story as Peter. The Harper’s Weekly illustrated triptych, furthermore, suggests that the horror of slavery’s violence was laid to rest with emancipation, and Peter’s transformation from a battered “contraband” to a valiant Union soldier.
In recent years, debates over the continuing meaning contained in cartes and other photographic images of enslaved people have been in the news. In 2019, Tamara Lanier filed a lawsuit against Harvard University over the ownership of a set of daguerreotypes made in 1850 of enslaved African and African American women and men from a South Carolina plantation. Lanier contended that as the direct descendant of the people in those images, the pictures rightfully belong to her. The portraits were commissioned by Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, a Swiss scientist, who hoped to demonstrate the biological inferiority of Africans and their progeny. The images are jarring. Women and men sit expressionless, facing the camera with their clothes pulled down to expose their breasts and bellies. Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that while Lanier did not have standing to claim ownership of the images, she could sue Harvard for “negligent infliction of emotional distress.”
It would seem like the project of a movie like Emancipation would be purely restorative, reconnecting “Peter” with a full human story—if not his own, which we can’t know. But these questions remain. At the premiere screening of Emancipation in late November, producer Joey McFarland, who is white, arrived with what he described as “the original photograph” of Peter. “I wanted a piece of Peter to be here tonight,” he said. (I’ll note my historian’s quibble that McFarland likely owns one of the many images of Peter that were printed in the 1860s, rather than the original carte de visite.) The backlash on social media was swift, with people criticizing McFarland for owning the image and bringing it to the premiere. McFarland soon apologized, explaining that he wanted to honor Peter. While social media rarely enjoys a reputation for fostering thoughtful discussion, the reaction to this incident points to one of the enduring legacies of slavery. Who can lay claim to Black people’s history and heritage?
What does it mean today, over 150 years after the abolition of slavery, for individuals or institutions to claim ownership of photographs of enslaved and emancipated Black people? Does it matter if the images are owned by a descendant, a museum, or a white movie producer? Is there a meaningful difference between purchasing a nineteenth-century carte of a Black person or purchasing an original edition of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography? I can’t help but wonder what the reaction might have been if Will Smith or his costar Charmaine Bingwa had arrived with Peter’s image tucked safely in a pocket.
Much of the negative reaction seems to have reflected a discomfort or revulsion with the spectacle of a white man positioning himself as the guardian of a battered, formerly enslaved Black man’s image and history. (Consider also that there’s the background of a growing discontent with Hollywood’s tendency to make—and award Oscars to—movies about slavery.) Historian Daina Ramey Berry, interviewed about the Lanier case in 2019, observed that enslaved people only possessed their souls. White people claimed ownership and control of their bodies, their labor, their children, and even photographs of them. Perhaps then it’s no surprise that today people responded so negatively to McFarland’s possession of a carte de visite of Peter.
Emancipation attempts to answer the question: What portrait would Peter have commissioned, and what story would he have told about himself? Other studio portraits of Black soldiers tell a decidedly different story than the historical image of Peter. In those images, Black men pose in their uniforms, bearing weapons and other props, and depict themselves as brave and handsome. In one portrait, a man in uniform poses with his family. Sojourner Truth posed for studio portraits in which she presented herself as a refined and intelligent woman, deliberately obscuring the injuries she suffered during her enslavement. Frederick Douglass, too, wrote and spoke about the power of photography and its significance for Black people, who could represent themselves as they saw themselves. These images, unlike the picture of Peter, show how Black men and women chose to represent themselves in the Civil War era. These are the pictures they bought and possessed to tell their own stories. We can only imagine that Peter, too, might have commissioned a different picture of himself.
