User:Lmccormack1213/sandbox

JAMES PRESLEY BALL

"James Presley (J.P) Ball, one of the only known African-American daguerrotypists working in the nineteenth century, sought to fight fire with fire by commissioning an anti-slavery panorama, painted entirely by African-American Artists. Titled Ball’s Splendid, Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States, and measuring 2,400 square yards, the 1855 exhibit was designed to tour extensively throughout the United States both to protest slavery and to promote the daguerreotype studio of its sponsor.35 Upon completion, Ball’s panorama was exhibited in the abolitionist centers of Cincinnati and Boston." (will paraphrase this later)

"Ball's panorama presented the immersive illusion of a slaves journey from freedom in Africa, through capture and the journey to the United States, through slavery in the South, and freedom again in the North. It was accompanied by pedagogical materials designed to aid viewers in learning the "lessons sought to be inculcated" by the experience." (will paraphrase later)

"One demand was for the panoramas to promote a scientific discourse of evidentiary truth, and specifically to traffic in truths that could be substantiated by ethnographic, spatial forms: landscapes, bodies and artifacts. Another cultural demand to which this seems to capitulate is for works by African-Americans to be factual rather than artistic. However, although Ball replicates traditional panoramic aesthetics for this work, and therefore does not push the form as far as Walker and Douglass, he still utilizes, even mobilizes, these techniques in the service of counterimperialist discourses." (will paraphrase later)

"Most notably, Ball’s panorama juxtaposes images that evoke imperialist nostalgia with images that are honest about the violence of history; blends discourses in a way that foreshadows Douglass’s blending of discourses (especially the discourse of image and text); and blends cultures in a way that plays with the concept of racial purity central to the segregation inherent in the institution of slavery." (will paraphrase later)

Jarenski, Shelly. "“Delighted and Instructed”: African American Challenges to Panoramic Aesthetics in J. P. Ball, Kara Walker, and Frederick Douglass." American Quarterly, vol. 65 no. 1, 2013, pp. 119-155. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/aq.2013.0003