In the 1850s, a runaway slave who called herself Sojourner Truth electrified American audiences with her accounts of life in bondage. But her fame depended on more than her speaking skills: She was one of the first Americans to use photography to build her celebrity and earn a living…
…Each carte de visite—a small photograph mounted on a card—was, in days before television and social media, its own form of viral marketing. The cards were so novel that they sparked a craze, The New York Times’ Andrea L. Volpe explains. Cheap, small and easy to collect and pass from hand to hand, they were tailor-made for both news buffs and sentimental folks. Soldiers and their sweethearts had them made as pocket-sized reminders of love affairs and family bonds. But they were also used as an early form of photographic advertising, spreading the never-before-seen faces of political leaders and public figures.At first blush, Sojourner Truth seems like an unlikely photographic pioneer. Born into slavery sometime around 1797 under the name Isabella Baumfree, she was sold multiple times and beaten, harassed and forced to perform hard labor. In 1826, she walked away from her master’s New York farm in protest of his failure to live up to a promise to emancipate her ahead of a state law that would have made her free. She then sued John Dumont, her former master, for illegally selling her five-year-old son and won her case.
