Abolishing a Smile

Frederick Douglass was the most photographed man of his time—reportedly photographed more than Abraham Lincoln. But there’s one thing you’ll almost never see in Douglass’s photos: a smile. The famous American abolitionist believed that smiling would play into 19th-century stereotypes of Black people as cartoonlike objects of ridicule. Of the 160 known portraits of Douglass, he’s smiling in only one, which shows him with his wife and sister-in-law.