Over the course of his life, Frederick Douglass routinely made use of photography, as art object, political instrument, and metaphor with a particular investment in the relationship between image making, freedom, and progress. The frequency with which he sat for photographic portraits has earned him the status as the most photographed man in the nineteenth century. Douglass’s images circulated widely as collectable cartes-de-visites and in personal and political albums. The photographs’ networks of circulation are crucial to understanding Douglass’s photographic practice.

In Chapter 4, I consider how poets reconfigured the long-play stereo album and challenged the spatial limits of the printed book. In particular, I turn to Langston Hughes’s LP book Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961) and Amiri Baraka’s poetry album It’s Nation Time (1972), recorded for Motown’s Black Forum label, in order to discuss how the stereo LP opened new black sonic spaces at a contentious moment in history. While many poets made recordings during the 1960s, what distinguishes these works is their ongoing dialogue with the specificities of stereo sound, the LP, and sound in its spatial dimensions. Part of what is radical about a stereophonic poetic is the way that it opens a space within a space -- one that sits neither inside nor outside history.