Photography and the Promise of Democracy: Frederick Douglass, Afro-Argentine Portraiture, and the Racial Politics of 19th-Century Photography

Join us for a talk and discussion with Alejandra Uslenghi, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University, moderated by Ingrid Brioso Rieumont (Spanish and Portuguese).  Uslenghi's presentation will explore the political and representational claims on photography in late 19th century, beginning with Frederick Douglass's visionary writings on the medium. Recently brought back into public conversation through Isaac Julien's Lessons of the Hour, Douglass's reflections frame photography as a democratic tool capable of challenging racial hierarchies. Drawing from her forthcoming volume, Fotografía y democracia. Para una justicia representacional (forthcoming 2026), Alejandra Uslenghi will present her Spanish translation of Douglass's lectures, her introductory essay, and a curated visual album of Afro-Argentine portraiture from the same period. 

The talk will situate these materials within Uslenghi's broader research project on the arrival of photography in South America—focusing on the daguerreotype era, the introduction of cartes-de-visite, the popularization of photographic prints, and their intersections with race, labor, and urban modernization. Through these visual and textual archives, the presentation invites reflection on the racialized politics of representation—and the enduring promise of photography as a democratic practice.

Alejandra Uslenghi is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, specializing in modern literature, visual culture, and the history of photography in Latin America. Trained at the New School for Social Research, Uslenghi explores the intersections of philosophy, aesthetics, and modernity in Latin American cultural production. Her scholarship offers a compelling case study in the theoretical reception of Walter Benjamin in Latin America. Her book Latin America at Fin-de-Siècle Universal Exhibitions: Modern Cultures of Visuality (2015) examines how Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico used 19th-century world's fairs to craft visual narratives of modernity within a global capitalist economy. She is also the editor of Walter Benjamin: Culturas de la imagen (2011) and La cámara como método: La fotografía moderna de Grete Stern y Horacio Coppola (2021, with Natalia Brizuela). Her current project focuses on émigré German and Eastern European women photographers and their influence on Latin American modernist visual culture. Uslenghi has contributed essays to major art exhibitions, including Gonzalo Elvira: Leer el sueño, Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia, and Art_Latin America: Against the Survey, where she wrote on figures such as Grete Stern and Alicia D'Amico.

Monday, October 27, 2025 

4:30 - 6:00 pm

Rockefeller 001

Sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.