The plate from Akron

I open like a book. On the left, a pad of faded rose velvet, pressed with a pattern of scrolls and stamped in the middle with the name of the man who made me, S. J. Miller, and the town, Akron, Ohio. On the right, behind glass and a gilt oval mat, a face.

I am a daguerreotype, a sheet of copper coated with silver, polished until it shone, made sensitive to light and set in a camera for some seconds while the man in front of it did not move. There is no negative behind me. I am the only one. Another would need another sitting.

Hold me straight and you see him. Tilt me a little and he darkens and turns ghostly, a negative of himself, and then comes back when you tilt me again. I am a mirror that remembers one thing. Like a mirror, I show him reversed, left for right, which is how he saw himself every morning and never how anyone else saw him.

He is Frederick Douglass. He escaped from slavery in Maryland as a young man and became one of the great voices of abolition, and sometime between 1847 and 1852 he came to this studio in northeastern Ohio, a region full of people who wanted slavery ended and who would buy and treasure a likeness like me. He knew exactly who would see me. He sat for photographers again and again across his life, more often than almost any American of his century, because he understood that a picture could go places he could not and could contradict the cartoons printed of people like him.

So look at what he chose. No smile, no sentimental tilt of the head, no prop or column or book. A dark coat, a patterned waistcoat, a white collar and a soft pale bow at the throat. His hair stands thick and full. His jaw is set. His eyes come at you level and do not drop, and the mouth below them holds a whole speech in reserve.

Most of the portraits made in studios like this one were stiff and alike. Miller was lucky in his sitter, and I suspect his sitter told him where to put the camera.

I have been closed and opened for over a century and a half. Every time the lid lifts, he is ready.

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