# The Publisher Was the Sitter
> Truth sold her own cartes de visite, registered the copyright in her own name and left the photographer unnamed. In 1864 there was no copyright in photographs to take.
> The Study - 2026-09-27
> Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/study/the-publisher-was-the-sitter/
## Key points
- The trade was running seven months before the copyright. On 4 July 1863 the National Anti-Slavery Standard printed her mail-order terms, fifty cents and a three-cent stamp, letters to Battle Creek, Michigan. The February 1864 registration hardened a going concern rather than starting one.
- What she registered was not a photograph. The entry of 16 February 1864 covers the title of an engraving, because photographs had no protected category of their own in United States law until the Act of 3 March 1865.
- Our reading, marked as ours: the photographer is anonymous because she took the space. Her name and caption occupy the part of the mount where a studio imprint belonged, and most institutions holding these cards record no photographer at all. What the sources state, rather than imply, is that Frederick Douglass had a hundred and sixty portraits made between 1841 and 1895 and, unlike Truth, let the photographer's name be printed instead of his own.
- The price is genuinely unsettled and the margin is unknown. Published figures run from twenty-five to fifty cents and two of them descend from the same scholar. No source reached states what a card cost her to have made.
- Her one instrument in her own name is this one. Eleven years later the copyright of her own book was entered in the name of her white manager, Frances W. Titus, at Washington.
- The claim our record made for her was slightly too large. She is the only known sitter of the period to hold copyright in her own photographic likeness, registered under the engraving category, not the only person other than a studio: cartes of the child Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence were copyrighted in 1863 in the name of the woman who had bought her freedom.
## The business was running seven months before the copyright
## What she registered was not a photograph
## Our reading: the photographer has no name because she took the space
## The price, the tax stamp and the figure nobody has
## Her own, and where that phrase runs out
## Three things our own record had wrong
It is easy to tell this as Sojourner Truth copyrighting her photograph, which would make her an early adopter of a protection that did not exist yet. What she actually did was harder and less tidy. She was already selling cards by post at a published price, she took the only category the statute offered her, the title of an engraving, she put her own name and her own sentence in the place on the mount reserved for the photographer and she kept the proceeds against travel and a mortgage. She could not read the entry she filed and other people wrote her letters, and eleven years later her own book was registered in her manager's name. Set against that, the card is not a curiosity of legal history. It is the one piece of property in her life that the paperwork puts in nobody's hands but hers.
## Questions
**Did Sojourner Truth copyright her own photographs?**
She registered a copyright in her own name on 16 February 1864, in the Clerk's Office of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan at Detroit. Strictly it was not a photographic copyright, because photographs were not a protected category in United States law until the Act of 3 March 1865. The entry covers the title of an engraving, the title being the caption printed on the card.
**What did a Sojourner Truth carte de visite cost?**
Between twenty-five and fifty cents, and the sources do not agree on a single figure. Her published mail-order terms of 4 July 1863 were fifty cents plus a three-cent stamp. Figures of twenty-five cents and twenty-five to fifty cents appear in the scholarship, and they are not independent of each other. A surviving card carries a two-cent federal tax stamp, which under the 1864 schedule implies a retail price of twenty-five cents or less.
**Who photographed Sojourner Truth?**
In almost every case nobody knows, and that appears to have been her choice. Her name and caption occupy the part of the mount where a studio imprint would normally be printed, The Metropolitan Museum explicitly records the artist as Unknown, while the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian's NMAAHC simply carry no photographer field. The Art Institute of Chicago is the exception and names S. C. Wright as a collaborator. Only two studios can be named at all: the Randall Studio of Detroit, on the National Portrait Gallery's record for a cabinet card rather than a carte, and more softly Wright's New York Gallery of Battle Creek.
**What did she do with the money?**
It paid for her travel and subsistence as a lecturer and for a house. Period notices reprinted in her Book of Life describe the photographs as her only means of support for travel, livelihood and a home in Michigan, and one gives the figure she was working to clear as a nine hundred dollar mortgage on the Battle Creek house. The Copyright Office connects the earlier phase of the selling to raising money for the First Michigan Colored Infantry.
**What does I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance mean?**
The shadow is the photograph and the substance is the living woman who needs feeding, housing and moving from one lecture to the next. The sentence is a price tag and a statement of ownership at once, and it is the legally registered title of the work rather than a motto added to it. Transcriptions differ slightly between holding institutions in capitalisation and punctuation, so it is worth quoting from a named object.
## Sources
- [1] Marilyn Creswell, 'Sojourner Truth and the Power of Copyright Registration', United States Copyright Office blog, 8 December 2020, read in full in an Internet Archive capture of 17 December 2025 after loc.gov returned a bot wall at every fetch rung. Used for the registration of 16 February 1864, the verbatim entry text covering the title of an engraving, the in-person price of twenty-five to fifty cents, the sentence that Truth sat for portraits at least eleven times and the connection of the earlier selling to the First Michigan Colored Infantry. Detroit as the place of filing comes from source 4, not from this post.
- [2] Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Bondswoman of Olden Time ... with a History of her Labors and Correspondence drawn from her Book of Life, Boston, published for the author, 1875, full text. Used for the dictated letter from Freedmen's Village enclosing four shadows against two dollars received (page 180), the customer letter of 17 January 1868 from 53 Broadway sending one dollar (pages 206 to 207), the reprinted notices on selling photographs at lectures and on the nine hundred dollar mortgage, a related Stickney letter of 14 April 1863 in the Appendix at pages 321 to 324, signed Phebe H. M. Stickney, which reports Caldwell's enlistment but carries no price, and the title page entering the copyright in the name of Mrs Frances W. Titus. This volume does NOT contain the 4 July 1863 mail-order sentence, which rests on source 3 alone.
- [3] Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, exhibition brochure text for 'Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery', Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2016, reproduced in full with object captions. Used for the mail-order terms of fifty cents and a three-cent stamp printed in the National Anti-Slavery Standard of 4 July 1863, the tax stamp, without a denomination, on one of two known cards carrying caption, name, copyright and stamp, the comparison with Frederick Douglass allowing the photographer's name to be printed, and the 1863 copyright on the cartes of Fannie Virginia Casseopia Lawrence in the name of the child's redeemer Catherine S. Lawrence.
- [4] Bauman Rare Books catalogue entry for an 1864 captioned Sojourner Truth carte de visite, quoting Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance, University of Chicago Press, at pages 63 to 64. Used for the filing of the copyright at Detroit on 16 February 1864, for Grigsby's finding that Truth claimed her property rights in advance of the copyright in a letter of 3 February 1864, and for her finding that the name, caption and copyright were added to the cards all at once.
- [5] Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, catalogue description of carte de visite 2018.17.12 with full recto and verso transcription, read in a mirrored copy after si.edu returned a bot wall. Used for the recto reading I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance, Sojourner Truth and the verso copyright notice naming the Clerk's Office of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Mich.
- [6] National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, object record NPG.79.220, Sojourner Truth, Randall Studio, active 1865 to 1875, albumen silver print, dated 1864 and printed about 1870, place given as Detroit, Wayne County, Michigan. Read in a browser after a direct fetch returned 403. Used to correct our own record's description of the Randall image as a later sitting and to establish that the only firmly named studio in her cartes is in Detroit.
- [7] Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 301989, Sojourner Truth, 'I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance', 1864, artist recorded as Unknown, and Art Institute of Chicago object 238249, an 1864 to 1865 card described as by Sojourner Truth in collaboration with S. C. Wright. Used for the cataloguing of the photographer as unknown across holding institutions and for the softer Wright attribution.
- [8] Anthony J. Cavo, 'The Civil War Sun Picture Tax', Antique Trader, on the photograph tax in force from 1 September 1864 to 1 August 1866, giving a two-cent stamp for images costing up to twenty-five cents and three cents for twenty-six to fifty, with the caveat that the duty could be assessed on a whole order and a single stamp affixed to one card of a batch.
- [9] Library of Congress, African American Odyssey exhibition, Civil War section, read in an Internet Archive capture, stating that Truth was illiterate and engaged her friend Euphemia Cockrane to write her letter of 25 February 1864 to Mary R. Gale from Detroit.
- [10] Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, catalogue record for the Gladstone Collection carte de visite, item 98501244, recording the credit as Copyright 1864 by Sojourner Truth with no photographer named. Read in an Internet Archive capture.
- [11] Jackie Clay, exhibition review of 'Sojourner Truth, Photography, and the Fight Against Slavery', Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 3, no. 1, Summer 2017. The only published statement we reached that the surviving stamp is a two-cent one, in a passage that then refers to the stamps as postage stamps, which is why the price inference drawn from it is flagged in the text. Also used for the curators' view that Truth was unique in filing a copyright in her own name as sitter rather than photographer, and for the Douglass carte carrying the photographer's name in embossed script.
- [12] Library Company of Philadelphia, Digital Collections, object record Islandora:3252, read in an Internet Archive capture because the live host refuses direct fetches. The true source of the sentence that Truth captioned, marketed, copyrighted and sold at least eleven different carte-de-visite portraits of herself at her lectures and through the mail, which our own record had attributed to the Library of Congress.
- [13] Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 1884 edition with the memorial chapter, full text, for her own recollection of selling printed songs for five and ten cents apiece and of William Lloyd Garrison selling a good many of them for her. This passage is not in the 1875 volume cited at source 2.
- [14] Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, object record 2012.46.11, read in an Internet Archive capture because si.edu refuses direct fetches. Used for the identification of the sitter's grandson as James Caldwell of Company H, 54th Massachusetts Infantry, for the daguerreotype on her lap and for the card's dimensions of 10.2 by 6.4 cm.