Mirror Immortal
“Freemen of Color”
Quarter-plate daguerreotype, hand-colored. Circa 1850(from the Jackie Napoleon Wilson Collection)
It was around 1850. No one knows the exact date or place. It may have been somewhere in Virginia on the day two young men of color decided to put on their best clothing, travel to the studio and pose for the camera. Their names and identities are lost to history but their direct gaze stares back at us across the veil of time, immortalized for prosperity. It is such a strange feeling to stare into the faces of the long dead 170 years later. I think it is because these men were once walking, breathing and alive like us on the Earth once. They had private thoughts lying in bed late at night. They felt the deep warmth of the sun on their faces and felt the chill of a heavy breeze on early winter mornings. These men laughed, loved, cried, experienced anger and perhaps lust. They are stark reminders of our mortality. The way the gentlemen on the left places his arms around the shoulder of the man next to him is probably an act of friendship or even brotherly love. We will never know. We’re only left to the fruits of our imagination to conjure up an inner and outer life for these ghosts from the past.
