From Carte de visite to Album Covers - Photography and Liberation

The industrial revolution and the emergence of photography in the 1840s ushered in the modern age. In  Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, a PBS documentary (consider donating), you can see the new realism of photographs used in combination with older media like newspapers and postcards in administering racial terror to maintain the status quo. Photographs were also tools of liberation: Sojourner Truth fashioned herself and her photographs; at her lectures she sold visiting cards/carte de visites--a photo of her freed self--to earn part of her livelihood.

   

When combined with an even older medium like music, photography played a role in black liberation in South Africa explains Chimurenga publisher Ntone Edjabe:

If you look at the South African record covers of the 70s, for instance, the black consciousness jazz records, you get immediately the kind of liberatory spirit and mood that was beyond that. But you couldn't write that stuff. So you will put it all into an image kinda spiritual... of someone seeking freedom. For example, Winston Mankunku's "Yakhal Inkomo" record, he is sitting there: black man looking into the horizon... cigarette smoke and he is so strong. That kind of image of a black person? Then the record came out in 1968. You couldn't publish the image of a black person so dignified and so strong in the media - he did not look like a victim.