Sojourner Truth: I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. [Original albumen cabinet card portrait photo of Sojourner standing against studio backdrop].. This item is unavailable.Sojourner Truth: I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. [Original albumen cabinet card portrait photo of Sojourner standing against studio backdrop].

One mounted albumen cabinet card photo sized 3.9 x 5.9 in. mounted on tan studio board sized 4.25 x 6.5 in., rounded corners, printed caption below the image, printed photographer's imprint on verso (minor age-toning, minor spotting, slight soiling to fore-edges, old tiny pinhole evidenced at upper blank margin of mounted board not affecting the photograph, very upper right w/ slight creasing & cracking of photo, now neatly re-affixed), still a VG exemplar of this very rare cabinet card image. A very scarce full-length albumen cabinet card portrait of Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) taken when she was 84-83 years old, and used as a fund-raiser at her public events at the end of her life. This is one of Truth's late portraits, and she was quite unusual having acquired her copyright to her portrait during the Civil War, giving her control over both the distribution of the CDV and Cabinet Card images, and the revenues they generated. As one of the best-known African-American former slaves, abolitionists, and women's rights advocates of the 19th-Century, she traveled the country for decades giving lectures and attending conferences where she would sell her "Shadow" photographs as a primary means of support for her ongoing mission. According to extensive historical research by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Truth posed for Detroit photographer Corydon C. Randall's camera on three occasions between June, 1881 and April, 1882. The finished albumen photos were prepared in both Carte de Visite (2.25 x 3.5 in.) and Cabinet Card (4 x 6 in.) formats, and sold to Truth at .5¢ apiece. Randall's studio records show purchases of 50, 50, and 100 copies of each of the three separate poses, which was "an astonishing order for a woman in her eighties," but considering they were some of the last photographs of Truth, the editions size was quite small, with the Cabinet cards scarcer than the CDV versions. Grigsby details this standing pose in her book: the photographs "stage her against a pedastal in front of painted seaside backdrop. The effect is unique among her portraits. She stands in what purports to be a natural scene, her figure is smaller than the background, suggesting a vastness of space we have not seen before. . . Even as we recognize its artiface we indulge in the illusion of space and air and natural light that it so economically suggests. . . In these late seaside portraits, there is a soft, winsome quality, intensified when we realize that she is in her eighties and at the very end of a long, arduous life of personal and political struggle." Worldcat locates 1 copy of seated version CDV (Boston Athenaeum); See: Grigsby, Enduring Truths (2015), pp. 178-184. …