I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance

Worldbuilding Inside the Fugitivity of Madness

Sojourner Truth, "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance" (1864) “Born Isabella Baumfree to a family of slaves in Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth sits for one of the war’s most iconic portraits in an anonymous photographer’s studio, likely in Detroit. The sixty-seven-year-old abolitionist, who never learned to read or write, pauses from her knitting and looks pensively at the camera…At a human-rights convention, Sojourner Truth commented that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.” — Met Museum Medium: Albumen silver print from glass negative Dimensions: Image: 8.5 × 5.4 cm (3 3/8 × 2 1/8 in.)