Barnard’s stereocard practice reveals a much different attitude towards picturing people. Executed with an explicitly commercial motive between 1860-1876, this expansive body of work features a surprising number of pictures of African Americans, both enslaved and emancipated. These photographs largely represent blackness in a humanist manner, and frequently reference the work of canonized painters and formal conventions. Barnard’s stereocards were clearly designed for a certain type of “refined” bourgeois consumers with knowledge of the Western pictorial tradition. In re-staging both iconic and formal aspects of the canon, Barnard not only mitigates the novelty of stereography, but presents black subjectivity in a format familiar to white, upper-middle class viewers. The photographer quite literally constructs an augmented reality of the era, particularly in comparison to the crude representations of blackness found elsewhere in the visual landscape. Yet, what is the effect of such formalism on black bodies, and how can we evaluate their agency within the ocular and commercial space of the stereograph? This paper attempts to establish a critical lens through which to view these black subjects and the historically marginalized photographic format that they inhabit.