Black History Month, Week 4: PHOTOGRAPHERS

                   Featured book in this week's display: Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present by Deborah Willis (2000)

From the Introduction:

   "While there is a growing awareness of works by contemporary black photographers, there has been very little historical research or critical analysis of the images produced by nineteenth and early twentieth-century African-Americans.  Few art historians and scholars in the field of nineteenth-century photography have focused on the fine works and activities of African-American photographers.
   "African-Americans have produced photographs  since 1840. [...] The first photographs made by black photographers are, like all photographs of this period, significant in terms of their contributions to American history and culture.  What makes them particularly significant is that the inhumane institution of slavery existed in the 1840s and would survive another twenty-five years. ... Although pervasive racial discrimination existed throughout the United States, hundreds of free men and women of color established themselves as professional artists and daguerrotypists during the first twenty-five years of photography's existence.
   "It is astonishing for us to look back with a late twentieth-century perspective at the lives and works of these early nineteenth-century black photographers.  Concerned about how black people were portrayed in a world of rank racist imagery, black photographers were especially sensitive to negative depictions of black Americans during the mid-1800s. [...] Many black photographers contradicted these depictions by making representative portraits of their subjects.  Most of their African-American clients wanted to celebrate their achievements and establish a counterimage that conveyed a sense of self and self-worth.  Obligingly, many black photographers recorded the significant event in African-American life--celebratory as well as unsettling."  (Willis, Deborah, Reflections in Black, W. W. Norton, 2000, p xv-xvii)

Jules Lion (1810-1866) made Daguerreotype of an Unnamed Young Woman, probably in his New Orleans studio in 1842.  Born and educated in France, Lion exhibited and won prizes for his paintings and lithographs in Paris by the mid-1830s.  He emigrated to New Orleans in 1837, and was employed in the portrait lithography studio at the New Orleans Bee. Back in France in 1839, Lion learned to make daguerreotypes.  He brought his new skill back to New Orleans where he lived the rest of his life, making (daguerreotype and lithographic) landscapes of New Orleans and many portraits, and instructed art and lithography at Louisiana College.

[Urias A. McGill, half-length portrait, facing front] sixth plate daguerreotype, by Augustus Washington, about 1855. Urias McGill was one of four McGill brothers who ran a very successful business in Liberia. The brothers owned several trans-Atlantic vessels for exporting Liberian products such as palm oil and camwood. The firm also operated a store in Monrovia. The photographer, Augustus Washington (c.1820-1875), was born in Trenton NJ and studied at the Oneida Institute, Kimball Union Academy, and Dartmouth College before becoming a teacher in Hartford CT.  He learned to make daguerreotypes to finance his education, and eventually opened a daguerrean studio in Hartford.  In 1852, he emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia, where he opened another studio.  Eventually he gave up photography to serve in the Liberian House of Representatives and Senate.

This is a portrait (c.1875) of J. P. Ball, African American Daguerreotypist, Entrepreneur, and Activist. Ball traveled extensively and used his photographic skill to build a successful business as well as to document the lives of slaves.  He used his candid images in lectures, pamphlets, and other antislavery activities. He also made important images from the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Ball was born ("a free person of color") in Virginia in 1825.  He settled in Cincinnati in 1849, Ohio being at the time a leading abolitionist state, and Cincinnati a sophisticated, cultured gateway to the West.  His success was such that he was named the official photographer of the 25th anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation (1887).  During the 1870's he left Ohio and, over the next 30 years, resided and opened studios in several locations including  St. Louis, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and eventually Honolulu.  He died in Honolulu in 1904. (above, Photographer unknown)

Thomas E. Askew (1847-1914) photographed Summit Avenue Ensemble in the living room studio of his home in Atlanta in 1899.  The photograph's subjects are Askew's five sons and a neighbor, all musicians.  "...[I]n the portraits prepared by Askew, the Georgia Negro Exhibit provided a resounding declaration of the self-worth, self-esteem and self determination of a people in spite of the obstacles thrown in their path." *

This portrait of Frederick Douglass was taken about 1895 by Cornelius Marion Battey (1873–1927).  Battey, an educator, is known for his portraits of musicians, statesmen and Masons.  He was the director of the Photography Department at the Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama. His photographs were exhibited in US and European galleries, and published in several magazines.

P. H. Polk (1898-1984) was a student of Battey at Tuskegee Institute, where Polk, too, became a faculty member after 1927.  Pearl Cleage Lomax, author of a book about Polk entitled P. H. Polk: Photographs, says of Polk:  He would take our pictures and let us see that those who said we were invisible were lying. That those who said we were ugly were lying. That those who claimed we were less than human were lying. That those who said we did not love each other, and marry, and produce children, and suffer, and grow old were lying…[He] would let us bloom in the safe zone before his camera, and we saw ourselves differently through his lenses. We saw ourselves shining in all our specificity. In all our generalities. In all our terrible humanness. We saw ourselves just shine.**  Polk is well known for portraits of influential personalities like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Washington Carver; and for his candid portraits such as the one above: The Pipe Smoker, 1932, (from the Paul R. Jones Collection, Atlanta, GA), many featuring Alabama farm workers of the 1930s.

* Quote from Profile: Thomas E. Askew , (c) ddfr.tv, 2012  (Digital Diaspora Family Reunion).
** Lomax, Pearl Cleage, P. H. Polk: Photographer.  Nexus Press, 1980. 

Photographs above (except The Pipe Smoker) are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired: published in the US before 1923.   

The Pipe Smoker is from the Paul R. Jones Collection, published digitally by the Traditional Fine Arts Organization (TFAO) online magazine, Resource Library, as part of an exhibit catalog for "Through These Eyes: The Photographs of P. H. Polk" at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, August-October, 2000.