The Black American studio photographers who transformed history

The arrival of the daguerreo­type in 1839 sig­nalled a rev­o­lu­tion. Bring­ing art and com­merce togeth­er under one roof, the pho­to stu­dio democ­ra­tised por­trai­ture. Both afford­able and acces­si­ble, pho­tog­ra­phy reclaimed rep­re­sen­ta­tion from the exclu­sive purview of the rul­ing class. 

In the Unit­ed States, Black pho­tog­ra­phers paved their own path before and after Eman­ci­pa­tion, cre­at­ing a wealth of social and cul­tur­al his­to­ries woven togeth­er in Called to the Cam­era: Black Amer­i­can Stu­dio Pho­tog­ra­phers (Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press). The book fea­tures more than 100 pho­tographs which trace the evo­lu­tion of the medi­um in the work of artists includ­ing James Van Der Zee, Roy DeCar­a­va, Gor­don Parks, and Kwame Brathwaite.

The first cen­tu­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy in the Unit­ed States was able to doc­u­ment­ed the tran­si­tion from slav­ery to seg­re­ga­tion. In the hands of the rul­ing class, pho­tog­ra­phy was used as a tool to oppress and uphold the sta­tus quo. But some, like Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, took mat­ters into their own hands – and Dou­glass become the most pho­tographed per­son of the 19^th century.

“Fred­er­ick Dou­glass was very sophis­ti­cat­ed in his use of pho­tog­ra­phy as a polit­i­cal weapon to chal­lenge the crude stereo­types that degrad­ed Black peo­ple,” says John Edwin Mason, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of His­to­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia in Charlottesville.

For Called to the Cam­era, Mason con­tributed an essay on Hen­ry Mar­tin, a Black man born in 1825 who spent the first four decades of his life in slav­ery. Dur­ing that time, Mar­tin was leased to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia in Char­lottesville and was for­mal­ly employed fol­low­ing eman­ci­pa­tion. He rose to head jan­i­tor and bell ringer at the whites-only insti­tu­tion at the turn of the 20^th century.

Although he nev­er learned to read or write, Mar­tin, like Dou­glass, under­stood the pow­er of por­trai­ture and the ways in which it could be used to pro­vide pow­er­ful counter-nar­ra­tives to the preva­lence of racist pro­pa­gan­da pop­u­larised through black­face, then the most pop­u­lar form of enter­tain­ment nationwide.

“[Martin’s] work at the Uni­ver­si­ty undoubt­ed­ly exposed him to the walls of the rotun­da, dec­o­rat­ed with pow­er­ful white men start­ing with Thomas Jef­fer­son, founder of the Uni­ver­si­ty,” says Mason. ​“Mar­tin knew what a por­trait of dig­ni­ty and pow­er looked like and decid­ed to get one for himself.”

Mar­tin under­stood the pow­er of a pho­to­graph lay in its func­tion as an arte­fact which could be passed from one gen­er­a­tion to the next. One day in 1897, Mar­tin made afflu­ent alum­nus David Cul­breth an offer he couldn’t refuse: a por­trait, which he sent the fol­low­ing autumn. Cul­breth not only kept the pho­to­graph, he wrote fond­ly of the encounter in his memoirs.

“It’s a remark­able stu­dio por­trait that shows Hen­ry Mar­tin com­plete­ly divorced from the way that he was usu­al­ly pho­tographed as a ser­vant — and he did this at least twice,” Mason reveals.

“The Spe­cial Col­lec­tions just received a new set of per­son­al papers from anoth­er alum­nus and it has a dif­fer­ent for­mal por­trait of Hen­ry Mar­tin, styled to look like a pres­i­dent or Supreme Court jus­tice. And it all starts with him under­stand­ing the pow­er of visu­al representation.”

Called to the Cam­era: Black Amer­i­can Stu­dio Pho­tog­ra­phers is out now, pub­lished by Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press.

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