The Black American studio photographers who transformed history

Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers celebrates figures like Frederick Douglass, who seized photography’s radical, emancipatory potential.

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.

Hooks Brothers Studio (Robert and Henry Hooks) Untitled [Students looking at photographs], ca. 1950. Collection of Andrea and Rodney Herenton
Hooks Brothers Studio (Robert and Henry Hooks) Al Green in the Hooks Brothers Studio, ca. 1968. Collection of Andrea and Rodney Herenton
Austin Hansen, Eartha Kitt Teaching a Dance Class at Harlem YMCA, c. 1955. Photograph by Austin Hansen used by permission of
Morgan and Marvin Smith, Marvin Painting a Self-Portrait, ca. 1940 © Morgan and Marvin Smith
Morgan and Marvin Smith, Untitled, [Marvin and Morgan Smith and Sarah Lou Harris Carter], 1940 © Morgan and Marvin Smith

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 19th 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 20th 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.”

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr, (American, born 1993) Oftentimes, justice for Black people takes form of forgiveness, allowing them space to reclaim their bodies from wrongs made against them, 2018 © Elliott Jerome Brown Jr
Gordon Parks, Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 © The Gordon Parks Foundation
Unidentified, [Untitled] (Two Men in Work Clothes, Wearing Hats, One Standing, One Seated), ca 1880. Tintype New Orleans Museum of Art, Gift of Stanley B. Burns, MD.
James Van Der Zee, Untitled (Bride and Groom), 1926 © James Van Der Zee Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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