African American History

The camera arrived in America at almost the same moment as the abolition movement was finding its voice, and some of the people who understood photography best were Black Americans who knew what it meant to control your own image.

Frederick Douglass is the clearest example. He sat for photographers again and again, and historians often describe him as the most photographed American of the 19th century. He wrote and spoke about photography and saw a dignified portrait as an answer to the caricatures that filled popular prints. His pictures always show him looking straight at the viewer, serious and composed.

Those caricatures are part of the record too, and they are worth seeing for what they are. Much of the printed material of the 1800s, from sheet music covers to advertising, used crude racial stereotypes. Set beside them, the studio portraits that Black families commissioned for themselves read as a deliberate correction.

In 1900 W.E.B. Du Bois helped assemble an exhibit for the Paris Exposition that included hundreds of photographs of Black Americans in Georgia and elsewhere. They show homes, businesses, students, teachers and families, and the point was plain: this is what progress looks like a generation after slavery. Those photographs are now in the Library of Congress. Photographers at schools such as Hampton and Tuskegee documented classrooms and trades in the same years, and in the 1930s and 1940s the government photographers of the Farm Security Administration, among them Gordon Parks, recorded Black life in the rural South and the cities of the North.

What these pictures show again and again is ordinary life carried on with care. A church congregation on the steps, a graduating class, a family in their best clothes on a porch. Look at the clothes and the poses. Nearly all of these sitters had chosen how they wanted to be seen, and it shows.