Historic Portraits Rejoice the Earliest African American Photographers

The National Gallery of Art has introduced an exhibition that may hint African American photographers and portrait topics from the earliest days of pictures.

The upcoming exhibition titled Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography charts the evolving understanding of portrait pictures as a device of illustration amongst African Americans within the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Featuring some 70 works drawn from the National Gallery’s assortment, the exhibition traces African American photographers and portrait topics in daguerrotypes within the nascent days of pictures’s growth, chronicling the evolution of the medium as a way to outline Black group, aspiration, and id. Unfolding over the course of three thematic sections, the exhibition is organized chronologically and explores how portrait pictures was each embraced as a way of self-empowerment and utilized to exert management over illustration.

The first part “Black Entrepreneurs” tells the story of James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington, three main early African American portrait photographers who established thriving studios quickly after the medium was launched within the United States within the 1840s and 1850s. Ball, Goodridge, and Washington photographed each Black and white shoppers across the Civil War period. By signing their portraits, which was unusual amongst daguerreotypists, they established their authorship of the images and highlighted the function of Black entrepreneurship.

The second part “Portraits” explores depictions of African Americans in largely white-owned studios within the years each earlier than and after the Civil War, revealing how pictures of the interval each bolstered and disrupted stereotypes. Portraits of each free and enslaved males, girls, and kids on view exemplify the complexities of company and consent throughout this time.

Meanwhile, the ultimate part “Studios” examines the rise of Black-owned studios within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It presents work by famend studio photographers similar to Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee, alongside lesser-known artists, similar to G. Addison Turner and Daniel Freeman.

Together, these pictures inform a broader story of how Black Americans used pictures to doc their lives, outline their public picture, and protect their histories throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography shall be on view on the National Gallery of Art in Washington from November 7, 2026, to March 14, 2027.