National Gallery shows early photos of Black Americans

The National Gallery of Art in Washington will open an exhibition on November 7 examining early photographs of African Americans and the difficulty of knowing from many portraits whether the sitters were enslaved or free.

The exhibition, titled “Remember Me,” includes 70 black-and-white photographs displayed chronologically under dim lights to help preserve them. Some images date to the 1840s, when the daguerreotype process helped make photographs on silver-plated copper sheets more common.

Diane Waggoner, the gallery's acting head and curator of photographs, said it is often difficult to tell from portraits of African American sitters from the 1840s through the 1860s whether they were enslaved or free.

The identities of two enslaved women in the exhibition have been established. One, Patty Atavis, appears in an 1848 portrait with Anna Whitridge, a white child she cared for. Records show Atavis was purchased by a doctor in Baltimore County, Maryland, at age 23, stayed with the family after slavery ended and was buried in the family cemetery in 1874.

Other images may have been used to argue for abolition. A small 1860 portrait of two girls in matching dresses was found with a slip of paper bearing the phrase “Peculiar Institution,” a euphemism for slavery.

The exhibition also highlights early Black photographers James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge and Augustus Washington, who opened studios in the 1840s. It ends with images from the late 1800s and early 1900s showing Black communities after the Civil War, including portraits, a school band, women learning dressmaking in Alabama and Black Red Cross nurses who were allowed to treat Black soldiers during the Spanish flu pandemic.