“Remember Me” and the Limits of Early Black Portraiture

By James Calloway

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will open “Remember Me” on November 7 with 70 black-and-white photographs, arranged chronologically under dim light to preserve them.

An AFP preview includes images dating as far back as the 1840s, when the daguerreotype process made portraits printed on silver-plated copper sheets common keepsakes.

What can a nineteenth-century portrait establish?

Diane Waggoner, the gallery's acting head and curator of photographs, said: “Throughout the 1840s through the 1860s, it's often very difficult to tell just by looking at a portrait of an African American sitter, whether they are enslaved individuals or are free.”

Her warning defines the exhibition's central problem: looking cannot supply a sitter's legal status.

Slavery persisted across a large part of the United States until the Civil War ended in 1865. Portraits of Black Americans from that period remain scarce even in free Northern states, and definitive accounts of how they were made are scarcer still.

Waggoner summarised the visual trap: “It's easy for us to kind of look at them and think we know what's going on, but we don't really.” The display therefore treats identity as a question requiring records, rather than an effect a camera alone can guarantee.

Can Patty Atavis's 1848 portrait settle her status?

Records establish the identities of two enslaved women, each photographed with a white child in her care. Patty Atavis stares intently at the camera while a restless Anna Whitridge sits on her lap in an 1848 portrait.

A doctor in Baltimore County, Maryland, bought Atavis at 23; she remained with the family after slavery ended and was buried in its cemetery in 1874. Her documented biography supplies a firm human history where the portrait alone cannot establish whether a sitter was free.

How did an 1860 portrait become abolitionist evidence?

A tiny 1860 portrait shows two wide-eyed girls in identical dresses. A paper slip reading “Peculiar Institution,” a euphemism for slavery, was found inside the image's ornate display case.

The girls' names remain unknown; they may be sisters, but their different skin tones hint that one may have had a white father.

Ross Kelbaugh, a researcher and collector of most of the photographs, said the image may have circulated at abolitionist meetings to ask: “How could this 'institution' keep these little girls enslaved?”

Since 1971, Kelbaugh has scoured antique shows and flea markets for images of Black Americans that few collectors sought. He explained: “I recognized...that this was an important part of American history.”

The National Gallery of Art acquired part of his collection in 2023, while he donated other images to the exhibition.

What did Black studio owners claim?

The first section concentrates on James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge and Augustus Washington, three pioneering Black entrepreneurs who opened studios in the 1840s. They mostly served white clients and produced elegant, hand-colour-tinted portraits, placing their names on their work.

Waggoner said: “All three black photographers were excellent at what they did.” She continued: “It was promotion of their business, but it was also you know claiming themselves as artists.” The move connected commercial self-promotion to an explicit claim of artistic authorship.

They championed abolition. Washington left the United States in the early 1850s and migrated to Liberia, where he photographed, with some grandeur, the leaders of the new free Black state.

How did photography become self-determination?

The final section turns to the late 1800s and early 1900s, documenting life once many African Americans had migrated north in the wake of the Civil War. Waggoner said: “There's this emergence of a generation of Black photographers within their own communities...seeing photography as this means of self-determination and self-expression.”

Elaborate portraits present apparently affluent Black couples, alongside a proud school band and women learning dressmaking at an institute in Alabama. The exhibition places those images beside reminders that segregationist policies persisted.

A group portrait honours Black Red Cross nurses who had long been excluded from training programmes. They were recruited during labour shortages towards the end of World War I. A small group was eventually allowed to treat Black soldiers in the US Army who had been struck down by Spanish flu.

The exhibition's chronological design makes that shift visible: uncertain identities give way to studios, migration, community institutions and nurses recording professional work within a system that had excluded them. As “Remember Me” opens on November 7, the National Gallery of Art will place acquired and donated photographs within a public account linking uncertain status with Black self-representation.