Seventy Early Photographs Ask: Enslaved or Free?

The National Gallery of Art in Washington will open "Remember Me" on November 7, an exhibition of seventy black-and-white photographs of African Americans whose legal status — enslaved or free — often cannot be determined from the image alone. Previewed by AFP, the show spans works from the 1840s, when the daguerreotype process made images on silver-plated copper sheets common keepsakes, into the early 1900s.

"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," said Diane Waggoner, acting head and curator of photographs at the gallery. Slavery persisted across a large swath of the United States until the end of the Civil War in 1865, and photographs of Black Americans from that period — even from free northern states — remain relatively rare.

Rarer still are definitive answers about the circumstances in which the pictures were taken. "It's easy for us to kind of look at them and think we know what's going on, but we don't really," Waggoner said. The gallery will display the seventy prints chronologically under dim lighting to help preserve them.

Whose faces survive, and what records tell us?

The identities of only two enslaved women in the exhibition have been established; each is pictured with a white child she cared for. In an 1848 portrait, Patty Atavis stares intently at the camera while a restless girl, Anna Whitridge, sits on her lap. Records show a doctor in Baltimore County, Maryland, purchased Atavis at age 23; she stayed with the family after slavery ended and was buried in the family cemetery in 1874.

Other images likely served the abolitionist cause. A slip of paper bearing the phrase "Peculiar Institution" — a euphemism for slavery — was found in the ornate display case of a tiny 1860 portrait of two wide-eyed girls in identical dresses. Their names are unknown, and they may be sisters, but their different skin tones hint that one may have had a white father.

Ross Kelbaugh, a researcher and collector who supplied most of the photographs in the show, suggested the portrait circulated at abolitionist meetings to ask: "How could this 'institution' keep these little girls enslaved?" Kelbaugh has scoured antique shows and flea markets for images of Black Americans since 1971, an era when few collectors showed interest. "I recognized...that this was an important part of American history," he said. The National Gallery acquired part of his collection in 2023, and he has donated other images to the exhibition.

Who held the camera?

The first section of "Remember Me" centers on three pioneering Black entrepreneurs — James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge and Augustus Washington — who opened photography studios in the 1840s, serving mostly white clients with elegant, hand-color-tinted portraits.

"All three black photographers were excellent at what they did," said Waggoner, noting that they also put their names on their work. "It was promotion of their business, but it was also you know claiming themselves as artists." All three championed abolition. Washington left the United States in the early 1850s for Liberia, where he photographed, with some grandeur, the leaders of the new free Black state.

The exhibition closes with photographs from the late 1800s and early 1900s, documenting life after many African Americans migrated north following the Civil War. "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," Waggoner said.

Those galleries hold elaborate portraits of seemingly affluent Black couples, a proud school band, and women learning dressmaking at an institute in Alabama. The segregation of the era remains visible in the work itself. A group portrait honors Black Red Cross nurses, long excluded from training programs and recruited during labor shortages near the end of World War I; a small group of them was eventually permitted to treat Black US Army soldiers struck down by Spanish flu. For practitioners and historians alike, "Remember Me" signals how far institutional collecting of this material has traveled since Kelbaugh began hunting it at flea markets more than fifty years ago.