Volume 23, Issue 2 | Autumn 2024

American Art History Digitally
sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art
A Measure of Success: An African American Photograph Album from Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century ConnecticutInteractive Feature

by Laura Coyle, with Mirasol Estrada and Allan McLeod
The focus of this DAH project is an album of turn-of-the-twentieth-century commercial portrait photographs of African Americans in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The author shows how the album enacts Frederick Douglass’s ideas about photography, how the people in the album used photography to construct images of racial uplift, and how the compiler used the album to create a composite image of Black respectability and community. Photographs and photograph albums gave African American sitters an opportunity to be visible and resist erasure, even as they participated in mainstream American society. The practice of sharing photograph albums also facilitated transmission of Black individual, family, community, and national history and values though a powerful combination of images and storytelling, which capitalized on the strength of African American oral traditions. Ultimately, photographs like those in the album helped sitters and viewers imagine, and even achieve, a better life in the decades after Reconstruction (1863–77).

Laura Coyle is assistant director for cataloguing and digitization at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she is coeditor with Michèle Gates Moresi of the photography book series Double Exposure. Before joining the Smithsonian, she was curator of European art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She earned a PhD in art history from Princeton University, an MA in art history from Williams College, and a BA from Georgetown University. Her research specialties include modern and contemporary art, the history of photography, and the history of still-life painting.

Email the author: coylel[at]si.edu

Citation: Laura Coyle, with Allan McLeod, “Interactive Feature,” in Laura Coyle, with Mirasol Estrada and Allan McLeod, “A Measure of Success: An African American Photograph Album from Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Connecticut,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 23, no. 2 (Autumn 2024), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2024.23.2.24.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License Creative Commons License unless otherwise noted.

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Scholarly Article|Interactive Feature|Conservation|Project Narrative

Introduction

Families around the turn of the twentieth century proudly displayed and shared photograph albums in the parlors of their homes, where they received guests. This interactive feature may be considered NCAW’s digital parlor. Here, viewers are invited to page through the photograph album of Allston family and other portraits in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The album, which contains thirty portraits and one memorial card dating from the 1880s to about 1910, was a gift of the family of Keith M. Jones in honor of Lonnie Bunch. The album conservation project received federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care Initiative, administered by the Smithsonian National Collections Program. Conservation made it possible to digitize the album more safely for preservation and access, including for this interactive feature.

Viewers may look through the album pages in sequence as double-page spreads or see all the pages laid out as thumbnails in the album overview and use the navigation buttons to jump to specific pages. Viewers may also choose the photograph viewing option with a choice of two tabs: Lives and Catalogue Record, and then “pull out” photographs or ephemera inserted in the album to see an entire item, front and back. The Lives tab provides the type of information that the compiler and keepers of the album probably would have shared in conversation with a friend or family—for example, the names of the people portrayed (or possibly portrayed), stories about their lives, and anecdotes about their families and communities. While the actual stories the compiler and keepers told are lost forever, the stories in Lives allow the viewer to experience the album in a way that approaches what the compiler and keepers intended while recognizing and honoring the people and communities that the album represents.

The interactive feature is best viewed in fullscreen mode. Use the button at top left or open in a new window.

Notes

[1] Barbara Orbach Natanson, “C. M. Bell Studio Collection of Photographs at the Library of Congress,” Library of Congress Research Guides, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, last updated April 2022, https://www.loc.gov/.

[2] “Pach Brothers Portrait Photograph Collection (PR 84),” Guide to the Pach Brothers Portrait Photograph Collection, 1867–1947, Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections, New-York Historical Society, New York, August 21, 2023, https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/.