Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography

Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography is an important exhibition that looks at one of the most powerful roles photography has played: the ability to shape how people are seen, remembered, and represented. Bringing together around 70 works from the National Gallery of Art’s collection, the exhibition offers a rich and nuanced look at African American life, identity, ambition, and community through photography from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

At a time when photography was still a relatively new medium, African Americans quickly understood its potential. A portrait could be more than a likeness. It could be a statement of dignity, independence, belonging, and aspiration. For Black photographers and their clients, the camera became a way to challenge the limited and often deeply prejudiced images of African Americans that circulated during and after slavery. Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography makes clear that these photographs were not simply records of the past; they were also acts of self-definition.

The exhibition begins with the work of early African American photographers including James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington. Working soon after photography was introduced in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, they established successful studios and photographed both Black and white clients. Their careers reveal the opportunities and risks involved in building a business at a time of profound social and political change. Significantly, these photographers often placed their names on their portraits, asserting their authorship at a moment when Black entrepreneurship itself carried important meaning. Their photographs provide an extraordinary window onto everyday life around the Civil War while also demonstrating the role photography could play in the larger struggle for equality and recognition.

The exhibition also examines portraits of African Americans made in predominantly white-owned studios before and after the Civil War. These photographs reveal the complicated relationship between photography and representation. Images could reinforce stereotypes, but they could also give individuals a presence and dignity that challenged those same stereotypes. The portraits of free and enslaved men, women, and children on view raise difficult questions about agency, consent, power, and who had control over the making and circulation of an image. Following the abolition of slavery, portraits increasingly reflect a new emphasis on individuality and self-presentation, offering glimpses of people determined to be seen on their own terms.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the growth of Black-owned photography studios created new spaces in which African Americans could take greater control over their own representation. Photographers such as Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee became celebrated for their portraits, while artists including G. Addison Turner and Daniel Freeman represent the many talented photographers whose work deserves wider recognition. Their photographs of individuals, couples, families, and community groups show people presenting themselves with pride and intention. These are images of people building lives, relationships, careers, and communities—and choosing how they wanted those lives to be remembered.

What makes Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography especially compelling is the way it moves beyond the idea of photography as a passive historical record. The exhibition asks us to consider who was behind the camera, who was in front of it, and what it meant for a person to have control over their own image. Seen together, these photographs reveal the complexity of Black experiences during a period marked by slavery, emancipation, segregation, migration, and profound social change. They also remind us that the desire to be seen as an individual, rather than through someone else’s assumptions, has always been central to the photographic portrait.

The exhibition also marks the first time that many works from the Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection have been shown at the National Gallery of Art since the collection was acquired in 2023. As an important holding of early American vernacular photography, the collection adds depth to the exhibition and brings attention to photographs and photographers that have often remained outside the better-known narratives of photographic history.

Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography is organized by the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition is made possible through leadership support from the Trellis Charitable Fund, with additional support from Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman. It is curated by Diane Waggoner, acting head and curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, with Sarah Greenough, former senior curator and head of the department of photography at the National Gallery of Art.

More than an exhibition about early photography, Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography is an exhibition about visibility, authorship, and the right to define one’s own image. Its photographs give us a chance to encounter African Americans not simply as subjects within a historical narrative, but as individuals, families, professionals, entrepreneurs, and communities who actively shaped how they wanted to be seen. That makes this exhibition particularly important today, when questions about representation, identity, and who controls an image remain at the heart of photography.