Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography at the National Gallery of Art brings together approximately 70 works from the museum’s collection, many on view for the first time, to trace how Black Americans used photography to define themselves, celebrate their communities and challenge stereotypes during the 19th and early 20th centuries. On view from November 7, 2026, through March 14, 2027, in the West Building’s Ground Floor, Gallery G30, the exhibition draws on a new acquisition of 248 early photographs by and of African Americans, offering a fuller picture of Black life, entrepreneurship and self-expression in the era of slavery, emancipation and Reconstruction.
The show moves between images made before and after the Civil War, revealing the complexities of race, freedom and agency. In some prewar photographs, African Americans appear alongside the children of the white families that enslaved or employed them. Other images of those who had endured or escaped slavery became tools in the fight for abolition, circulating widely to document atrocities and build support for the Union cause. Photographers such as James F. Gibson and Henry P. Moore captured formerly enslaved people who had crossed into Union territory and workers on plantations where slave owners had fled, turning the camera into a form of testimony.
At the same time, African American photographers operated highly successful studios. James Presley Ball’s “Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West” in Cincinnati, Glenalvin Goodridge’s studio in York, Pennsylvania, and Augustus Washington’s work in Hartford, Connecticut, before his move to Liberia in 1852, all capitalized on the new demand for portraiture. Their clients included white families seeking tender group portraits and distinguished individual sitters. The Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection, which includes 11 photographs by Ball, Goodridge and Washington, forms a core part of the exhibition.
Frederick Douglass, who became one of the most photographed Americans of the 19th century, believed that images could dissolve stereotypes and challenge racism. He sold carte de visite prints at his speaking engagements and included them in his letters, insisting that photography allowed “men of all conditions” to see themselves as others saw them. In the show, subjects hold objects symbolic of newfound freedoms and accomplishments: a school bag, a book, a soldier’s uniform with gold embellishments. These details speak to education, enlistment and the hard-won right to self-representation.
Remember Me does not offer a single narrative. It presents a set of practices in which photography functions as both document and declaration, preserving faces and futures that too often were denied in the historical record.
Image: Portrait of Red Cross Nurses, c. 1918, gelatin silver print, Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection, Purchased with support from the Ford Foundation, 2023.39.141
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