The photographer Hugh Mangum captured dynamic gestures and facial expressions in his portraits, in an artistic era when stiff, immobile portraits were the norm. See more of his lost and found photographs:
Contemporary viewers who are more familiar with the era’s stiff portraits might be shocked at the variety of gestures and facial expressions that Mangum’s images capture. The stuffy quality of much early photographic portraiture was part technological—given limitations related to lighting and exposure—and part convention.
How did Mangum do it, then? Nobody can say for sure; the biographical record is sparse, and information about his artistic process is almost nonexistent. The essays that frame the hundred or so full color plates in “Where We Find Ourselves” provide rich historical context for his work. Mangum took his first Penny Picture portrait in Durham, in 1897, a year before the brutal Wilmington race riot.
Mangum’s portraits, however, also record things that neither he nor his sitters could have intended. Many of the poorly conserved glass-plate negatives are significantly degraded: cracked, with corroded or flaking emulsion, and often fused together. The imperfect prints made from them remind us of how fragile our access to the past is, and of how much of daily human life gets lost to history.
In 1903, addressing Jim Crow and segregation, W. E. B. Du Bois famously declared that the problem of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. In both his writing and his lesser-known work as a, Du Bois often framed American racism as a visual problem. In this, he extended the work of nineteenth-century black thinkers such as Frederick Douglass, who quickly recognized the power of photographic portraits to represent black peoples’ full humanity.
is associate professor of English at Pace University and the author of “The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States.”
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