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Cameras at Work: African American Studio Photographers and the Business of Everyday Life, 1900-1970

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Cameras at Work: African American Studio Photographers and the Business of Everyday Life, 1900-1970 W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2016 Cameras at Work: African American Studio Photographers and the Business of Everyday Life, 1900-1970 William Brian Piper College of William and Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Piper, William Brian, "Cameras at Work: African American Studio Photographers and the Business of Everyday Life, 1900-1970" (2016). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1477068187. http://doi.org/10.21220/S2SG69 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cameras at Work: African American Studio Photographers and the Business of Everyday Life, 1900-1970 W. Brian Piper Richmond, Virginia Master of Arts, College of William and Mary, 2006 Bachelor of Arts, University of Virginia, 1998 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the College of William and Mary in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies Program The College of William and Mary August, 2016 © Copyright by William Brian Piper 2016 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the professional lives of African American studio photographers, recovering the history of an important industry in African American community life during segregation and the long Civil Rights Movement. It builds on previous scholarship of black photography by analyzing photographers’ business and personal records in concert with their images in order to more critically consider the circumstances under which African Americans produced and consumed photographs every day. During the first half of the twentieth century, urban photography studios constituted essential spaces where African Americans considered ideas of commerce, art, labor, leisure, class, gender, and group identity; “Cameras at Work” situates studio photographers in the history of photography, twentieth-century black cultural politics, and the trajectory of African American business history. The rich records of the Scurlock Studio in Washington, DC center and focus my analysis, which I develop via close comparison of the Scurlocks with a number of other professionals including Morgan and Marvin Smith, Austin Hansen, Louise Martin, and Ernest Withers. These men and women acted locally while empowering African Americans to share their own images nationally, thus contributing to the creation of a wholly American visual culture. Throughout, I treat photographs as objects through which camera operators, consumers, and viewers articulated an understanding of themselves as well as the historical moment in which they negotiated the making of the photograph. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Dedication iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1. “To Develop Our Business:” Addison Scurlock, Photography, and the National Negro Business League 9 Chapter 2. 900 “You” Street: Real and Imagined Spaces of the Scurlock Photography Studio, 1900-1930 54 Chapter 3. “The Smarted Place for People Who Like to Pose:” The M. Smith Studio in Harlem 98 Chapter 4. Frame by Frame: Daily Business in the African American Photography Studio 147 Chapter 5. “We’re Competent, Well Equipped, Minority Owned, and Strictly Business:” The Scurlock Studio in Transition 216 215 Conclusion 253 Appendix 256 Bibliography 290 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my sincerest gratitude to Doctors Arthur Knight, Charles McGovern, and Alan Braddock for their guidance, advice, and above all, patience throughout the duration of this project. Thank you to Dr. Quincy Mills for his careful reading and insightful suggestions. Thank you to the College of William and Mary for supporting my research for a long time. The American Studies Program at William and Mary gave me a great group of wide-thinking and creative peers that have helped read actual pages, toss around ideas, and just keep me sane. Thank you: Ben Anderson, Margaret Freeman, Wendy Korwin, Mikal Gaines, and Sarah Glosson. I owe special debts of gratitude to Frank Cha and Seth Feman. All of these folks are doing their own great work and have helped this along in immeasurable ways. Any errors and missteps are my own. Thank you to Dr. Kimberley Phillips for seeing this project out of its infancy and guiding me in its early days. I would also like to thank the staff of the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History, in particular David Haberstich and Vanessa Broussard. Thank you to Paul Gardullo at the National Museum of African American History and Culture for your counsel and encouragement. The staff at the Mansucript and Photo divisions at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, especially Mary Yearwood, went above and beyond. Thank you to Alan Govenar at the Texas African American Photography Archive and every other archivist and librarian I have met along the way. Thank you to Dr. Deborah Willis for the groundwork, and your encouragement over hamburgers after our meeting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I could not have completed this project without my family. Mom and Dad thank you for all of the love, encouragement, and understanding. Corey Piper thank you for lending your ear, your close reading, and your sense of humor. This project would not even exist without the love and support of my wife Elizabeth Neidenbach. You are an amazing scholar. Thank you for believing in this work, pinning down all the details, and getting me to the finish line. ii For my parents, Bill and Julie Piper iii Introduction In his short essay “A Sunday Portrait,” Edward P. Jones ponders a photograph of his mother, Jeanette Satana Majors, sitting in front of a painting of the U.S. Capitol dome. Jones aligns the portrait, taken before his own birth, with “millions” of pictures purchased by “thousands upon thousands of other poor blacks … in the first decades of the twentieth century” who, upon arriving in the urban North, sought out a photographer’s studio in order to make a record of their transition to city life.1 Sitters for these portraits, Jones asserts, wanted to show off newly purchased clothes and objects, and to send the visual evidence of their new urban identity back home to relatives that had not made the migration. If newly arrived African Americans found in the North still more degrading and difficult labor or merely a different tenor of racial discrimination, the photographs they posed for allowed them, at least, to present their bodies in a way that gave them pleasure. By Jones’ own description, Majors’ portrait revealed her as “precious,” “majestic, so young and so innocent.”2 Jones imagines meeting his mother in the late 1930s on her way to have this portrait made in an unnamed studio in Washington, DC. Jones stops his mother as she reaches for the door of the studio, attempting an intervention that might have given her a less difficult life. In the dream, Majors regards her future son warily, and continues into the studio. Dodging customers streaming in and out of the front door, Majors leaves with a receipt to pick up her prints in a week’s time. At the end of the essay Jones imagines entering the space of the studio himself and asks them to “take my picture the same way 1 Edward P. Jones, “A Sunday Portrait,” in Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography, Deborah Willis, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1994), 35-40. 2 Jones, “A Sunday Portrait,” 37. 1 you took that of the woman who came before me.”3 On the surface, Jones’ piece is about a family history and the power of photographs to communicate across time. Yet, he also calls our attention to the mental and physical spaces around an African American photography studio, where “well-dressed, well-coiffed young people” traversed the 7th Street sidewalk, his mother conversed with her photographer, and the cardboard backdrop located Majors firmly in the American capital. Focusing on the spatial details included by Jones draws our attention beyond the simple importance of the studio to how it functioned as a space for African Americans to perform identity, to interact with a community, and to imagine oneself in new ways. During the first half of the twentieth century, photography studios constituted essential spaces where African Americans considered ideas of commerce, art, labor, leisure, class, gender, and group identity. “Cameras at Work” situates studio photographers in the history of photography, twentieth-century black cultural politics, and the trajectory of African American business history. The rich records of the Scurlock Studio in Washington, DC center and focus my analysis, which I develop via close comparison of the Scurlocks with a number of other professionals including Morgan and Marvin Smith, Austin Hansen, Louise Martin, and Ernest Withers. These men and women acted locally while empowering African Americans to share their own images nationally, thus contributing to the creation of a wholly American visual culture. Throughout, I treat photographs as objects through which camera operators, consumers, and viewers articulated an understanding of themselves as well as the historical moment in which they negotiated the making of the photograph. 3 Jones, “A Sunday Portrait,” 40. 2 Chapter One begins with the participation of Addison Scurlock and other photographers in the nascent black business movement of the early twentieth century. Leaders of the National Negro Business League (NNBL), including Booker T. Washington himself, routinely employed metaphors of sight, light, and vision when petitioning African Americans to demonstrate their achievements and spread the gospel of uplift. Photographers in the NNBL eagerly strove to make the Washingtonian “ideal” visible through images of successful black business ventures and proprietors.
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