A historic lens: How Black Americans used portraits and family photographs to defy stereotypes – Art-and-culture News , NewsGater

By Janette Greenwood

Unstable. Offender. Impoverished. Absent parents. Negligent mothers. “A tangle of pathology”, as the Moynihan Report, a 1965 study on black poverty.

For decades, the black family has been denigrated as dysfunctional.

When the media exploded in the late 19th centuryDemeaning images of African Americans – as inferior, clown, and dangerous – saturated almost every aspect of popular culture, from music to advertising.

The evolution of radio, film, and television in the 20th century only amplified degrading images, providing “proof” to white Americans of black inferiority and justification for denying them their rights.

Today, many of these same tired images persist and continue to feed baseless perceptions. A 2017 study showed that the media continues to “incorrectly portray black families as poorer, criminal and unstable than white families.”

When those malicious images began to proliferate, African Americans found an especially effective way to resist. They took over the camera to represent themselves, using photographs to represent who they really were. Apparently a “magic instrument” for “the displaced and marginalized”, as critic Bell Hooks writes, the camera provided “immediate intervention” to counter harmful images used to deny them their rightful place in American society.

A record of everyday African Americans

In 2013, a historian and collector named Frank Morrill, who lives in Charlton, a suburb of Worcester, Massachusetts, discovered more than 230 portraits of people of color among the photographer’s 5,300 glass negatives. William bullard that has.

Together with Morrill and my history students at Clark University, I researched these portraits and will co-curate .

I was drawn to these portraits because they illustrate the ways ordinary working-class families used the camera to represent themselves in all their humanity.

Bullard, a white neighbor of most of the people he photographed in Worcester, made these portraits from 1897 to 1917. His images challenge stereotypes of dysfunction by portraying the vibrancy of black family life just a few decades after emancipation.

While Bullard was doing his portraits, sociologist and civil rights activist WEB Du Bois was curated a photographic exhibition for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Du Bois sought to show the achievements of blacks to the rest of the world, and his images depicted middle-class and elite black Americans, often in a studio setting and without specific identification.

Bullard’s portraits, on the other hand, are extraordinary because they capture ordinary people on their porches, backyards, and living rooms. In addition, most families can be identified, allowing their stories to be told.

Symbols of resilience and aspiration

The existence of these family units was an achievement in its own right.

At the time Bullard made his portraits, slavery and family separations remained a traumatic memory for many of his subjects. As a result, the family portraits were especially meaningful. They testified about the achievements and aspirations of African Americans and the resilience of their kinship networks.

And for a people whose history had so often been erased, photographs provided an opportunity to preserve their stories for future generations.

In 1900, Rose, Edward, and Abraham Perkins posed for Bullard in his Worcester backyard. Born into slavery in South Carolina, the three brothers and other family members had settled on an old plantation that Edward managed to buy only a few years after emancipation.

But their dream of living as independent farmers ended with the disappearance of reconstruction. A backlash of terror against the state’s black population once again marked the beginning of the rule of the white supremacists.

Caught in the vice of falling cotton prices and an economic depression, Edward lost his land. With their hopes for new lives in the south demolished, Edward and his wife Celia made the decision to seek fuller freedom in the north. They went to Worcester in 1879; Rose, Abraham, and many other family members soon followed.

As refugees from terrorism and economic disaster, the brothers, in their portrait, embody triumph and perseverance, and commemorate the tenacity of family ties that remained intact through slavery, emancipation and migration.

Convey respectability and stability

Other photos show flourishing young families claiming their place in American society. Subjects present themselves as normal, upstanding Americans who share the same values, tastes, and aspirations as their contemporaries.

In 1904, Thomas, a native of Virginia, and Margaret Dillon, born near Boston, posed with their three children in their living room. Cross-legged and hands in the pockets of an elegant suit, Thomas appears as a proud patriarch. Margaret, with a smile on her face and her lush skirt cascading to the floor, radiates motherly love and decorum. She holds her baby while two older, well-dressed children stand between the mother and father.

Floral wallpaper, lace curtains, and framed paintings mean a well-appointed home. A poster on the wall commemorates President Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to the city in 1902, suggesting the family’s involvement in politics and local affairs.

In this picture of respectability and stability, the Dillons defy almost all stereotypes of the dysfunctional black family. Although they worked for white families, Thomas as a coachman and Margaret as a domestic servant, and they had yet to achieve middle-class security, their portrait is brimming with aspirations.

Disproving stereotypes of black men

When the Dillons and others posed for Bullard, Lynchings of black men increased in the US. The brutal “black beast rapist” – an archetype invented in the white South during Reconstruction – Often served as justification for these murders. Lynching postcards they circulated widely, along with “humorous” cartoons and postcards showing black men stealing chickens and watermelons.

In the midst of this attack on black manhood, some families focused their portraits on fathers and sons. Around 1904, Raymond Schuyler, a railroad worker from upstate New York, took a portrait with his four children in a snow-covered park. Playfully sitting on a boy’s sleigh, his arms wrapped around one of his young daughters, Schuyler embodies a benevolent and gentle masculinity.

, a father poses with his baby on his lap, his large hands securely holding his son. He wears the uniform of the Knights of Pythias, a fraternal organization that defends the values ​​of responsibility, community and family.

The silent resistance of family photography

As black men struggled against claims of their inherent criminality, Black women fought a dualistic stereotype – that of the promiscuous “Jezebel” or the servile “Mamita”. Black women fought these images by presenting themselves with respectability and decorum.

Take Jennie Bradley Johnson, who posed with her two smartly dressed daughters, May and Jennie. Sitting in a lush garden, surrounded by hydrangeas, Johnson exudes motherly warmth and modesty. Recently widowed and facing the burden of raising her family alone on the salary of a laundress, she nevertheless projects strength and resilience in the face of loss.

Historical portraits provide an invaluable means of delving into the distant past. And other photographers have continued the tradition.

In 2017, photographer Zun Lee presented his exhibition “Fade resistance, ”Composed of 20th century“ orphan ”Polaroids that Lee discovered at garage sales and on eBay. The African Americans in the photos proudly pose with their cars, dress up for Easter, and play with their children.

Like the Bullard portraits, the familiar images found by Lee are, as Lee wrote, a reminder that “there is a vivid history of black visual self-representation that offers a hauntingly contemporary counter-narrative to conventional distortion and erasure.”

Demonstrating the gulf between stereotype and reality, these portraits of black families reveal the ways in which ordinary working black families have long become invisible in mainstream American culture. They reveal the common goals shared by all American families: the desire for stability and security, and the opportunity to raise and support children so they can have a better future.

Janette greenwood he is a history teacher, Clark University

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