WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES
WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUGH MANGUM, 1897–1922
EDITED BY MARGARET SARTOR AND ALEX HARRIS FOREWORD BY DEBORAH WILLIS
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INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL LESY
Published by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
I feel very strongly, though, that this amorphous people are in desperate search for something which will help them to re-establish their connection with themselves, and with one another. This can only begin to happen as the truth begins to be told. We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities. The mass culture, in the meantime, can only reflect our chaos: and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life—and a great transforming energ y. —james baldwin,
“mass culture and the creative artist: some personal notes,” 1959
CONTENTS
FOREWORD Frame by Frame xi Deborah Willis INTRODUCTION A Man in His Wholeness 1 Michael Lesy THE PHOTOGRAPHS 9 WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES 99 Margaret Sartor THROUGH THIS LENS 147 Alex Harris AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 155 Margaret Sartor BIBLIOGRAPHY 161
FOREWORD Frame by Frame DEBORAH WILLIS It would be easy to focus on their eyes. To attend exclusively to the direction of their gazes downward or forward. To read them as signifiers of status or station, establishing or rejecting connection and relation. — tina campt, Listening to Images
where we find ourselves is the perfect title for this exquisitely researched book. It is a compelling metaphor, a question, a statement of fact. In looking at this book of portraits, I felt compelled to complete the phrase with a resounding answer—We find ourselves in the photographic studio. In looking at these striking images created at the turn of the twentieth century until just after the end of the First World War, a crucial period in American history, we can consider migration, family life, land owners and sharecroppers, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, the employed and the underemployed, and black and white Americans in the rural South. Both beauty and humanity are enacted in profound and meaningful ways in the portraits. Seen through the lens of Hugh Mangum, the intersection of these two visual experiences begins to unravel the complexity of what it means to dress for a studio photographer. Each adult sitter made a conscious decision to select clothing—perform style— that defined his or her understanding of self, and in so doing, these people have left us an evocative and surprising legacy of images. Gendered identities are represented by fashionably dressed women wearing bold, striped blouses and cinched-waist skirts and men posing in the popular tailored jackets of the period. It is important to read the details: the facial hair of men, their beards and moustaches; the pearl necklace and earrings of a black woman in a large white collar, her hair parted down the center; the feathered and plumed hats of men and women, black and white; the fur scarves and cotton neckties; the treasured objects, from bicycle to family dog. Hairstyles define and refine! And there is abundant humor to be found, on both sides of the lens; for instance, in a series of self-portraits made by Hugh Mangum,
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who goes from looking directly at the camera to hiding behind his bowler hat. (He sometimes included himself in the first or final frame exposed on a negative otherwise filled with paying clients.) The photographs show us lives marked both by notable affluence and by hard work, but they are all imbued with a sense of self-creation, and often joy. So many of the portraits are animated by a spirit of playfulness. Mangum’s energy, his instinctive ability to connect with his sitters, is palpable even now. These pictures affirm the sitters’ encounter not only with the lens but also with the photos’ use, with future possibilities for interpreting the images. For instance, the accidental double exposure of an African American girl and a young white woman, both of them unsmiling, both of them conscious of their poses. This superimposition brings into being an encounter that can be fictionalized, that disrupts the photographic narrative. Other double exposures are disquieting and intense as they construct past and present—child and soldier, dreamy-eyed girl and family portrait. The portraits collected here were never intended to be viewed as a group but as individual frames, of a family, of a man, woman, child. In looking at these images— from an archive of glass plates and contact prints—in the twenty-first century, we are able to see what the photographer experienced on a daily basis. The diversity of his studio is present in all the manifestations of these portraits. We can see that the black middle class of Durham visited the studio alongside white upper-class residents. Were the white sitters privileged in some way over the black sitters as they waited for the portraits? (While it doesn’t appear so, from the democratic, nonhierarchical way the contact sheets are organized—the sitters seem to have shared the space equally—it is difficult for us to know for sure.) Did laboring black and white sitters stand in line for their portraits after a long day’s work doing laundry or cooking in hot kitchens, in fields, warehouses, or classrooms; or possibly in barbershops or at the printing press? We are left to wonder about who walked into the studio and why, especially in light of what we understand about the segregated South in the historical record. Mangum’s photographs create a new way of connecting the known and imagined past of the racial divide—they hint at unexpected relationships and histories. These dazzling images—made even more dazzling by the work of time—are a celebration of life, suggesting that the sitters constructed their own narratives in collaboration with Hugh Mangum. In thinking about early to mid-twentieth-century photographic history, we might label these images as studies of a time and place, calling them vernacular; however, I would suggest that these portraits are much more complex than that. Mangum’s portraits impart a rare sense of empathy, joy, status, and community: they are not “typed” images, simple signifiers of status or station. They contain an implicit message that we must redefine our ways of looking, that we should look through his lens with a sense of empowerment rather than subjugation. And then we can find ourselves in the mirror of the sitter. xiv
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Hugh Mangum, tintype, photographer unknown, ca. 1895. Courtesy of the West Point on the Eno Photograph Collection, Durham Parks and Recreation, Durham, North Carolina.
WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES MARGARET SARTOR
to tell the story of photographer Hugh Leonard Mangum’s brief life I have had to rely on a handful of recorded facts, his own scribbled notes, passed-down recollections, numerous publications from his era, and an old traveling trunk. Interesting stuff, but not much from which to construct a biography. In comparison to that relatively small accumulation of what we know about the photographer, the speculation and stories generated by the portraits he left behind are very nearly inexhaustible. And the lives behind these portraits, like the scattered facts we know about Hugh Mangum, are, in many ways, the more compelling for their incompleteness. The gaps in our understanding lead us to consider more carefully what we know or, more importantly, what we think we know. The people in these portraits stare back at us across a hundred years of time’s passing, through the indelible marks of damage and disregard. We may think the difference of a century considerable, and in so many ways that is true. But these portraits suggest that the distance between then and now, them and us, is a lot closer than we might expect. It would be impossible to identify and uncover the life stories of everyone who visited Mangum’s studio, but by immersing myself in the historical record, I hoped to better understand the texture of those lives and to get as close as possible to seeing as Hugh Mangum saw—or at least to cultivate a more nuanced appreciation of his way of seeing. This proved to be an endlessly compelling education, both factually and visually. And it became more than that. Over time, I began to feel that I, like Mangum, was itinerant. Moving from archive to archive, and face to face, it was as though I were traveling to places familiar yet unfathomable, to a time that was distant but also in need of my immediate, if not urgent, attention.
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Raleigh, North Carolina. Around that time, Mangum created an advertisement for “The Mangum & Cobb Photo Company, of New York, with Southern Headquarters now at Raleigh” that included the declaration, “We lead —Others try to Follow.” Mangum’s travel log doesn’t show that he went to New York, and it also doesn’t show that he visited Washington, D.C.—yet he left behind mounted photographic prints of the Capitol and the newly completed Library of Congress building that appear to be his photographs. There are other vintage prints and advertisements from the 1900s showing that he made photographs for the Dixie Photo Co. and in partnership with other photographers under the imprint of the Novelty Photo Co. We know from vintage prints mounted inside cardboard frames engraved with his studio’s name that from 1906 to 1919 he operated the Mangum Studio, seasonally, in East Radford and Pulaski, Virginia. And for two years prior to his death in 1922, he operated the Mangum Studio in Roanoke, Virginia. Hugh Mangum’s nephew, Jack Vaughan, was born in 1911. He knew his uncle well. Decades later, in the 1970s, Vaughan played a crucial role in helping to salvage and save Mangum’s glass plate negatives. In an interview from the early 1980s, Vaughan recalled that his uncle liked to “roam” and, as a rule, would “ride the rails until his money give out then come back [home].” At its peak in the early 1900s, the Durham depot served twenty-nine passenger trains a day; with five different railroad lines spreading out like the arms of a starfish, the possibilities for Hugh Mangum to roam were nearly boundless. Hugh Mangum’s open-door policy of welcoming a racially diverse clientele may have been unconventional, disdained by some and embraced by others, but in some counties, in some years, it may also have been illegal. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the concept of “separate but equal” was constitutional; its ruling supported the racial segregation of public facilities, such as passenger trains and depot waiting rooms. Though different cities and counties segregated at different times between 1876 and 1902, restrictive laws known as Black Codes that severely limited black people’s movement, education, voting rights, and property ownership had passed in North Carolina’s General Assembly much earlier, in 1866. Reconstruction nullified, but did not eliminate, the practice of Black Codes. In 1875, with the assistance of Virginia-born attorney and educator John Mercer Langston (who had his portrait taken by Hugh Mangum not long before he died in 1897), Congress wrote and passed a Civil Rights Act. Aimed at protecting African Americans’ rights of citizenship, the law was never effectively enforced and did not cover public schools. After Plessy v. Ferguson, southern white politicians were able to revive the principles of the Black Codes, and in North Carolina, as elsewhere in the
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from left to right: Leah Fitzgerald, Mary Jane Fitzgerald, and Agnes Fitzgerald, original prints by Hugh Mangum shown at actual sizes, ca. 1897–1902. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
era were far less sensitive to light than high-speed films or digital sensors, so motion and depth of field in a photograph were not so easy to control as they are today. Still, Mangum would have known that a slow shutter speed would record movement as a blur, so why didn’t he wait for (or dictate) stillness from his subjects? The blurs in the photograph may not have been intentional, but they were avoidable. Regardless of technical limitations, it appears that Mangum followed his instincts, let his emotions dictate when to trip the shutter. Indeed, it is the technical “flaws” in this image, as in some of Welty’s best pictures, that give the photo its vitality and ethereal charm—that and the damage that blooms from the edges of the negative to provide the moment with a dark halo of mystery. Only after I’d studied this photograph countless times did I realize that the younger girl might be Mangum’s daughter, Julia. If it is Julia, then this photograph would have been made very close to the time her father died. The photographs Hugh Mangum made of himself and of the people closest to him make it easier to imagine how it may have felt to know him or to sit in front of his camera. They make it clear that, for him, photography wasn’t a business he left behind at the end of the day but part and parcel of his life, the means through which he found a way—or his way—to engage with the world. From the beginning of his itinerant career, the town Mangum visited most frequently, besides Durham, was East Radford, Virginia, where he met, courted, and in 1906 wed Annie Carden. During the sixteen years they were married, Hugh Mangum regularly demonstrated his affection for Annie by photographing her, both in the
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THROUGH THIS LENS ALEX HARRIS
two young men bookend another young man in a linen suit. In the late nineteenth century, perhaps intentionally, possibly by chance, these three sat before Hugh Mangum’s lens, and his shutter preserved their expressions. The black-and-white glass plate negative deteriorated over a century of neglect, until it was professionally cleaned by highly trained conservators at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University in 1986, and then photographed again in high-resolution color with a digital camera when the technology became available in 2006. Interpreting this color scan—as well as over a hundred other scans of Mangum’s negatives—into photographic print form for publication and exhibition was a central challenge that Margaret Sartor and I faced as editors of this book. Like so many photographers, early in my career I experienced the disappointment of seeing my own work badly reproduced in publications and recognized how crucial it was for me to understand and to control the quality of photographic reproduction. Making prints for exhibition and publication for myself and other photographers became a goal. For thirty years, I pursued that goal in the darkroom with light, chemistry, and light-sensitive paper. For the last two decades, I have worked with the frequently changing hardware and software on scanners, computers, and inkjet printers to adjust images or make black-and-white or color-pigmented inkjet prints on fine art paper. During the process of editing and printing Hugh Mangum’s work I collaborated with Margaret Sartor and relied on her advice as final arbiter for the look, tone, and cropping of each image. With the excellent scans provided by the Rubenstein Library, we tried to capture and render as much information as possible, even from parts of Mangum’s negatives that today seem thin or dense—significantly under- or overexposed—but in his day would have been customary exposures for
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Photographs Collection at the Rubenstein Library, their intended home. Once there, they would be cleaned and photographed, a process that could take months. We asked for and received permission to photograph all the negatives that day so we might consider them for this book. We held the individual plates up to the light of one of the farmhouse windows, then placed them on what amounted to a portable copy stand, a light box on which I could photograph the plates with my digital single-lens reflex camera. We were especially interested in the chance juxtapositions that occurred in the plates that had become stuck together or attached to the leaflets. We also knew that the Duke conservators would attempt to separate these plates and that this might be our only chance to capture this random layering of exposures. We are fortunate that the Duke archivists decided to create color digital scans of their original collection of Mangum’s black-and-white plates. Margaret and I had never seen black-and-white photographs of this era reproduced in color. Photographing Mangum’s plates at the Nygard’s house, we were simply following Duke’s lead. As we looked at his portraits, Mangum’s exposures of a fraction of a second on glass made a hundred years earlier seemed part of a longer, more complex, and, now, more colorful story. In the scratches, cracks, fingerprints, and delicate color shifts that surrounded and sometimes covered the sitters’ faces, we were looking at portraits of individuals through the portal of time. And in an image, sometimes what is hidden can be just as important as what is shown, particularly when what obscures that image also gives it a mysteriously beautiful quality. That day at the Nygards’ house, we decided to include the evidence of damage to Mangum’s plates in this book and to reproduce Mangum’s photographs in color. No one living knows which portraits Hugh Mangum considered his most successful, or by what criteria he may have judged them. He worked in the early days
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of the medium, when photography’s artistic merits were still under debate and practitioners were trying to grasp what, beyond a commercial purpose, photography could accomplish. As portraits, however, there is one standard to which Hugh Mangum’s photographs would have been held—and still can be—and that is the degree to which they provided a “passkey,” as the writer Reynolds Price wrote of Eudora Welty’s photographs, “to a time and place much like all others, where life is lived in bolted rooms called men, women, children.” Editing a life’s work without benefit of the artist’s input, as we have done, is not unusual in the history of photography. For instance, curators, editors, and writers are still combing through work made by Garry Winogrand, the legendary street photographer who portrayed life in the United States from the 1950s through the early 1980s. When he died, he left behind 300,000 unedited photographs in various forms, including some 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film. On the other end of the spectrum is the distinguished photographer and curator Edward Steichen, who, nearing the end of his life, was so concerned that only his selection of his photographs be left to represent him that he frantically destroyed any negative that he judged not to be of aesthetic value or historical importance. In his lifetime, Hugh Mangum’s portraits weren’t widely known outside his family or his customers; only now, nearly a century after his death, are they receiving serious attention. The same is true of other photographers, some of them among the greatest practitioners of the medium, such as E. J. Bellocq, whom I mentioned earlier. Other bodies of photographs that were nearly lost and are now considered an important contribution to photographic history include Mike Disfarmer’s blunt and revealing studio portraits made in the 1940s in Heber Springs, Arkansas; Richard Samuel Roberts’s meticulous and dignified portraits of African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s in Columbia, South Carolina; Vivian Maier’s astonishingly original street photographs of Chicago and New York in the 1950s and 1960s; and William Gedney’s deeply sympathetic photographs of life in marginalized communities in America and abroad made between 1955 and 1984. There are many directions we might have gone in choosing photographs for this book. We could have carefully selected a broad overview of Hugh Mangum’s pictures to represent the range of individuals, emotions, and poses he captured in his studio, as well as the variety of landscapes and group portraits he made outside the studio. Mangum seems to have had a genius for making his subjects feel at ease, sometimes with silly or hilarious results. A selection focused only on those types of pictures was an option. Or we could have focused on the outliers, portraits of individuals who, to our twenty-first-century eyes, were interesting primarily for their eccentricity.
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