Hugh Mangum on Main Street: Portraits from the Early 20th Century

Portraits never go out of style.  They are, and always have been, the most popular form of photography.  From the daguerreotype to the Instagram selfie, our love for portraits has been one of the constants in the history of photography.

Why?  Lots of reasons.  We can start with the fact that making portraits is often fun, as any teenager with a cell phone can tell you.  It's also a way that we preserve (and even create) memories of people and events that are dear to us.  (Kodak built an empire on fun and memories -- Kodak moments.)

But there's more to it than this.  After all, we like looking a portraits of people we don't even know.  Other empires have been built on this foundation.  (Think of all the magazines and newspapers the line the checkout aisles in grocery stores.)  These photos show us people we want to meet, but never will -- and they give us permission to stare, an important part of the equation.

The exhibition "Hugh Mangum on Main Street:  Portraits from the Early 20th Century", which looks at the career of an unknown but highly accomplished photographer from Durham, North Carolina, points to two other factors that keep us coming back to portraits.  First, we believe that they tell us something true and essential about the subjects of the photographs.  I think that's true, although not in a completely straightforward way, as the show's curators, Sarah Stacke and Margaret Sartor, point out.

Second, portraits, if they're old enough and good enough, transport into the past and introduce us to people who seem, at the same time, very much like us and almost unimaginably different.  We long to know who they were and what became of them.  We feel our connection and our distance in equal measure.  That's the tantalizing thing.

 

Portraits by Hugh Mangum.  {All photos courtesy of the curators.]

Here's the story behind Mangum's portraits (many thanks to Sarah and Margaret for allowing me to quote from their text):

Inside or outside his photo studio, Hugh Mangum created an atmosphere –– respectful and often playful –– in which hundreds of men, women, and children genuinely revealed themselves.  Hugh Mangum on Main Street:  Portraits from the Early 20th Century, features a selection of images from the
Post-Reconstruction South that shows personalities as immediate as if they were taken yesterday.

Born and raised in Durham, Mangum began establishing studios and working as an itinerant photographer in the early 1890s, traveling by rail through North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.  Remarkable for his time, Mangum attracted and cultivated a clientele that drew heavily from both black and white communities.  Though this era was marked by disenfranchisement, segregation, and inequality –– between black and white, men and women, rich and poor –– Hugh Mangum portrayed all of his sitters with candor, humor, and spirit. Above all, he showed them as individuals, and for that, his work –– though largely unknown –– is both historically vital and personally mesmerizing.  Each client appears as valuable as the next, no story less significant.

 

Photo by Hugh Mangum.  [Click on any image to see a larger version.]

The Penny Picture camera that Hugh Mangum used was ideal for creating inexpensive and accessible novelty portraits.  Anywhere from six to twenty-four sitters could be photographed on one negative, reducing cost and labor.  As a result, the order of the individual images on a single Penny Picture print (as presented here) reflects the order in which his diverse clientele rotated through the studio, the prints reasonably representing an afternoon or a day’s work for this gregarious photographer.

During Mangum's lifetime he likely exposed thousands of glass plate negatives. Sadly, most of these were destroyed through benign neglect after his death or are now lost, as were almost all records of the names and dates associated with them.  The images that survived –– around 700 glass plate negatives  –– were salvaged from the tobacco pack house where Mangum built his first darkroom.  For decades, the negatives caught the droppings of chickens and other creatures living in the pack house.  Today they are in various states of an unfortunate, yet often poetic, deterioration.  Some plates are broken and on others the emulsion is peeling away, but the hundreds of vibrant personalities in the photographs prevail, engaging our emotions, intellect, and imagination.

 

Portraits by Hugh Mangum.

There are no indications that Mangum intended his photographs to serve any political purposes, but it is likely that for many of his sitters, in fact they did.  By the turn of the 20th century, African Americans were well practiced at engaging the power of photography to challenge racial ideas, as well as to create and celebrate black identity.  For Mangum’s black clients, a studio portrait was one way to emphasize and attest to their accomplishments, prosperity, beauty, and individuality.  They shared the pictures with friends and made them the foundation of family photo albums, ultimately using them to shape their own identities and those of future generations.

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"Hugh Mangum on Main Street:  Portraits from the Early 20th Century" opens at the History Hub, 500 W. Main St., Durham, North Carolina, on Tuesday, July 22 and runs through the end of August.  The public is invited to a launch party for the exhibition on Wednesday, July 23, from 5:30pm to 7pm, and a program on Mangum and his work at 3pm on Sunday, August 10.  There is no charge for the exhibit, program or party.  The Hub is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 5pm.

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Comments

[Stan B.]

Amazingly "democratic" collection of photographs- would love to see the actual prints!

[John]

@Stan:

I'd like to see the prints, too. So would the curators. Most are tucked safely into family albums, if we're lucky, or rotting away in attics, basements, and landfills, if we're not.

Your point about this being a democratic collection of photos is absolutely correct. They were inexpensive enough to be available to all but the very poorest.

Just as importantly, Mangum, who was white, portrayed African-Americans with dignity and respect at a time when many depictions of black people in popular culture were crude caricatures and demeaning stereotypes.