Using gloved hands and utmost care, assistants carry the treasures out of storage and place them on a table in a well-lit viewing room. The small, rare photographic portraits are encased in hinged velvet-lined metal cases. “Look at her, isn’t she stunning?” says Eleanor Jones Harvey, a senior curator here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). She points to a portrait made in 1859 of an African American woman with center-parted hair, lace gloves and a look of tremendous poise, style and confidence. The woman was Rhoda Goodridge, and the man behind the camera was her husband, Glenalvin Goodridge of York, Pennsylvania.

Largely forgotten today, Goodridge was one of the most important African American photographers of the 19th century, who, along with James P. Ball of Cincinnati and Augustus Washington of Hartford (both of whom are also well represented in SAAM’s collections), helped define this emerging art. Indeed, after major acquisitions in 2021 and 2023, SAAM can now boast the largest collection of daguerreotypes and photographic jewelry from the earliest known African American photographers—many of the images never before exhibited.

“Before daguerreotypes, if you wanted a portrait made, you commissioned a painter,” says John Jacob, SAAM’s director of photography, as we study Rhoda’s portrait. “Photography democratized portraiture because it was significantly cheaper. But until we acquired these images, we weren’t able to show in our collection that African Americans were part of this process, as photographers and subjects, and also as entrepreneurs and innovators, experimenting with the latest technology and investing in it.”

The stars of these collections are Goodridge, Ball and Washington. Their studios were up and running just a few years after Mathew Brady, the best-known American photographer of the 19th century, had opened his first portrait studio, in New York City in 1844. Using the daguerreotype process—invented in France in 1839, it employed highly polished, silver-plated copper sheets and produced images of striking luminosity—Goodridge, Ball and Washington made portraits of white and Black clients, mainly as keepsakes for family members.

“The daguerreotype was referred to as a mirror with a memory,” Jacob says. “It was meant to be held and looked on with loving eyes. Your own gaze was reflected back at you as you were looking at the image of your loved one.”

Goodridge’s portrait of Rhoda is an ambrotype, made by placing an underexposed glass negative against a black background. This technique, patented in 1854, displaced daguerreotypes. Good-ridge and Ball also adopted the tintype process, which produced images on a thin sheet of iron coated with a dark lacquer or enamel.

SAAM began acquiring these portraits in 2021, from a larger collection assembled over 45 years by Larry J. West, a historian and collector of 19th-century material who specializes in African American photography.

The rarest items are pieces of photographic jewelry containing images of African American subjects. During our tour of the collection, Harvey singles out her favorite: a lapel pin with an ambrotype of a young, goateed Black man in a suit. He has an open, friendly face, and apart from the 19th-century string tie, he looks as if he could walk right out of the photograph and start discussing contemporary affairs. “It’s magical because it’s timeless,” Harvey says. “And the level of self-possession and self-assurance is spectacular.”

Jacob observes that this man, like most African Americans in the collection, looks middle class. “They really do,” says Harvey. “Middle or upper middle class, which are strata of African American life that have been effectively erased from the bulk of the 19th-century narrative. We’ve been telling a story grounded in our confirmation bias, that all the art forms were dominated by white artists and patrons.”

To some observers, the white faces in the collection might raise a question—why did they choose to have their portraits made by Black photographers when white photographers were also available? Part of it might be the prodigious reputations some of these photographers achieved. Further, “there’s an assumption that the white clientele would be sympathetic to abolition and want to support these people,” says Harvey. “But we really don’t know.”

To be sure, abolitionist networks in Boston and Cincinnati deliberately supported Black artists and entrepreneurs. Moreover, all three photographers were committed abolitionists, and two were actively involved in helping fugitive slaves escape. “Larry West has found a number of connections between the photographers, abolitionists and the Underground Railroad,” says Harvey. One of the reasons West brought his collection to SAAM is to inspire more scholarship and research.

West appears on the computer screen for an interview. He’s sitting in his home office in Washington, D.C. with a Mathew Brady portrait of Frederick Douglass and a lithograph of Abraham Lincoln on the wall behind him. Asked for his age, he replies in a New York City accent coursing with prickly good humor, “Oh, I’m very old, and that’s all I’m saying.” Asked to describe his personality, he answers, “A determined … deal maker. A lover of American history. A storyteller through collecting.”

Like many collectors, he says, he has an obsessive side, a desire to keep buying and researching. He bought his first daguerreotype 48 years ago in Mamaroneck, New York, for $10. The cover glass was quite corroded, but it appeared to feature a Black man wearing a tuxedo. The image activated West’s curiosity—who was this man, and how had he lived?

“Within two years or so, I acquired a watch locket with four dags of African American people,” West says, using the nickname for daguerreotypes, “and that started me collecting and researching photo-jewelry, and eventually assembling the world’s best Black photo-jewelry collection, which is now at SAAM.”

In the mid-1970s, while an executive for Avon, the cosmetics company, he was collecting vintage photographs of Abraham Lincoln. Then he started collecting images showing Brady and other early American photographers at work, with their families and in other settings. Over the decades, these efforts led to a massive collection of images, which West donated to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in 2007.

It wasn’t until 2010 that he began to collect works by Goodridge, Ball and Washington and understand their importance. “They were special, damned special,” he says. “They all, as Black men, overcame the biggest obstacles to success, and many thousands of early photographers failed. They learned the daguerreotype process, raised enough capital to buy equipment and open a gallery, learned to run a business and attract enough white customers to financially survive, and tolerate the discrimination that undoubtedly existed.”

“Look at Glenalvin,” he says. “He was a smart guy, a teacher in Black schools as well as a photographer. He was the son of William Goodridge, a prosperous free Black merchant who was also a conductor on the Underground Railroad.”

William’s house in York, Pennsylvania, is now a museum called the Goodridge Freedom Center. Visitors can see where the family hid freedom seekers under the kitchen floor, and there’s a reproduction of Glenalvin’s daguerreotype studio, or “gallery,” as it was known, in an upstairs room.

“His business had gone soft, so his father let him open a gallery in the house,” West says. “At night they would lead the freedom seekers through the alleys to the railroad tracks. When Glen had a gallery downtown, they would hide people there at night before taking them to the tracks.” William Goodridge owned a railroad freight delivery service, running between York and Philadelphia, and he built false compartments in his train cars to conceal fugitive slaves.

In 1862 Glenalvin was working in a new studio in Columbia, Pennsylvania, when a white woman in York accused him of rape; the York Daily Record later called the charges “trumped up,” but he was convicted by an all-white jury and sent to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where he spent part of 1863-64 in an unheated cellblock. His father rallied the York community and convinced Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Curtin to issue a pardon, but by then Glenalvin was sick with tuberculosis. “He may have contracted it in prison, but a number of early photographers got lung diseases from mercury vapors and other chemical fumes” that weakened their pulmonary system, West says.

When he was released from prison, Glenalvin moved to East Saginaw, Michigan. “It was part of the deal, that they move away,” says West. Glenalvin
joined a studio in Saginaw, where he worked for a time. In 1867, at the age of 38 or 39, Glenalvin Good-ridge died of tuberculosis in Minneapolis. “His family had six photographers, including his son, and they prospered in galleries for 75 years,” says West. Rhoda went on to remarry.

James Presley Ball, an imposing light-skinned man with an enormous beard, had a gallery that featured paintings, mirrors, a piano and mounted figures of goddesses draped in robes. The walls were bordered with gold leaf and flowers. The Cincinnati business was known as Ball’s Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West. Among his subjects were P.T. Barnum, Frederick Douglass and the family of Ulysses S. Grant. On a trip to England with his family in 1856, Ball photographed Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens.

Ball was a prominent abolitionist. His photograph of the Quaker abolitionist Levi Coffin surrounded by a large group of freedom seekers is the most famous image that exists of the Underground Railroad. He published abolitionist pamphlets, and his studio was considered a stop on the route to freedom. In 1855 he oversaw the creation of a “Mammoth Pictorial Tour” of American slavery: a 600-yard-long panoramic canvas featuring painted scenes of captured Africans, slavers tossing people overboard in the Middle Passage, forced labor on plantations, runaways pursued by bloodhounds, a lynching and other brutal tableaux. First exhibited in Cincinnati and then Boston, it was displayed to audiences by slowly unwinding the gigantic canvas scroll. After Ball’s studio was destroyed by a tornado in 1860, “whites helped him rebuild,” says West. “He carried on photographing through the 1860s, and then something happened.”

After two successful decades in Cincinnati, Ball moved to Greenville, Mississippi, then Vidalia, Louisiana, then St. Louis and Minneapolis, where he opened a new studio. In 1887 he moved again to Helena, Montana, where he was celebrated as a photographer. Around 1900 he moved to Seattle, opened his last studio, and then died in Hawaii in 1904, at the age of 79. What propelled his wanderings in later life is unknown—perhaps changing climates to treat his persistent rheumatism.

Augustus Washington, born free to a formerly enslaved father and a South Asian mother in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1820 or 1821, was one of the first African American students to attend Dartmouth College. His passion for daguerreotype photography displeased the college president and angered his own family, according to an autobiographical letter written by Washington.

Washington opened a studio in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1846. Soon afterward he took an astonishing photograph of the radical abolitionist John Brown, which is now in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery collections. Lifting up his right hand, as if repeating his public pledge to destroy slavery, Brown fixes the camera with an eagle-like stare. In his other hand he holds a flag believed to be the standard of the “Subterranean Pass Way,” a militant alternative to the Underground Railroad that Brown wanted to establish in the Allegheny Mountains.

Washington had a bitter hatred for slavery and racism, and after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which left free Black Americans like him vulnerable to capture as suspected slaves, he decided to emigrate to Africa. He became convinced, as he wrote, that it was “impossible” for African Americans in the United States “to develop our moral and intellectual capacities as a distinct people.” With his wife, Cordelia, and two small children, Washington sailed across the Atlantic in November 1853, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, which promoted the colony of Liberia as a sanctuary and opportunity for African Americans.

Once in Monrovia, the country’s capital, Washington set up a daguerrean studio and, despite a bout with malaria, managed to make $500 in his first five weeks, or more than $19,000 in today’s money. He also worked as a merchant, taught Greek and Latin at a high school, built two houses for the rental income, and began cultivating sugarcane. Showing formidable ambition, he expanded his landholdings to 1,000 acres, rose to prominence in politics, opened stores and factories, and was appointed as a judge. The Liberia Herald described him as likely to become one of the colony’s “most devoted, enterprising and patriotic citizens.” He remained in Liberia until his death in 1875, describing it as “the last refuge of the oppressed colored man.”

Presumably he never imagined that his photographs would be sought after by wealthy collectors in the 21st century, nor that they might one day grace the walls of prestigious art galleries. West is glad that Washington’s work will hang in SAAM alongside Ball, Goodridge and Brady, but he is not without regrets about selling his collection.

Though the West collection is significant in placing the long-overlooked work of Black photographers in the foreground, it doesn’t contain many photographs of Black people themselves. But early this year, SAAM bought more than 400 photographs of Black Americans and abolitionists from Robert Drapkin, a physician who began collecting antique photographs in the mid-1970s. By offering distinguished images of Black Americans in the 19th century, the Drapkin holdings “complement the West collection without repeating it,” says John Jacob.

In September, SAAM will open a re-envisioned photography gallery on the second floor of the museum’s east wing—part of a multiyear overhaul of SAAM’s entire permanent collection, with an eye toward elevating historically underrepresented figures and communities. The theme of this gallery is the democratization of portraiture and the way African Americans adapted photography to represent themselves; it will include nine striking photos by Ball, along with three paintings from his contemporary Robert Duncanson, a Cincinnati-based artist who colored some of Ball’s photographic plates. The placement of the gallery is significant: midway between the museum’s galleries displaying Colonial-era works and those exhibiting its 20th-century holdings. This location “makes [the installation] a fulcrum for visual history,” says Harvey. “This emerging free Black society is now wanting to be in front of the camera and behind the camera. And so it’s really a sea change for 19th-century America encapsulated in this gallery.”

A young woman in a long white gown stands erect on the beach, one sandalled foot resting on wet sand. In the lushly black-and-white photo, her columnar body rises past frothing waves and the stiller sea beyond, to a strip of dark horizon. The frame cuts off her head and, as if to compensate, a beaded gourd dangles from her fingers; you can almost hear the instrument’s watery rattle against the rhythm of the surf. In the background, a swimmer’s dark arms lunge across the surface of the water; closer in, a lady in a white bonnet splashes in the foam, her body hidden by spume. The photo vibrates with the things we cannot see.

Bar Beach in Lagos, Nigeria, where that photo was shot in 2010, no longer exists. “It is now a building site,” the artist Akinbode Akinbiyi informs us on the audioguide for MoMA’s New Photography 2023 exhibition. “That stretch of beach has literally disappeared. Moments really are fleeting. That’s why I think photography can be very helpful, because it reminds you of what was.”

A powerful riptide of nostalgia runs through the whole show, which focuses on one of Africa’s most immense, ceaselessly expanding, moulting and self-erasing megalopolises. Bar Beach is haunted — by the political prisoners and criminals who were executed there in the 1970s; the crowds who gathered to watch the firing squad; all those who also came to swim, pray, sell food or gaze out across the Atlantic. Akinbiyi started going there in 1982 and returned regularly, until the shoreline was obliterated by the still unfinished new city-in-a-city, Eko Atlantic.

A sense of ritual and ceremony suffuses his photos, which are rich in tension even when their subject is repose. A dog slumbers in the sand while two men stride past gripping long staffs, as if on their way to part the waters. A white couple sits side by side on wooden chairs, as two black youths in white shirts — one on horseback, the other on foot — canter off in opposite directions.

These pictures benefit from the mystery that surrounds them; the rest of the exhibition could use a stronger dose of context. The seven photographers included here all have some connection with Lagos, though they have scattered across multiple continents. The show combats change with reflection, answering the city’s convulsive growth with calm meditations on the past. And yet, frustratingly, we’re not given enough information to understand where, when, why or how most of these pictures were taken, or what submerged currents of significance they invoke.

The psychologist and architectural photographer Amanda Iheme, for instance, excavates the inner life of aged buildings, looking for meaning in their ruination. “Buildings, the same as humans, have the experience of change,” she says, wisely. A text panel teases us with subtext: “For the artist, the physical condition of this architecture — much of it a product of Lagos’s Afro-Brazilian culture and British colonial history — testifies to contemporary attitudes towards the city’s past, which range from reverence to apathy.” This is where some narrative background would be useful, or at least a little insight into the specific urban richness lurking in abstractions like “culture”, “history”, “past” and “attitudes”.

In the 19th century, west Africans who had been kidnapped, enslaved, sold on in Brazil and eventually freed began returning to Lagos in numbers large enough to shape the city’s vibe. Iheme lingers on one evocative but now vanished relic of that era, the Casa da Fernandez or Ilojo Bar. The graciously neoclassical 1855 palazzo, which looked like it could have been transplanted from any colonial city in Latin America, was declared a national monument — and then abandoned to a lively form of decay.

Iheme lovingly captures the leprous facade, with its stripped plaster, wobbly railings and listing walls. “That same place where people were held as slaves in chains before they were taken across the Atlantic, 200 years after that now, people have markets inside here,” she marvels on the audioguide. “Can you just see how time moves?”

Sometimes it lurches — brutally. In 2016, bulldozers showed up unannounced and tore the whole structure down in a single day, an act of violence that followed decades of neglect and was answered by impotent indignation. “This building is a remembrance of what our ancestors went through in slavery and how they triumphed, came back and they showed that they were well-to-do,” a government minister intoned over the pile of rubble. Iheme salvaged a lone brick, and photographed it in close-up, making the fragment look every bit as imposing as the landmark it stands in for.

Her photos of another crumbling monument, the Old Secretariat Building, are even more eloquent of the city’s selective amnesia. A 1906 British colonial mash-up of dignity and whimsy, with a pair of pink belltowers sandwiching a peak-roofed temple front, the complex still stands — barely. Iheme focuses on the building’s half-shadowed interiors — a gloomy stairway leading down into a glowing puddle of light; disused furniture stacked in a yellow chamber, awaiting either redemption or destruction. These are the messy piles where Lagos stashes its splintered recollections as it hurtles towards the future.

In a series called The Archive of Becoming, Karl Ohiri burrows into forgotten storerooms to discover unsuspected beauty in images that nobody had bothered to protect. He collected negatives that were shot in commercial studios and then left for years, perhaps decades, to be ravaged by heat and humidity. Ohiri’s artistry lies in finding, scanning, choosing and printing portraits of fashionable Lagosians who perform versions of themselves for a distracted posterity.

A boy in white trousers, white tie and pale seersucker shirt adopts a studiously casual pose. A parade of deliberate smiles, awkward embraces, squirming babies, glimmering dresses, patterned robes — all that crafted self-presentation dissipates in the mildewed frame. This poetic archaeology, with its amoeboid blooms and splashes of colourful decay, replaces the formal portrait with a hybrid creation, part memory, part ghost. Smears and splodges appear as bruises left by time.

In a similar vein, Kelani Abass mines his family’s old albums, cutting and pasting them into wooden letterpress frames. The years have done their work here too, fading bright clothing and clear outlines to a sepia blur. Casual snapshots morph into sculptural relics of a 20th century when many Africans cheered their nations’ independence movements and looked to the future with brittle hope.

If Nigeria’s capital still cranks out spasms of bold optimism, they’re not visible in this gentle, backward-looking show. Logo Oluwamuyiwa’s black-and-white photos do capture the city’s vitality, but in a throwback style that recalls Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander. The formal experimentation has a stately, old-fashioned quality. Overlapping planes condense into flat surfaces, fragments of motion snap into coherent compositions and a self-portrait in a car’s wing mirror pays frank homage to the old masters of such techniques. And maybe that’s exactly what a metropolis in the throes of tumultuous change needs: a chronicler with a classic touch.

To September 16, moma.org

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It happens to most of us, we feel like we’re in a rut with our photography.

Here are three exercises you can work on at any time to get yourself back to seeing great compositions, interesting perspectives and unique subjects to photograph.

Look up

This is one of my favorite ways to change perspective when creating images.

Look up. Straight up.

No matter where you are, take a minute and look directly above you, look up. You might be surprised at what you see, new angles and shapes, amazing light fixtures and ceilings.

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What’s in your cup?

Coffee? Tea? Wine? Beer? Water?

Whatever it is in your cup, get creative this week and photograph it.

Find unique and interesting angles. Look for shadows or reflections.

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How are you feeling?

This exercise might require a bit more work. It’s a little more complex than usual.

How are you feeling this week? Today? How will you feel tomorrow when you pick up your camera? By the end of the week?

Create a photograph that shows how you feel each day this week.

It doesn’t have to be a self-portrait. Push yourself to find how you feel in the scenes around you that you find. What is it for you that depicts those feelings?

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A weekly challenge to get you out of your rut

Join us in the Photofocus Community and you’ll get a new photo challenge every Monday.

Sharjah: The Xposure International Photography Festival is returning for its 8th edition next year, and has opened entries for its annual International Photography and Film Awards (IPFA), which received an astounding 17,116 entries from 180 nations last year recording an 80 per cent increase in submissions compared to previous years, making it one of the largest and most diverse photography competitions in the world.

The festival has opened entries for its 2024 awards edition to both amateur and professional photographers to send in their applications to https://awards.xposure.ae/register/ before October 30, 2023.

Categories and prizes

The organisers of the awards encourage entrants to enter up to 10 images or films by choosing their specialty from across the competition’s 8 main categories, including one for short films. They are: Architectural Photography, Drone Photography, Mobile Photography in collaboration with Samsung, Nature & Landscape, Night Photography in collaboration with Samsung, Photojournalism, Portraiture, Short Film & Moving Image, and Street Photography.

The overall winner receives a $6,000 prize while category winners receive a $3,000 prize. Additionally, the second place entry in each category receives a $1,500 prize, and the following five highest scored entries in each category will have their nominated entry exhibited during the annual festival next year.

Special categories – Junior Category

The 9th category is the Junior category open to UAE residents whose past winners have gone on to build successful portfolios in photography. Amateurs who dabble in all types of still photography recorded by phone, DSLR, or mirrorless camera can participate in this free-to-enter competition. Additionally, photographs must have been taken in the past three years. The top seven placed images will be exhibited at Xposure 2024 and additional equipment prizes will be awarded to first and second place.

Tariq Allay: ‘Awards have created prolific new opportunities for up and coming talents’

HE Tariq Saeed Allay, Director General of Sharjah Government Media Bureau said: “Xposure is a globally recognised platform for celebrating photography, film and other visual mediums. The annual celebration has created prolific new opportunities for up and coming photographers and visual artists to showcase themselves and highlight their careers on its sought after stage, receive cash prizes and other accolades. The increasing popularity of these awards with each passing year, as reflected in the submission numbers, is the best reflection of the value that Xposure has created for photographers worldwide in the past seven years, and testifies to Sharjah’s growing importance as a global incubator of culture and creativity”.   

The Xposure Awards jury includes some of the most experienced and respected names in the field. Comprising a diverse group of leading professionals, critics and industry heavyweights who specialise in various photography genres, the jury reviewed and evaluated a staggering 17,116 submissions from 180 nations last year, making Xposure one of the biggest and most diverse photography competitions in the world. The International Photography & Film Awards boasts 41 top industry professionals and critics who will use their expertise to judge the huge number of entries.

For more information, visit https://awards.xposure.ae/

It’s these “subtleties”, Jody says, that she relies on to express queerness and discomfort in Self-Portrait. “Queerness for me is more complex than the way you dress or who you sleep with,” they tell us. “The switch between imperfect ways of presenting stereotypes in the zine of butch/femme/leather dyke then seeks to disrupt stereotypes and the assumptions we make of queer folk from the ways we present ourselves.” On a favourite image in Self-Portrait, the photographer quickly points to a shot of themselves lifting up their dress. “I felt a lot of discomfort taking that picture and embodying that character again,” they explain. “I dressed in the underwear I bought to feel sexy for an ex-partner and put on my most femme outfit.” For Jody, the act of undressing allowed her to play around with obscuring the face gaze, prompting audiences to question the consent of the subject. “It’s like, come fuck me, but I don’t want to see,” Jody says. “Perhaps a little insight into the hyper-sexuality and discomfort I felt with myself when I used to sleep with cis straight men.”

Overall, it’s a beautiful debut by a promising young talent in the London photography scene. For so long, the art of the eroticised self-portrait or erotic documentarian photography seemed to be on its way out. With Jody, there’s a promising new future for the form. As for Jody’s next project, there’s two in the pipeline that we’re eager to see. “I am beginning a documentary project on queer love languages,” they tell us. “Photographing lovers, families and relationships of all ages and backgrounds, and talking to them about the ways that they express their love.” And, an exciting new photo book (we’ve already got to see a sneak peak of) coming out in September that develops Jody’s – now signature – style.