Shot in Alabama: A History of Photography, 1839–1941, and a List of Photographers

By Frances Osborn Robb

Shot in Alabama by Frances Osborn Robb is a visual and textual narrative of Alabama’s photographic history from 1839 to 1941. It describes the phenomenon of photography as practiced in Alabama as a major cultural force, paying close attention to the particular contexts from which each image emerges and the fragments of microhistory that each image documents.
 
Presented chronologically—from the very first photograph ever taken in the state to the appearance of cameras as commonplace possessions in mid-twentieth-century households—Robb draws into sharp relief the eras of daguerreotypes, Civil War photography, photographic portraiture at the end of the nineteenth century, urban and rural photography in the early twentieth century, WPA photography during the Great Depression, postcards and tourist photography, and pre–World War II illustrated books and art photographs. Robb also examines a wide spectrum of vernacular photography: Alabama-made photographs of everyday people and places, the photographs that fill dresser drawers and shoeboxes, a vast array of unusual images against which Alabama’s more typical iconography can be measured.
 
She also chronicles the work of hundreds of photographers—black and white, amateur and professional, women and men—some little-known outside their communities, some of them the medium’s most important practitioners. “Who Shot Alabama?” is an accompanying appendix that includes 1,400 photographers by name, working dates, and location—a resource that will help countless individuals, families, and archives identify the specific Alabama photographers whose names appear on family photographs or those in institutional collections.
 
Shot in Alabama is an insightful document of photography as both a communicator and creator of social, cultural, economic, and visual history. It highlights the very personal worlds rendered by individual photographs as well as the larger panorama of Alabama history as seen through the photographs collectively. A landmark work of research, curation, and scholarship, it fills the void of published history on Alabama photography and is an invaluable resource for historians, archivists, librarians, collectors, hobbyists, and readers with an interest in Alabama history or historic photography. Shot in Alabama is a book that all Alabamians will want on their coffee tables.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9780817388782

Book preview

Shot in Alabama

Shot in Alabama

A HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, 1839–1941 AND A LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHERS

FRANCES OSBORN ROBB

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

Published in cooperation with the Alabama Bicentennial Commission

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Jansen

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Russell Brothers, Anniston. Tango Dancers Charlotte and Frank Jones. Circa 1921. Gelatin silver print made from 7 × 5" negative.

Anniston-Calhoun County Public Library, Russell Brothers Collection.

Cover and interior design: Michele Myatt Quinn

Published in cooperation with the Alabama Bicentennial Commission

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robb, Frances Osborn.

Title: Shot in Alabama : a history of photography, 1839–1941, and a list of photographers / Frances Osborn Robb.

Description: Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015050538| ISBN 9780817318789 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780817388782 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Photography—Alabama—History—19th century. | Photography—Alabama—History—20th century. | Photographers—Alabama—Biography.

Classification: LCC TR24.A2 R63 2016 | DDC 770.9761—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050538

To David

Contents

List of Figures

Maps

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 - Engraved by the Sunbeams

The Daguerrean Era, 1839 to the Mid-1850s

2 - All Kinds of Pictures

Competing Technologies, 1855–1861

3 - The Ambrotypes and Bible I Sent by Mrs. Culver

Wartime, 1861–1865

4 - Remember That I Want a Picture

Photography, 1865–1880

5 - My Bud, A Rather Good Looking Somebody

Likenesses, 1880–1929

6 - One of Our Most Remarkable Views

Outdoor Photography, 1880–Early 1900s

7 - Make Pictures! Always . . . the Song . . . in My Head

On Location, Early 1900s–1929

8 - From Alabama

Illustrated Books and Art Photographs, 1880–1941

9 - Photography Was One of My Hobbies

Snapshots, 1889–1941

10 - Things Began to Change

Local Photography, 1929–1941

11 - Designed . . . For the Government

Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1935–1941

12 - Foster Turned in Some Damn Good Pictures

Project Photography, 1929–1941

13 - How Little They Know

Looking Forward, 1941–1945

Appendix: Who Shot Alabama? A List of Alabama Photographers, 1839–1941

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

FRONTISPIECE 01.

O. V. Hunt, Photographer, Birmingham Alabama, Taking View of 20th Street from Derrick of Tutwiler Hotel. July 18, 1913.

FRONTISPIECE 02.

Robert Shattuck Hodges. Gully at Havana, Hale County. July 7, 1920

MAP 1.   Alabama map showing nineteenth century locations noted in Shot in Alabama

MAP 2.   Alabama map showing twentieth century locations noted in Shot in Alabama

0.1.   Russell Brothers, Anniston. Tango Dancers Charlotte and Frank Jones. Circa 1921

0.2.   Allen Christopher Oxford. Self-Portrait. Circa 1910

0.3.   Allen Christopher Oxford. Self-Portrait. 1870s

0.4.   Draffus L. Hightower. The Martin-Clark House in the Snow, Cotton Hill, Barbour County. 1940

0.5.   Unattributed. Baby in a Punch Bowl, Birmingham. Circa 1940

0.6.   Attributed to Horace Stewart. Me [Carl Stewart Jr.] & 13 Small & 1 Old O’possum. 1938

0.7.   Unattributed. Boy Holding a Straw Hat, Probably a Slave of the Bunker Family of Mobile. Circa 1860

0.8.   James N. Byrd. Elderly Man. Early twentieth century

0.9.   John Horgan Jr. The First Alabama-vs.-Auburn Football Game in Birmingham, Lakeview Baseball Park. February 22, 1893

0.10.   E. H. Green. Fayette Ice Cream Truck Collecting Milk Cans. Hamilton, Marion County. 1927

0.11.   Russell Brothers, Anniston. The Andrew Green Family. Circa 1918

0.12.   Herbert Pinney Tresslar. Self-Portrait. Circa 1900

0.13.   Unattributed. Horace King. Mid- to late 1850s

0.14.   Unattributed. Sarah Jane Jones McManus King [Mrs. Horace King]. Circa 1865

1.1.   Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard and William H. Harrington. Joshua Lanier Martin and Sarah Ann Mason Martin of Tuscaloosa. 1840

1.2.   Robert L. Kirkland. Man in a White Vest. Early 1850s

1.3.   Attributed to Archibald Crossland McIntyre. Dr. Peter McIntyre. Early 1850s

1.4.   Attributed to William H. Thomas. Madison County Courthouse, Huntsville. Circa 1850

1.5.   Attributed to William H. Thomas. Diploma Awarded to Maria Louisa Meredith from Tuscumbia Female Collegiate Institute. June 22, 1854

1.6.   Chauncey Barnes. Man Holding a Cigar. Early 1850s

1.7.   Chauncey Barnes. Woman and Boy. 1850s

1.8.   Unattributed. Martha Davison of Old Scotland Plantation, Monroe County. Early 1850s

1.9.   Unattributed. Mary Elizabeth Stairley Brockman McAuley and Her Daughter Tallulah James Brockman, later Mrs. John Hollis Bankhead Sr., of Wetumpka. Early 1850s

2.1.   Attributed to W. P. Hughes or Charles F. Moore. Sam S. Harris, Autauga County, Class of 1859, University of Alabama. 1859

2.2.   Unattributed. Aletheia Ann Whitlow of Old Spring Hill, Marengo County, Later Mrs. Allen Christopher Oxford. 1850s

2.3.   John F. Stanton. Young Man in a Satin Vest. 1850s

2.4.   John F. and J. P. Stanton. Woman in a Blue Dress, a Connection of the Woodworth Family. Circa 1856

2.5.   Unattributed. The Farnham House, Bellville, Conecuh County. 1850s

2.6.   Unattributed. Christopher Kit Curtis, of Old Spring Hill, Marengo County, Smiling. Mid-1850s

2.7.   Unattributed. John Hammerly, One of the First Settlers of Athens, Alabama. Late 1850s

2.8.   Unattributed. Bant, House Slave of the Fearn Family of Huntsville. Mid- to late 1850s

2.9.   Unattributed. S. G. Cochran’s Slave Nurse or Mammy with His Children. Circa 1858

2.10.   Unattributed. Unidentified Man, Possibly a Relative of Timpoochee Barnard. Late 1850s.

2.11.   Attributed to J. F. and John P. Stanton or Chauncey Barnes. Franklin Street (Methodist) Sabbath School Pic-nic. 1856

2.12.   Unattributed. William Pressley Tanner and Sophronia Massey Ragsdale Tanner of Athens, Alabama and William Pressley Tanner of Athens, Alabama. Early 1850s

3.1.   Archibald Crossland McIntyre. First Inauguration of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States of America at Montgomery. February 18, 1861

3.2.   Ben Oppenheimer. Eleven Confederate Soldiers Near Pensacola, Florida. 1861 or 1862

3.3.   Unattributed. John Wesley Turnly of Athens, Alabama. June 1861

3.4.   Unattributed. Hugh William Caffey of Collirene, Lowndes County. Mid-1860s

3.5.   Unattributed. Ben Marshall Jr. of Mobile, Company E, 15th Confederate Cavalry. Circa 1864

3.6.   Moses & Piffet. Mobile Point Lighthouse. September 1864

3.7.   McPherson & Oliver. Steele’s Expedition, 300 Miles up the Allabama River. April–May 1865

3.8.   Unattributed. Guard Quarters of Ordnance Stores above Railroad Abutment, Decatur, Alabama. Early 1865

3.9.   Unattributed. Memorial Concert for Abraham Lincoln by the 102nd Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry Band, Burleson House, Decatur, Alabama. April 23, 1865

3.10.   William S. Seavey. Encampment of 84th Illinois Volunteer Regiment in Front of the Madison County Courthouse, Huntsville. January 1865

3.11.   Allen Christopher Oxford. U.S.A. Soldiers Climbing Pulpit Rock, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, 1864

4.1.   Allen Christopher Oxford. Ironworks at Ironton [Oxmoor, Near Birmingham] as Seen from the Hotel Looking South-of-West. Circa 1875

4.2.   T. Henry Hughes. Ice Factory, Mobile. April 19, 1870

4.3.   Unattributed. Mrs. Martha Harvie Jordan McCartney Weaver Bone of Maysville, Madison County. Circa 1866

4.4.   Barnes & Wallace. Young Woman in a Confiding Pose. Mid-1870s

4.5   Allen Christopher Oxford. US Congressman Benjamin Sterling Turner of Selma. 1869–1872

4.6.   Chauncey Barnes. Ethan Richey, Seated, with a Serious Expression. Late 1860s

4.7.   Unattributed. Cora Jane McCants, Later Mrs. Ashley Holloman, Monroe County. Circa 1865

4.8.   T. Henry Hughes. Cotton Slide and Warehouse, Prairie Bluff, Wilcox County. 1869–1871

4.9.   Robinson & Murphy. Two Men Wearing Confiscated Ku Klux Klan Disguises, Huntsville. 1868–1869

4.10.   Joseph Voyle. Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor Office under Federal Guard. 1868

4.11.   Allen Christopher Oxford. Memorial Portrait of Eliza Curtis Oxford with Emblems of Death and Resurrection. July 3, 1873

4.12.   Allen Christopher Oxford. James R. Powell, First Elected Mayor of Birmingham. 1873

4.13.   Charles F. Moore. Harry Theophilus Toulmin and Mary Henshaw Toulmin of Mobile. Circa 1872

5.1.   Arthur S. Proctor. Missionary William Henry Sheppard Pointing to a Map of the Congo. Circa 1893

5.2.   William A. Reed. Young Man Wearing a Suit and Tie. October 5, 1897

5.3.   Allen Christopher Oxford. Young Girl Wearing Glasses, Seated in a Giant Boot. 1880s

5.4.   B. M. Mattocks. Barefoot Boy. Early 1890s

5.5.   Ira F. Collins. Smiling Girl. Early 1900s

5.6.   Sarah Cofield Madame McGehee. Nonnie Cooper. 1885–1888

5.7.   David W. Buchanan. Young Woman, Perhaps Mattie A. Carter, Surrounded by Her Companions. Early 1890s

5.8.   Copley & Ray. Girl Wearing First Communion Dress and Wreath. 1888

5.9.   Erik Overbey. Seated Man Wearing a Pale Hat. 1920s

5.10.   Family of Mitchell and Geneva Bobo Shackelford. Baby on a Quilt, Covin, Fayette County. 1910s–1920s

5.11.   Unattributed. The Thomas Jackson Denson Family before Their Farmhouse, Helicon, Winston County. Circa 1904

5.12.   John T. Burnitt. Anna Eppes and Her Fiancé, Edward Brock McCarty, in a Buggy at the McCarty Farm Near Demopolis. Circa 1904

5.13.   Searcy Wilson Judd. Margaret Burns Matthews in Her Front Hallway in Huntsville, beside Hiram Powers’s The Greek Slave. 1920

6.1.   D. W. Langdon. Geology Wagon and Camp, Near Prattville, Autauga County. September 16, 1886

6.2.   Turner & Son. Black Creek [Noccalula] Falls, Near Gadsden, Etowah County. Mid-1880s

6.3.   Eugene Allen Smith. Gully at Avery’s, Havana, Hale County. July 11, 1885

6.4.   Eugene Allen Smith. Red Ore Crusher and Dump, Spaulding Mine, Red Mountain, Jefferson County. August 26, 1901

6.5.   John Horgan Jr. Cole Furnaces, Sheffield, Colbert County. 1889

6.6.   Thomas E. Armitstead. Loading Bananas into a Refrigerated Boxcar, Mobile Docks. Mid-1890s

6.7.   Ira F. Collins. Unk Matts Roamin Chariot, Huntsville. 1898

6.8.   Allen Christopher Oxford. Man Driving Oxcart, Birmingham. 1870s

6.9.   John Horgan Jr. At 93 Haf a Mellions to Much fer Me. Circa 1890

6.10.   Russell Brothers, Anniston. The Cotton Picking Industry, Near Alexandria, Calhoun County. Mid-twentieth century gelatin silver copy print of 1890s photograph

7.1.   Unattributed. Martin Dam Construction Workers Posing on the Blades of the Water Wheel of Unit #1, Elmore County. August 12, 1926

7.2.   O. V. Hunt. Streetcar 216 at Avenue E and 20th Street, Ensley. 1915

7.3.   Huff, (first name unknown). Orange Beach, Baldwin County. 1910s

7.4.   Frank Stewart. Lover’s Lane, Fairhope, Baldwin County. 1916

7.5.   Frances Benjamin Johnston. Students Studying in the Library, Tuskegee Institute. 1902

7.6.   Arthur P. Bedou. Machine Division, Tuskegee Institute. Circa 1908–1910

7.7.   Unattributed. Streetcars Parked on Dexter Avenue, Montgomery, during a Strike. November 23, 1905

7.8.   St. John. Nathan Bedford Forrest Klavern Rally, Birmingham. October 15, 1924

7.9.   Lewis Hine. Madeline Causey, Ten-Year-Old Worker, Merrimac Mill, Huntsville. November 1913

7.10.   Johnson & Overbey. Cargo Ship Belvernon in Port at Mobile on a Festive Occasion. 1905–1907

7.11.   Alfred C. Keily Sr. Ensley Community House—A Citizenship Group on a Hot Day. 1920s

7.12.   Unattributed. Mrs. A. D. Drake, Mrs. C. A. Kittredge, and Miss Theresa Branch, Alabama Power Company Home Service Advisors at the Better Farm and Home Demonstration at Auburn, Alabama. Circa 1926

8.1.   Mary Morgan Keipp. The Grapevine Swing. Mid-1890s

8.2.   Rudolph Eickemeyer Jr. The Plantation Well, Mount Meigs, Montgomery County. Early 1890s

8.3.   James Washington Otts. Musicians. Circa 1900

8.4.   Mary Morgan Keipp. Boy Playing a Cane Flute. Circa 1900

8.5.   Lois Slosson Sundberg. Fishers with Their Catch, Fish River, Baldwin County. Circa 1901

8.6.   Lois Slosson Sundberg. Sheep Shearing, Slosson Farm, Silverhill, Baldwin County. Circa 1900

8.7.   Eugene Allen Smith. Black Creek [Noccalula] Falls, Near Gadsden, Etowah County. March 1903

8.8.   Eugene Allen Smith. Smith’s Son (Also Named Eugene Allen Smith), at Merriwether’s Landing, Black Warrior River Near Eutaw, Greene County. July 15, 1886

8.9.   Richard Shattuck Hodges. Borden-Wheeler Springs, Cleburne County. Circa 1905

8.10.   Draffus L. Hightower. Draffus L. Hightower on His Harley Motorcycle, Barbour County. 1920s

8.11.   Draffus L. Hightower. Car on the Pea River Plank Bridge between Barbour and Bullock Counties. 1936

9.1.   Attributed to Eugenia Bankhead. Tallulah Bankhead in Her Teddies, Jasper. Late 1910s

9.2.   Unattributed. Runner Out, Baseball Game at Spring Hill College, Mobile. 1890s

9.3.   Adolph Bluttman. Touching. Mid-1910s

9.4.   Unattributed. Pauline Cagle with a Snowball, Hanceville, Cullman County. 1932 or 1933

9.5.   Unattributed. Girl Running toward the Photographer, Birmingham. 1930s

9.6.   Unattributed. Orville Wright’s Biplane Flying over a Cotton Field on the Frank Kohn Plantation West of Montgomery. Late 1910

9.7.   Roland Harper. Members of the Kennamer Family Arriving for their Annual Reunion, Pisgah Primitive Baptist Church, Kennamer Cove, Marshall County. August 28, 1937

9.8.   Albert Lebourg. Car Loaded with Furniture on a New Highway Bridge Near Guntersville. Circa 1930

9.9.   Adolph Bluttman. Wet. Mid-1910s

9.10.   Kathryn Tucker Windham. First Plane Ride [Going Up], Near Thomasville, Clarke County. 1930

10.1.   Unattributed. Smiling Woman and Boys, in the Vicinity of Searles, Tuscaloosa County. 1937

10.2.   A. C. Keily Jr. Photographer Hanson Alston outside the Darkroom, Birmingham. Late 1920s

10.3.   Cloud Studio. Bradford Funeral Home, 1525 Seventh Avenue North, Birmingham. Early 1930s

10.4.   Erik Overbey. Opening of Gone with the Wind at the Roxy Theater, Mobile. 1939

10.5.   P. H. Polk. Donald L. Polk, P. H. Polk’s Son, at Age Sixteen. 1951

10.6.   P. H. Polk. Three Men Who Established Tuskegee Institute’s Flight School: G. L. Washington, Administrator; Dr. F. D. Patterson, President; and Charles Anderson, Its First Flight Instructor. 1936

10.7.   Olan Mills Studios, Montgomery. Oliver Wood Till and Maude Estelle Wheeler Till of Braggs, Lowndes County, on Their Twenty-fifth Wedding Anniversary. May 1943

10.8.   Olan Mills Studios, Athens. Mary Houston Martin and Benjamin Frederick Martin Jr., David Houston Martin, Richard Wilkes Martin, and Mamie Chandler Martin. 1944

10.9.   Fred N. Hiroshige. Haywood Patterson, Defendant, at the Second Scottsboro Boys Trial with His Mother in the Morgan County Courthouse, Decatur. 1933

11.1.   Arthur Rothstein. Girl [Artelia Bendolph] at Gee’s Bend, Wilcox County, Alabama. April 1937

11.2.   Arthur Rothstein. Eroded Land on Tenant’s Farm, Walker County, Alabama. 1937

11.3.   Arthur Rothstein. Tent Occupied by Sharecropper Family Now Living in a Migrant Camp Near Birmingham, Alabama. 1937

11.4.   Marion Post-Wolcott. Negro, Almost Eighty, Who Has Been Running Ferry across River from Camden to Gee’s Bend for almost Forty-Eight Years, Gee’s Bend, Alabama. 1939

11.5.   Arthur Rothstein. Guard at Company Town [Wenonah], Jefferson County, Alabama. 1937

11.6.   Dorothea Lange. A Negro Tenant Farmer and Members of His Family Hoeing Cotton on Their Farm in Alabama [Near Eutaw]. July 1936

11.7.   Walker Evans. Sharecropper Bud Fields and His Family at Home, Hale County, Alabama. Summer 1936

11.8.   Walker Evans. Washstand in the Dog Run and Kitchen of Floyd Burroughs’s Cabin, Hale County, Alabama. Summer 1936

11.9.   Jack Delano. Filling Out Applications for Employment at the DuPont Powder Plant Near Childersburg at the Employment Office in Sylacauga, Alabama. May 1941

12.1.   Peter Sekaer. Two Women on a Porch, 25th Street, Birmingham. Circa 1938

12.2.   L. C. Harmon. Storing Kudzu, S. P. Storrs Farm, Elmore County. 1940

12.3.   William Pryor. Black Miner and Fire Boss B. Sutherland, Who Goes in First to Detect Explosive Methane Gas, Carbon Hill, Walker County. September 1938

12.4.   Unattributed. Houses Being Relocated by Barge, Guntersville Dam, Marshall County. Circa 1941

12.5.   Will Arnold. William Wyatt Bibb Bridge over the Alabama River at Claiborne, Monroe County. 1931

12.6.   Frances Benjamin Johnston. Forks of Cypress, Near Florence, Lauderdale County. 1939

12.7.   W. N. Manning. Miss Octavia Adkinson’s Smart Bucket, Adkinson Farm, Near Peachburg, Bullock County. July 17, 1935

12.8.   Kenneth Space. Saturday in Talladega. 1936 or 1937

12.9.   Unattributed. Dexter Avenue, Looking East, Showing State Capitol, Montgomery. 1937

12.10.   Unattributed. An Air Corps, Alabama National Guard, North American O-47 Observation Plane above Wilson Dam, Tennessee River, at Muscle Shoals. October 22, 1939

13.1.   Unattributed. Woman Welder, Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company [ADDSCO], Mobile. 1942–1945

13.2.   Unattributed. Alabama Polytechnic Institute Students and Faculty Listen to President Franklin D. Roosevelt Ask the US Congress to Declare War. December 8, 1941

13.3.   Unattributed. Frances Louise Osborn and Paula Ann Osborn Posing for a Christmas Photograph with a V for Victory Sign, Birmingham. 1942

13.4.   Unattributed. A Soldier’s Mother Sitting in Her Driveway, Bessemer. 1942–1945

13.5.   Unattributed. Thomas Joseph Mallon, Ship Repair Unit, Pearl Harbor, Oahu Island, Hawaii. December 1941

13.6.   Unattributed. Commemoration of the Production of the Millionth 75 mm and 155 mm Shell Forgings at Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, Ensley, left to right: A. J. Patrick, Jr., Worker; E. M. Streit, Shell Forging Plants Turn Foreman; D. Miller, Superintendent of Shell Plants; and Colonel E. C. Bomar, US Army District Ordnance Chief. Circa 1943

13.7.   Schleger Studio. Sweet Potatoes Ready for Shipment in Cullman. Spring 1944

13.8.   Arthur Rothstein. Julien H. Case’s Farmhands Load TVA Superphosphate Fertilizer, Lauderdale County, Alabama. June 1942

A.1.   Albert French Harris. Self-Portrait as the Kodak Man. Circa 1916

Preface

ONE DAY IN 1916, TWENTY-EIGHT years after he retired from the photography business, Allen Christopher Oxford demolished the shed that held his old glass negatives. At age eighty-one, he planned to buy a car and build a garage on the site of the shed (figure 0.2). His five-year-old granddaughter, Sarah Rogers, was visiting that day. For the rest of her life, she recalled the crash of breaking glass as men shoveled her grandfather’s negatives into a truck.¹

Oxford saved some of his old prints, however, pasting them into an album, along with this dedication to his daughter Josie, Josephine Oxford Rogers:

One can hardly imagine the pleasure it gives now and then to take down this Book of old time pictures and review my Art work of long long ago—the Majority of the Photos was made in Marion Ala in 1871 and later in my Birmingham Studio beginning with my location here in 1872 and thence until 1888 when I gave up the Photographic business. Many landscape and some other Negatives were made rather Promiscuously. Many of the views (and faces as well) which are not named have after these thirty and forty Odd years slipped away from my fading recollection

To Josie and her Children. Submitted

A. C. Oxford    Birmingham Ala 1916.²

In 1988, as I read Oxford’s words for the first time, it was hard to imagine a more evocative statement of the power of photographs, the pleasure they provide, and the impulses to take them, deliberately or indiscriminately (the nineteenth-century sense of promiscuous), then pass them to later generations. Oxford’s album also demonstrates photography’s paradox: a photograph may be meaningful long after its identification has begun to slip away.

Oxford realized that his fading recollections had stripped meaning from some of his old time pictures. I wondered how many other Alabama photographs were losing significance as time passed and their subjects were forgotten. My initial curiosity led to enduring fascination, with Oxford’s photographs and all those made in Alabama in the new medium’s first century.

A. C. Oxford’s album was an ideal introduction to historic Alabama photography. It led to so many interesting discoveries that he became a recurring character in this book. His photographs, including a self-portrait made when he was struggling to make a living in a city devastated by disease and recession, draw me into his world (figure 0.3).³

Each one intrigues me, for the information it contains and the mysteries it presents. Why does Alabama’s earliest known color photograph show a desolate gully (frontispiece 02)? How did a rural Alabama photographer learn the artistry that makes his photograph of an old house so satisfying (figure 0.4)? Who put the baby into the punch bowl (figure 0.5)?⁴

However, to be authoritative about Alabama photographs, looking and asking questions is just the beginning. So, as I sought old images, I studied local and Alabama history. I researched photographers and places. I studied photograph history, and I learned about 1890s baseball, the banana trade, picture postcards, and possums (figure 0.6). At my presentations about Alabama photography, people generously shared their encouragement, friendship, and old time pictures. To date, I have examined more than 100,000 Alabama photographs. I have discovered more than 1,400 photographers and photography businesses in Alabama between 1839 and 1941 (see the appendix). Yet I still feel the same fascination I began to feel more than twenty years ago, when A. C. Oxford’s album first caught my attention.

I believe that we all share this curiosity. We all may encounter what an Alabama daguerrean described in 1843 as a direct flash of the soul—a direct connection with our individual or collective past.⁵ A young slave looks at us, making us confront slavery at a personal level (figure 0.7). A cocky daredevil balances with his camera on a steel beam high above the Magic City of Birmingham (frontispiece 01). A teenager poses with his sister, creating a fantasy that fashions his future (figure 0.1).⁶

In recent years, much has been written about local photography: checklists and monographs about photographers and longer accounts of photography in some states and cities.⁷ Exhibitions introduce such photographers as geologist Eugene Allen Smith, who roamed the state with his camera, and the Shackelfords, an African American family that photographed blacks and whites for thirty years. Alabama Power Company’s superb picture book, People of Power, responds to the recent interest in everyday life, showing us an era before airport runway lights and night baseball games. These endeavors, Shot in Alabama among them, reflect the belief that photographs of ordinary Americans are significant documents and that studying them helps us understand our past.

Each photograph in this book illustrates facets of Alabama, with its mixed geography, varied people, and multivalent history. A thoughtful look at these images reveals fragments of their original contexts: the particular, often highly individual worlds from which they emerged and the microhistories they record. In studying them, we find that deposits of chemicals on bits of metal, glass, or paper are also endlessly suggestive visual histories. That conviction motivates me each time I download an image, open a letter containing a photocopy, or look at an original photograph.

Shot in Alabama is thus inescapably about vernacular photography. It is about Kathryn Tucker Windham, whose lifelong passion for taking pictures (as she always referred to photography) began at age twelve (see chapter 9). It is about Draffus Hightower, who kept his camera at the ready as he rode his motorcycle along south Alabama’s dirt roads (see chapter 8). It is about hundreds of photographers—black and white, amateur and professional, women and men—who were unknown outside their communities, but whose likenesses and photographic views have had a far greater impact on the state’s visual culture than those who achieved broader recognition. This book is also about their photographs, a vast array of everyday images that come to life only when their stories are remembered and shared.

Portraits are central to Alabamians’ experiences of photography because they comprise the overwhelming majority of images made there in the new medium’s first century. The state’s first photographs are portraits, made within months after instructions for making daguerreotypes reached America (figure 1.1). One of the state’s earliest daguerreans, Frederick Augustus Porter (F. A. P.) Barnard, was the first to publish improvements that made portraiture more reliable and portrait businesses possible: Alabama’s major contribution to the photographic craft.⁸ Alabama’s earliest known photographs by a black photographer are portraits: one of a school group and another of an elderly African American (figure 0.8).

Photographic likenesses were among the earliest widely purchased products of America’s emerging consumer culture. They responded to attitudes—sentiment, materialism, and fascination with technology—that continue to make portrait photography a powerful, significant phenomenon. When these likenesses move from the laboratory into the commercial gallery, they become trendy, relatively inexpensive, and increasingly desirable commodities. At the same time, they are mementoes of individuals and signifiers of their identities. This book explores the history of this paradoxical phenomenon, this oxymoron: the highly individualized commodity.

Today’s viewers, deluged with digital images, may find it hard to realize how special portraits were in photography’s first century. Then, they were uncommon, cherished possessions. Since not everyone could afford a likeness, having one was a status symbol, and sitting for a portrait was a noteworthy, highly ritualized occasion.

Given their special regard, the standardized appearance of photographic portraits may come as a surprise. These portraits, that make almost everyone look alike, reflect Alabamians’ participation in a relentlessly normative culture. In any given year, Alabama portraits are extremely similar, almost interchangeable, in technology, format, and style. Clothing and hairstyles are fashionable, regardless of economic status or ethnicity. Dignified, self-controlled behavior and proper attire emulate the highest echelon of local society.⁹

Families and friends, nevertheless, perceived one another’s likenesses as authentic individual representations, evocative of personality and sentiment—emotionally laden and subjectively interpreted. The validity of their perceptions and the idea of speaking likenesses—images considered to be unusually faithful to the depicted individuals—are supported by research indicating that socioeconomic status and some aspects of personality can be accurately deduced from a thirty-second glimpse of a photographic portrait.¹⁰ Judging from the photographs themselves, likeness—the approximation of the image to the customer’s perceived reality—mattered far more than creative composition or high aesthetic quality.

It cannot be said often enough that most of Alabama’s photographers were in business to make a living. They took what they were paid to take; thus, their work does not include many subjects that historians consider significant. Long-term success was rare, given the state’s demographics—a sparse, largely rural population and relatively low average incomes—and the minute numbers of Alabamians involved, before photography, in imaging culture. Thus many small Alabama cities never had resident galleries, and only the state’s largest and wealthiest cities—Mobile, Montgomery, and eventually Birmingham—became major photographic centers.

Most Alabama photography was a craft as well as a business. As with any craft, from the first daguerreans to today’s studio portrait photographers, uniformity and consistency sped the work and increased profits. Consequently, most Alabama likenesses are everyday commodities, like water jugs, short-staple cotton, or home brew. High-quality images, like art pottery, long-staple cotton, or single malt whisky, compose a minute proportion of the state’s photography. When photographs are thought of as commodities, many factors help us understand them better: volume, price, marketing, craft skills, business practices, demographics, technological and market-driven change, customer response, and photographers’ advertisements and activities.

Slighting the ubiquitous likenesses for other types of photographs would distort the historic record. Since most portraits of any era are very similar, however, a few may represent the whole. This means more space for all kinds of view photographs, to which many Alabamians respond with an enthusiasm that belies their relatively small numbers—perhaps as few as 1 percent of the nineteenth-century photographs made there.¹¹ A note on terminology: For the period this book covers, the word portrait is used to describe photographs of people usually taken indoors in a gallery or studio, while the word view refers to photographs taken outside or from a window that depict nature, the built environment, and sometimes people in exterior settings.

View and event photographs connect us to Alabama’s geography, built environment, and history, whether they show the first Alabama versus Auburn football game played in Birmingham (decades before the term Iron Bowl was coined) or a truck collecting milk for an ice cream factory (figures 0.9 and 0.10). Many reflect the unself-conscious boosterism of local photographers, while others, taken during the Great Depression by visiting photographers, show a devastated, wasted terrain.

The earliest Alabama views depict the built environment: a courthouse, a school, a road, a city, a small settlement. From the 1880s, they also document the state’s land, resources, and industries for scientific research, education, and businesses. New types of photographs emerge—snapshots and art photographs—in the 1890s, followed by documentary and local news photography.

Some images in this book evoke an era, an individual, or a culture: workers offloading bananas from a ship to a refrigerated boxcar (see figure 6.6); a teenage Tallulah Bankhead posing in her underwear as a vamp of the silent screen (see figure 9.1); and two World War I soldiers, one a Buffalo Soldier just returned from France (figure 0.11). Images and anecdotes anchor some photographers to their eras: Herbert Pinney Tresslar (figure 0.12) relaxing in his dark, ornate office; A. C. McIntyre’s Civil War adventures (see chapter 3); and William A. Reed’s courtship of a young woman who posed in his Rail Road Photo Car (see chapter 5).¹²

While most of the images in this study are Alabama-made, a few are Alabama-associated, shot by the state’s photographers outside the state or documenting Alabamians when they were away from home. Wherever made, the finest ones linger in the mind’s eye, including the daguerreotype portraits that depict a free black man and his wife, at ease before the camera lens (figures 0.13 and 0.14). A pensive woman sits in her front hallway in Huntsville, beside one of America’s most famous nineteenth-century sculptures (figure 5.13). A photo ID depicts a young Mobilian in the Ship Repair Unit at Pearl Harbor just after the Japanese bombing (figure 13.5). A couple poses on the day of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; their dignity would change to astonishment when they received the bill for their celebratory meal at Montgomery’s Elite Café (figure 10.7).¹³ The blurred focus of a small-town snapshot silhouettes a fellow and a mother possum with thirteen clinging babies, leaving the details to our imaginations (figure 0.6).

Studying local photographs is often challenging because visual images are silent witnesses to the individuals and scenes they picture. We may never know everything that we would like to know about them. Some are so rich in imagery, so layered in meaning, and so emotionally evocative that they repeatedly challenge us to understand them (figure 4.11). A few are in such poor condition that it is hard to discern their details (figure 3.11). Others, including a view of an impressive antebellum mansion on the Alabama River, are not yet precisely located and identified (figure 3.7). However, with experience and persistence, many perplexing images will yield their secrets, revealing fascinating aspects of personal and Alabama history.

To understand these local photographs I have gleaned much from family historians and genealogists, from photographers, and from archivists, collectors, historians, and other social scientists. Friends responded imaginatively to my need for information about old pictures. When I wanted to see a remote rock formation pictured in an 1898 photograph, Jerry Hinton Wise’s friends persuaded three groups of sportsmen to stop shooting at two one Saturday afternoon so that we could safely cross their hunting leases to reach it.

Friends who research the histories of pottery, furniture, and quilts shared their enthusiasms, methodologies, and insights. After Debra Hess Norris and Grant Romer introduced me to the process of dating photographs by technology and format at a Rochester Institute of Technology/Eastman House seminar, I have increasingly depended on my own knowledge and experience. I was much encouraged, nevertheless, when two giant figures in local photograph history—Dr. Richard Rudisill of New Mexico and Peter Palmquist of California—urged me to write a book about the first century of photography in Alabama. Include a checklist, Rudisill insisted.¹⁴ I followed their advice, though I extended the first century from 1839, when Alabamians began to experiment with daguerreotypy, to 1941, the year America went to war—in Alabama, a photographic watershed.

The result is not a study of the state’s best-known images or a photographic history of Alabama, but a work that moves the history of photography to the forefront, supported by social, cultural, and economic history. It addresses questions that focus on photography itself. What was photography like in Alabama in its first century? What types of photographs were made there and why and where? Who and what were the photographers’ subjects? Who were the photographers and how did they work? What did these images mean to their owners and viewers, and how have their meanings changed over time? How did photographs and photographers fit into the cultural fabric of their communities and state?

In photography’s first century in Alabama, when photographs were far less common than they are now, each image linked viewers to family, friends, colleagues, events, and places.¹⁵ These photographs still matter. They are windows into our individual and collective pasts. They give us a new way of looking at Alabama’s history, its environment, and its people and lifeways. And the photographs themselves, of course, are endlessly fascinating.

Acknowledgments

SINCE 1988, WHEN I BEGAN to research Alabama photographs and photographers, I have had the help of hundreds of people who own Alabama photographs, collect Alabamiana, know photography history and technologies, study all types of history, and care for photographs at libraries, archives, museums, and in homes from Maine to California. Thanks to all of them. Their efforts ensure that we have photographs to study and information to discover about the images, their contexts, and their meanings.

Among the many institutions that extended major assistance are, in no special order, the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery; Alabama Humanities Foundation; the state’s public libraries, and especially those in Anniston, Birmingham, Florence, Gadsden, Huntsville, Selma, and Mobile; the archives of colleges and universities in Alabama and across the nation, and especially those at Samford University, Auburn University, Spring Hill College, Tuskegee University, and Birmingham-Southern College; the Mobile Historic Preservation Society; History Museum of Mobile; Mobile Museum of Art; Birmingham Museum of Art; W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library and A. S. Williams III Americana Collection at the University of Alabama; Alabama Museum of Natural History; Geological Survey of Alabama; Limestone and Morgan County Archives; Huntsville Museum of Art; Montgomery Museum of Art; Landmarks Foundation/Old Alabama Town, Montgomery; the Library of Congress; National Archives; Tennessee State Library and Archives; Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin; the Historic New Orleans Collection; the J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi; the Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University; libraries and archives of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Universities; and the American Antiquarian Society. Many other organizations and institutions have provided images and information.

Many individuals fostered my research and shared insights and opinions about Alabama photography. They include present and former staff members of many institutions: James Baggett, Don Veasey, Marvin Whiting, and Kelsey Scouten Bates, Birmingham Public Library; Edwin Bridges, Bob Bradley, John Hardin, Norwood Kerr, Cynthia Luckie, Meredith McDonough, Steve Murray, Debbie Pendleton, and Frazine Taylor, Alabama Department of Archives and History; Clark Center, Marina Klaric, Donnelly Lancaster, and Jessica Lacher-Feldman, W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library, the University of Alabama; Dwayne Cox and John Varner, Special Collections and Archives, Auburn University Libraries; Robert Gamble, Alabama Historical Commission; Martin Olliff, Troy University Dothan; Guy Hubbs, Birmingham-Southern College Archives; Ronnie C. Tyler, director emeritus, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Anne Knight, Selma Public Library; Beverly Brannan, curator of photography, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress; Alan Trachtenberg, Yale University; Gail Andrews, Bryding Adams, and Suzanne Voce Stephens, Birmingham Museum of Art; David M. Robb and Bruce Hiles, Huntsville Museum of Art; stereograph collector Michael McEachern; photograph historians Dave Tinder of Michigan, Harvey S. Teal of South Carolina, and Lee Eltzroth of Georgia; William Tharpe, archivist, Alabama Power Company; Richard Holland, John Hall, Rosa Hall, Neil Snider, and Sheila Limerick, University of West Alabama; Michael Thomason, Elisa Baldwin, and Carol Ellis, the Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama; Leah Rawls Atkins and Wayne Flynt, Auburn University; Daniel Fate Brooks, Arlington Historic Mansion; Richard Diehl and Douglas E. Jones, the University of Alabama Museums; Craig Remington of the Cartography Laboratory, University of Alabama; Nick Tew and Lewis Dean, Geological Survey of Alabama; Kathy Bailey, Tuscaloosa Public Library; Susanna Leberman and Ranee’ Pruitt, Huntsville Public Library; Barbara Broach and Mary Nicely, Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts, Florence, Alabama; Lee Freeman, Florence Lauderdale County Public Library; Robert Stewart and Marion Carter, Alabama Humanities Foundation; John Allison and Susan Bzdell, Morgan County Archives; Louis Pitschmann, dean of libraries, and Mary Bess Paluzzi, associate dean of libraries at the University of Alabama; Marlene Rikard, Samford University; William Ferris, National Endowment for the Humanities; Joey Brackner, Alabama State Council on the Arts; Karen I. Henricks, Jacksonville State University; Bill Rambo, Confederate Memorial Park; Kirk Brooker, Demopolis Historical Society; Marjorie White, Birmingham Historical Society; Bryding Adams, Ralph Allen, Linda Bayer, Harvie and Lynn Jones, Dan Brooks, Paul Bryant Jr., Annie Crenshaw, Ferne Koch, Margaret Gaston, Al Nettles, Maria and Peter Rippe, Eugene Groves, Bert Hitchcock, Ann Biggs-Williams, John Reese, John Shaver, Bonnie Mitchell, Nancy Rohr, and Garland Smith. I owe special thanks to Marguerite Turner-Short, granddaughter of one of the state’s finest photographers, State Geologist Eugene Allen Smith; art photographer Pinky/MM Bass of Fairhope, granddaughter of photographer Lois Slosson Sundberg; Ruth Allen and Winston Smith of Marengo County; photographer and author Kathryn Tucker Windham; my dear friend photographer Chip Cooper, descendants and relatives of photographers, and many others. I thank every staff member of the University of Alabama Press, and especially Curtis L. Clark, Claire Lewis Evans, Daniel Waterman, Donna Cox Baker, Joanna Jacobs, J. D. Wilson, and Dawn Hall for their sustained efforts to make my unwieldy manuscript into a book.

My husband, David, read many versions of this text, provided general connoisseurship, expertise on painted portraits and landscapes, and help with maps and population statistics. My sons, Andrew, senior photograph conservator at the Library of Congress, and Matthew, curator of Pre-Colombian Art at the M. H. de Young Museum of Art, San Francisco, provided the computer expertise that made this book possible, and Sara Yorke, Sarah Stauderman, and Jennifer Josten were unceasingly supportive. In addition, Andrew reviewed the explanations of photographic terms for technical accuracy.

1

Engraved by the Sunbeams

The Daguerrean Era, 1839 to the Mid-1850s

We succeeded in producing a surface so exquisitely sensitive to the action of light, that the image . . . was formed upon it in the camera in a space of time almost inappreciable . . . a man walking may be represented with his foot lifted as about to take a step.

—Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, University of Alabama, 1841

AN ALABAMA DAGUERREAN DESCRIBES THE NEW INVENTION

ON FRIDAY, JANUARY 17, 1843, the Mobile Daily Register and Chronicle published an enthusiastic description of daguerreotypy, penned by the city’s first daguerrean, New York merchant John Armstrong Bennet.¹ Daguerreotypes had been made in the state since 1840, but no Alabama writer had published a better description of the new technology. Bennet wrote:

This invention of a celebrated French Chemist, by which light is caused to produce a picture superior to every effort of genius, is justly considered one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the age. . . . The value of a portrait depends upon its accuracy, and . . . the likeness produced [by this process] will be the exact image of the object from the same causes which enables a perfect eye to see. The precise expression of the face . . . in its minutest features will be at once and forever fixed; engraved as it were by the sunbeams, and as the operation seldom exceeds a minute, and is often finished in a few seconds, it is evident that the expressions of the face may be fixed in the picture which are too fleeting to be caught by the painter. By such flashes of the soul we remember our friends, and these cannot appear on canvas.²

Bennet considered daguerreotypy a marvel among the era’s many marvels: steamships, steel plows, mechanical reapers, electric telegraphs, and railroads. He noted that the new, almost magic imaging technology was an experimental science, accurate and quick enough to capture expressions—flashes of the soul—that do not survive the long process of creating a painted portrait.³ His claim of photography’s superiority echoes threats to painted portraits already voiced by other writers.

DAGUERREOTYPY IN ALABAMA, 1839 TO THE MID-1850S

By the winter of 1839–1840, less than a year after Louis J. M. Daguerre exhibited his daguerreotypes in France, F. A. P. Barnard and William H. Harrington were experimenting with the new technology in Tuscaloosa. By 1841 they had achieved three photographic benchmarks: They had made the state’s first daguerreotype portraits (figure 1.1), Barnard had published his improvements to the new imaging medium in a scientific journal,⁴ and the two scientists had opened the state’s first resident daguerrean gallery.

With these three factors in place—successful production, fairly reliable technology, and a new type of business—portraits would dominate photography’s first century in Alabama, as elsewhere. However, for individuals who reckoned to make a living from daguerreotypy there, Alabama’s demographics limited potential profits: a small, diffuse population with little interest in likenesses or spare cash to buy them, and the institution of slavery, which halved the market. Thus daguerreotypes are rare in the state. Most Alabamians never saw one.

Nevertheless, coins jingling in pockets and purses lured daguerreans to the state’s most populous areas, where they took portraits and occasional views. Other early daguerreans traveled from one small community to another. Their peripatetic activity was economically driven, but their travel also spread the new medium across the state. Alabamians learned about daguerreotypy from these daguerreans, their advertisements, and the likenesses themselves. They regarded them as a new kind of social glue, small surrogates that sustained relationships with absent relatives and friends.⁵

A NEW VISUAL IMAGING MEDIUM

The early history of American photography, drawing with light, is associated with scientists, including Samuel F. B. Morse. In 1839, after Morse met Louis J. M. Daguerre in Paris, he published an account of daguerreotypy, the first popular photographic technology in America. Morse noted that daguerreotypes are copper plates coated with silver on one side, bearing images of the visible world atop the silver. To create one, the daguerrean pours light-sensitive chemicals over the silver surface and places the plate in a small dark chamber, or camera, equipped with a lens and lens cover. When the cover is removed to allow light to strike the plate, a chemical reaction produces a latent image that is developed to make it visible and fixed to make it light resistant. The result is a daguerreotype—a unique, one-of-a-kind positive that is accurate, monochromatic, and highly particularized.⁶

As with all photography, daguerreotypy’s technology and its chemical, optical, and mechanical characteristics offer limitations and opportunities. Looking at a daguerreotype is an intimate, usually individual experience because most daguerreotypes are small, and the viewer must hold and tilt them to make the image appear. From the early 1840s to the late 1860s, most Alabama-made and Alabama-associated daguerreotypes and other one-of-a-kind technologies are housed in cases; hence, the term cased photographs.

By the early 1840s, manufacturers sold cameras and chemicals, as well as plates and cases, in fairly standard sizes (here rounded to the nearest quarter inch): whole (8½ × 6½), half (5½ × 4¼), quarter (4¼ × 3¼), sixth (3¼ × 2¾), ninth (2½ × 2), and sixteenth (1¼ × 1½). Their housing included a cover glass to protect the plate, a metal mat to frame it, and a paper tape and narrow flexible brass preserver to seal and protect the sandwich of plate, mat, and cover glass. Most Alabamians purchased the four smaller sizes and inexpensive leatherette cases.

ALABAMA AT THE DAWN OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In 1839, most of Alabama was wilderness, increasingly dotted with habitations as immigrants arrived in Mobile and settlers came overland from the Atlantic seaboard and down the Great Appalachian Valley. Farms and plantations dappled fertile areas near navigable rivers: the Tennessee River, running westerly across the top of the state; the Chattahoochee River along the state’s eastern border; and the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers, flowing from central and west Alabama into the Mobile River and into Mobile Bay. Alabama’s rough roads, many based on Native American trails, connected the state to its neighbors. Within the state, they led to and from Montgomery, a major transportation hub and (from 1845) the state capital.

Antebellum Alabama was home to farmers, plantation owners, slaves, laborers, and businesspeople. Pioneers improved their holdings or moved on. River landings developed. Towns grew, particularly if they were county seats or located at a transportation nexus. Yet, like other southern states, Alabama remained rural, defined and dominated by cotton agriculture (the state, 90 percent rural until the 1880s, was 65 percent rural in the 1940s). Commerce followed cotton’s rhythms. In fall and winter, after harvests and when waterways were navigable, barges, steamboats, ferries, and small craft crowded the rivers. River towns and landings bustled with activity, and daguerreans were on the move.⁷

ALABAMA’S FIRST DAGUERREANS

In the winter of 1839–1840, F. A. P. Barnard and William Harrington experimented with daguerreotypy in the state capital, Tuscaloosa. Barnard, an 1828 Yale College graduate, taught mathematics and natural philosophy at the fledgling University of Alabama. Harrington, who had been a precocious fifteen-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania medical school in 1825, had also been a doctor in Florence and a science professor at LaGrange College in nearby Courtland. After his wife and newborn child died, and after he had killed a man in self-defense, he abandoned medicine and moved to Tuscaloosa. Photography became his second career.⁸

ALABAMA’S FIRST DAGUERREOTYPES

Barnard and Harrington’s portraits of Sarah Ann Mason Martin and her husband, Joshua Lanier Martin, a Tuscaloosa attorney, former US congressman, and future Alabama governor (1845–1847), are the earliest known Alabama daguerreotypes (figure 1.1).⁹ Period inscriptions on their undisturbed paper seals identify and date them:

Mrs. Sarah A. Martin Taken in Tuscaloosa Ala. in the year 1840 by Dr. Harrington and Professor Barnard of the University of Alabama, and the first daguerreotype ever taken in Tuscaloosa.

Governor Joshua L. Martin taken in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the Year 1840 by Dr. Harrington and Professor Barnard of the University of Alabama and was among the first taken in the city Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

These two small images transport viewers to the dawn of photography. Although both are slightly blurred, each conveys a distinctive likeness and suggests personality. Their miens—calm and volatile—accord with what is known of their temperaments. A friend described Sarah Martin as a good wife and mother, warm friend, and faithful Christian—conventional attributes in accord with her conventional image. Her husband’s likeness, suggesting a feisty temperament barely held in check, accords with period descriptions. Martin was a self-made man, a successful attorney, former US congressman, and Jacksonian Democrat, fierce in the attack and quick in the retort. . . . His head and face were large . . . a close observer could hardly fail to see in these features the marks of the sterner attributes of his nature, self-will and unbending resolution.¹⁰

An 1839 painted miniature of Martin had depicted him as a genial cherub, despite his hope for an accurate likeness, expressed in a letter to his wife: Your New Years gift, my dear, I am having prepared for you, and my friends say it will be at least a most correct one if not a pretty one. What do you think it is—Do you give it up—yes—why my miniature.¹¹ For Martin and others who valued correctness, daguerreotypes’ impartial accuracy represented an improvement over hand-wrought likenesses.

Barnard and Harrington posed the Martins to take advantage of the natural light and focused the camera. Each sitter remained still during an exposure of perhaps thirty to sixty seconds or more, depending on the light, the lens, and the light-sensitizing chemicals, about which nothing is known. In Sarah’s portrait, technological requirements accorded with cultural preference, for her decorum is appropriate to an era of greater public formality than ours. Her straightforward gaze, associated in painted portraits with a lack of affectation, communicates directly with the viewer. Joshua’s likeness is more idiosyncratic: gazing away from the viewer, he asserts a strong individuality, unrestrained by portrait conventions.¹²

BARNARD’S DAGUERREOTYPE EXPERIMENTS

To eliminate blurs caused by movement, a basic requirement of portrait photography, daguerreans had to speed photochemical action on the plate. Using chlorine gas as an accelerator, Barnard shortened exposure time to a few seconds, as he noted in 1841.¹³ That October, the American Journal of Science and Arts published his methods for instantaneous photography, a first for an American scientist, and a monumental . . . milestone in American photographic history.¹⁴ This publication helped portrait daguerreotypy become faster and more reliable: Alabama’s most important contribution to the craft. It opened the door to photography businesses, or galleries (a term intended to evoke the fine arts), and ensured the proliferation of portrait photography.

SCIENTISTS AND ENTREPRENEURS

As the new technology became more reliable, some scientists became entrepreneurs. On October 9, 1841, Barnard and Harrington opened a Tuscaloosa gallery, one of the earliest in the southeast. They advertised portraits and landscape views until June 22, 1842, when Barnard quit the business, perhaps bowing to pressure from a legislative committee investigating the claim that he had neglected his academic duties for daguerreotypy. Always deeply committed to pursuits that interested him, Barnard continued to experiment in his university laboratory, where he mastered paper print technology (see chapter 2) and his student, George Little, polished his daguerreotype plates. A contemporary, William Smith, described the energetic, competitive Barnard as the best at whatever he attempted to do . . . turn the best sonnet, write the best love story, take the best daguerreotype picture, charm the most women, [and] catch the most trout.¹⁵

Until 1847, Harrington worked intermittently in Tuscaloosa. There he advertised hand-colored likenesses, instruction, and durable daguerreotypes, probably varnished or toned to protect the tarnishable silvered plate.¹⁶ Then he settled in New Orleans, where he ran the gallery of a former pupil, James Maguire, one of that city’s first daguerreans.

DAGUERREOTYPY, DATA, AND DEMOGRAPHICS

Soon daguerreans such as Robert L. Kirkland were operating resident galleries and traveling in Alabama (figure 1.2). A few had in-state careers of a decade or more, but most are known only from a few advertisements or the 1850 US Census. More than half of the state’s 1850s daguerreans are known only from that census. Most whose careers are known came from the mid-Atlantic corridor and New England.

To historians, the sparse data on early American daguerreans is frustrating. Of the sixty-six daguerreans so far documented in Alabama between 1839 and the mid-1850s, Kirkland is one of only six who can be associated with specific daguerreotypes because these six daguerreans’ names appear on a daguerreotype’s housing, or because enough contextual data exists to assign an image or two to specific makers. Most Alabama-made and Alabama-associated daguerreotypes are unattributed, and nearly sixty documented daguerreans cannot be positively associated with any Alabama daguerreotypes.

Alabama’s demographics challenged daguerreans who tried to make a living in the state. Her population was scattered, rural, and relatively low (570,756 in 1840 and 771,623 in 1850), and her cities were small (most county seats had populations in the low hundreds). Few potential customers had spare cash for daguerreotypes. Few had experience of portraiture, since paintings were costly luxuries.¹⁷ The institution of slavery further reduced the potential market.

Alabama’s sixty-six daguerreans are documented in twenty-two Alabama locations, a far cry from the daguerreian on almost every square and county that one writer claimed. More than 80 percent spent part or all of their Alabama careers in five cities with relatively large area populations: Mobile, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Huntsville, and Greensboro. For some, the new craft was a sideline. At Pinetucket near Auburn, Lewis Allen Foster ran a plantation; sold threshing machines; worked as an agricultural engineer; taught tin craft; took daguerreotypes; and ran a brick works, iron works, and sawmill. In Florence, Jeweler F. H. Bornheim made tiny daguerreotypes free for purchasers of pins or lockets to hold them.¹⁸

VISITING DAGUERREANS AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES

A few notable daguerreans, part of an informal network centered on the mid-Atlantic corridor, visited Alabama. One of the most striking characteristics of the state’s early photography is the influence of this network. Most of Alabama’s best-known daguerreans, including F. A. P. Barnard, Mobile’s Chauncey Barnes, and Montgomery’s Archibald Crossland McIntyre, learned the craft from or worked with men who were part of it. Visitors brought new technologies to Alabama: in 1847, photographs on paper, and in 1849, instruction in the Langenheim system, probably hyalotypes, circular positive photographs on glass, like those used a decade later in magic lanterns. No 1840s Alabama examples are known of either.¹⁹

Northeastern and mid-Atlantic daguerreans visited Alabama until about 1855, when they quit coming, perhaps because of the