Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922

By Deborah Willis and Michael Lesy

Self-taught photographer Hugh Mangum was born in 1877 in Durham, North Carolina, as its burgeoning tobacco economy put the frontier-like boomtown on the map. As an itinerant portraitist working primarily in North Carolina and Virginia during the rise of Jim Crow, Mangum welcomed into his temporary studios a clientele that was both racially and economically diverse. After his death in 1922, his glass plate negatives remained stored in his darkroom, a tobacco barn, for fifty years. Slated for demolition in the 1970s, the barn was saved at the last moment--and with it, this surprising and unparalleled document of life at the turn of the twentieth century, a turbulent time in the history of the American South.

Hugh Mangum's multiple-image, glass plate negatives reveal the open-door policy of his studio to show us lives marked both by notable affluence and hard work, all imbued with a strong sense of individuality, self-creation, and often joy. Seen and experienced in the present, the portraits hint at unexpected relationships and histories and also confirm how historical photographs have the power to subvert familiar narratives. Mangum's photographs are not only images; they are objects that have survived a history of their own and exist within the larger political and cultural history of the American South, demonstrating the unpredictable alchemy that often characterizes the best art--its ability over time to evolve with and absorb life and meaning beyond the intentions or expectations of the artist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469648323

Book preview

WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES

WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES

THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF HUGH MANGUM, 1897–1922

EDITED BY MARGARET SARTOR AND ALEX HARRIS

FOREWORD BY DEBORAH WILLIS | INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL LESY

Published by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

©2019 Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris

All rights reserved

Designed by Bonnie Campbell

Set in Legacy Serif and Raleway by Bonnie Campbell

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

All uncredited photographs are courtesy of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

Frontispiece and images on p. viii, Self-portraits, Hugh Mangum, ca, 1905–10.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mangum, Hugh, 1877–1922, photographer. | Sartor, Margaret, editor | Harris, Alex, 1949– editor. | Duke University. Center for Documentary Studies, publisher.

Title: Where we find ourselves : the photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922 / edited by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris; foreword by Deborah Willis; introduction by Michael Lesy.

Other titles: Documentary arts and culture.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press; [Durham, NC] : in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, [2019] | Series: Documentary arts and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018021267 | ISBN 9781469648316 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469648323 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mangum, Hugh, 1877–1922. | Southern States—Pictorial works. | LCGFT: Portraits. | Documentary photographs.

Classification: LCC TR680 .M2956 2019 | DDC 779/.2—DC23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021267

Excerpt from James Baldwin’s Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes © 1959, in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, published by Pantheon/Vintage Books, 2011. Used by arrangement with the James Baldwin Estate.

DOCUMENTARY ARTS AND CULTURE

Edited by Alexa Dilworth, Wesley Hogan, and Tom Rankin of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University

In a time when the tools of the documentary arts have become widely accessible, this series of books, published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, explores and develops the practice of documentary expression. Drawing on the perspectives of artists and writers, this series offers new and important ways to think about learning and doing documentary work while also examining the traditions and practice of documentary art through time.

CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

documentarystudies.duke.edu

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897–1922, cocurated by Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris and organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

On view January 19–May 19, 2019.

This book is dedicated to environmental activists Margaret Nygard and Holger Nygard; photographer David Page; North Carolina genealogist William Perry Johnson; and Hugh Mangum’s nephew, Jack Vaughan. Without the unified hard work of these far-sighted individuals—their commitment to the value and preservation of Hugh Mangum’s glass plate negatives—this work would not be available to us.

And to Robert L. Byrd, who made the preservation of visual materials an important mission of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

I feel very strongly, though, that this amorphous people are in desperate search for something which will help them to re-establish their connection with themselves, and with one another. This can only begin to happen as the truth begins to be told. We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities. The mass culture, in the meantime, can only reflect our chaos: and perhaps we had better remember that this chaos contains life—and a great transforming energy.

—JAMES BALDWIN, MASS CULTURE AND THE CREATIVE ARTIST: SOME PERSONAL NOTES, 1959

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Frame by Frame

Deborah Willis

INTRODUCTION

A Man in His Wholeness

Michael Lesy

THE PHOTOGRAPHS

WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES

Margaret Sartor

THROUGH THIS LENS

Alex Harris

AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Margaret Sartor

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FOREWORD

Frame by Frame

DEBORAH WILLIS

It would be easy to focus on their eyes. To attend exclusively to the direction of their gazes downward or forward. To read them as signifiers of status or station, establishing or rejecting connection and relation.

—TINA CAMPT, Listening to Images

WHERE WE FIND OURSELVES is the perfect title for this exquisitely researched book. It is a compelling metaphor, a question, a statement of fact. In looking at this book of portraits, I felt compelled to complete the phrase with a resounding answer—We find ourselves in the photographic studio. In looking at these striking images created at the turn of the twentieth century until just after the end of the First World War, a crucial period in American history, we can consider migration, family life, land owners and sharecroppers, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, the employed and the underemployed, and black and white Americans in the rural South. Both beauty and humanity are enacted in profound and meaningful ways in the portraits. Seen through the lens of Hugh Mangum, the intersection of these two visual experiences begins to unravel the complexity of what it means to dress for a studio photographer.

Each adult sitter made a conscious decision to select clothing—perform style—that defined his or her understanding of self, and in so doing, these people have left us an evocative and surprising legacy of images. Gendered identities are represented by fashionably dressed women wearing bold, striped blouses and cinched-waist skirts and men posing in the popular tailored jackets of the period. It is important to read the details: the facial hair of men, their beards and moustaches; the pearl necklace and earrings of a black woman in a large white collar, her hair parted down the center; the feathered and plumed hats of men and women, black and white; the fur scarves and cotton neckties; the treasured objects, from bicycle to family dog. Hairstyles define and refine! And there is abundant humor to be found, on both sides of the lens; for instance, in a series of self-portraits made by Hugh Mangum, who goes from looking directly at the camera to hiding behind his bowler hat. (He sometimes included himself in the first or final frame exposed on a negative otherwise filled with paying clients.)

The photographs show us lives marked both by notable affluence and by hard work, but they are all imbued with a sense of self-creation, and often joy. So many of the portraits are animated by a spirit of playfulness. Mangum’s energy, his instinctive ability to connect with his sitters, is palpable even now.

These pictures affirm the sitters’ encounter not only with the lens but also with the photos’ use, with future possibilities for interpreting the images. For instance, the accidental double exposure of an African American girl and a young white woman, both of them unsmiling, both of them conscious of their poses. This superimposition brings into being an encounter that can be fictionalized, that disrupts the photographic narrative. Other double exposures are disquieting and intense as they construct past and present—child and soldier, dreamy-eyed girl and family portrait.

The portraits collected here were never intended to be viewed as