WASHINGTON, DC.- Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography charts the evolving understanding of portrait photography as a tool of representation among African Americans and illustrates the richness and complexities of Black life and culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Featuring some 70 works drawn from the National Gallery’s collection, the exhibition traces African American photographers and portrait subjects in the nascent days of photography’s development, chronicling the evolution of the medium as a means to define Black community, aspiration, and identity.

Unfolding over the course of three thematic sections, the exhibition is arranged chronologically and explores how portrait photography was both embraced as a means of self-empowerment and utilized to exert control over representation. The first section, Black Entrepreneurs, tells the story of James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington, three leading early African American portrait photographers who established thriving studios soon after the medium was introduced in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. Understanding that their portrait studios could be incubators—places for opportunity but also risk—they photographed a wide range of clientele, both white and Black, offering insight into societal change and daily life in the years surrounding the Civil War. These artists each chose to credit the resulting portraits with their names, a somewhat unusual practice among daguerreotypists, asserting their authorship and the role of Black entrepreneurship within the struggle for equality and justice.

The second section, Portraits, explores depictions of African Americans in largely white-owned studios in the years both before and after the Civil War, revealing how photography of the period both reinforced and disrupted stereotypes. Portraits of both free and enslaved men, women, and children on view exemplify the complexities of agency and consent during this time. After the abolition of slavery, portraits of African Americans reflect a new sense of individuality and dignity for many of the pictured subjects.

The final section, Studios, examines the rise of Black-owned studios in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the opportunities these environments offered the photographers to create affirming pictures. It presents work by renowned studio photographers such as Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee, alongside lesser-known artists, such as G. Addison Turner and Daniel Freeman. This section features individual portraits, depictions of couples and families, and community groups. Collectively they demonstrate how Black Americans took ownership of their own image in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and created works that celebrated their identities, communities, and values.

Remember Me marks the first time many works from the Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection, an important holding of early American vernacular photography, will be on view at the National Gallery since its acquisition in 2023.