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#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}Inside or outside his photo studio, Hugh Mangum created an atmosphere â€" respectful and often playful â€" in which hundreds of men, women and children opened themselves. Though the late-19th-century American South in which he worked was marked by disenfranchisement, segregation and inequality â€" between black and white, men and women, rich and poor â€" Mr. Mangum, who was white, portrayed all of them with candor, humor, confidence and dignity.
Above all, he showed his subjects as individuals, and for that, his work â€" largely unknown â€" is mesmerizing.
Mr. Mangum attracted and cultivated a clientele that drew heavily from both black and white communities â€" a rarity for his time. In the context of turn-of-the century Southern society, segregated by law and custom, the diversity displayed in his negatives is striking. Each client appears as valuable as the next, no story less significant.
Hugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke UniversityThough his life was brief â€" he died at 44 â€" it encompassed momentous shifts amid a turbulent and complex period in American history. Mr. Mangum was born in 1877, the year Reconstruction ended. When he died from influenza in 1922, World War I had ended only three years earlier. Those decades included both acclaimed black thinkers like Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, and some of the most difficult years in African-American history.
Although there are no tidy dates separating the phases and forms of racial discrimination, the removal of federal troops at the end of Reconstruction was arguably the advent of Jim Crow laws. Lynching peaked in the 1890s. At the same time, members of the black community, built on the strength of its own values and institutions, cultivated resistance to laws and customs that excluded and devalued them.
I have not found any indications that Mr. Mangum used his photographs for political purposes, but it is likely that many of his subjects did. By the turn of the 20th century, African-Americans were well practiced at engaging the power of photography to challenge racial ideas, as well as to create and celebrate black identity. Mr. Mangum’s subjects used his images to emphasize accomplishments, prosperity, beauty and individuality. They shared them with friends and made them the foundation of family photo albums, ultimately shaping their own identities and those of future generations.
Hugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University The photographer, Hugh Mangum, is at top left.The details in the studio portraits, framed against bare backdrops, are intimately attached to the sitters. A stunning young woman is featured in the top left frame of a negative (Slide 11). Dressed in a casual white cotton dress, she has her stately shoulders and enduring gaze turned away from the camera. Her elegant jaw line; long, arched eyebrows; and composed lips exude a quiet confidence that makes one want to know more about her life.
Another series of exposures (below) shows a woman looking almost woeful at first. But by the third exposure, she leans back, laughing. The sequence is delightful because it is unexpected, maybe even to her. Unbridled emotion was unusual in early-20th-century portraiture, yet this is not an atypical sequence in Mr. Mangum’s photographs.
Hugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke UniversityAnother sequence (Slide 2) shows five women following a similar set of expressions and poses that include a smile, a serious air and hands behind the head, revealing what a typical portrait session with Mr. Mangum might have entailed.
The Penny Picture camera that Mr. Mangum used was ideal for creating inexpensive and accessible novelty portraits. Multiple subjects could be photographed on one negative, reducing cost and labor. Remarkably, the order of the images on the Penny Picture camera negatives reflects the order in which his diverse clientele rotated through the studio, the negatives reasonably representing a day’s work for this gregarious photographer.
As for Mangum the man, there are but scattered records of his life, stored in aging boxes belonging to his granddaughter in Cary, N.C., including letters, sketches, photographic fliers and supply orders, his professional hypnotist card and books in which he left his autograph.
Hugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke UniversityThe most tantalizing remnants are his images. They raise questions about, and offer a glimpse into, both his character and Southern society. Mr. Mangum probably exposed thousands of glass plate negatives, both in professional studios and as an itinerant photographer. Sadly, most of those were destroyed through benign neglect after his death or were lost, as were almost all records of the names and dates associated with them.
The images that remain â€" about 700 glass plate negatives preserved in Duke University’s Rubenstein Library â€" were salvaged from the tobacco pack house on the Mangum family property where the photographer built his first darkroom. For decades, the negatives caught the droppings of chickens and other creatures living in the pack house. Today they are in various states of deterioration. Some are broken and the emulsion is peeling on others, but the hundreds of vibrant personalities in the photographs prevail, engaging our emotions, intellect and imagination.
A century later, Mr. Mangum’s portraits allow us a penetrating gaze into individual faces of the past, and in a larger sense, they offer an unusually revealing glimpse of the early-20th-century American South.
Hugh Mangum/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke UniversitySarah Stacke is a photographer based in Brooklyn and Durham, N.C. She is working on a publication about Hugh Mangum’s life and work.
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