Hugh Mangum’s subjects appear somewhat stilted at first glance, their natural energy undercut by the anesthetizing gaze of the camera lens. But as the frames progress, the photographs lose the statuesque quality common amongst early studio portraits of unsmiling men and women, instead capturing moments of joy, surprise and, most impressively, spontaneous fun.
It’s this singular quality that drew photojournalist Sarah Stacke’s attention when she first flipped through a set of Mangum’s snapshots in 2010. As Stacke recounts for NPR, the “smiles and laughter,” “quirky gestures” and general playfulness of the early 20th-century North Carolinian photographer’s portraits are unique for an era often defined by its staid formality—as are the people depicted in his photographs, which include individuals of different class, gender and race living during the height of Jim Crow.
Now, nearly 100 years after Mangum’s death in 1922, his work is finally being seen by a wider audience: Photos Day or Night: The Archive of Hugh Mangum, a new monograph edited by Stacke and curated in conjunction with the photographer’s granddaughter, Martha R. Sumler, draws on unseen images and ephemera from the family’s archive, while an exhibition at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art that opens this weekend chronicles the diversity of Mangum’s oeuvre, from his portraits of affluent, well-known sitters to those whose identities have been forgotten today.
According to Kerry Rork of the Chronicle, Duke’s independent student newspaper, Mangum shot most of his portraits between 1899 and 1922. Operating throughout North Carolina and southwest Virginia, he opened his makeshift studios to people from all walks of life, allowing individuals of different races, classes and genders to pose in a single shared space. Mangum’s focus, in the words of Margaret Sartor—co-curator of Nasher’s Where We Find Ourselves exhibition—was to examine how subjects would “perform in front of the camera” and show off their distinct personalities.
One of Mangum’s most important tools was the Penny Picture camera, which Stacke notes was designed to produce multiple exposures (up to 35 separate images) on a single glass plate negative. The Penny Picture operated somewhat like a modern-day photo booth, with sitters posing for a progression of photographs, perhaps involving props or shifting facial expressions.
In one set of portraits included in Duke’s collection of Mangum photographs, a young man in a bowler hat offers the camera a shy smile. By the next shot, his reserve has already begun to falter. He takes off his hat, stands next to a friend, and serves up the same half-grin. Then, in the third frame, he laughs freely, his cheeks stretching to serve up a million-watt smile.
This phenomenon is evident across Mangum’s extant portraits regardless of their subjects’ age, race or gender. But it’s perhaps most apparent in his photographs of African-American clients: As Stacke writes for NPR, these men and women “present themselves as lighthearted, resolute and everything in between. They bring their children to the studio to be photographed, an ode to the hope they have for the lives their sons and daughters will live.”
It’s likely, Stacke argues, that many such sitters “were working publicly and privately to establish black agency, independence and community vitality.” Cementing their legacies in studio portraits—especially ones in which the South’s segregation laws seem somewhat distant, their boundaries erased by the integrated nature of Mangum’s photo-filled negatives—could have served as a key step in accomplishing this goal.
In a statement, Sartor and co-curator Alex Harris note that after Mangum’s death, his family stored his work in a tobacco barn on their farm. These thousands of glass plate negatives remained in the barn, unseen, for some 50 years, but reappeared during the 1970s, when the barn was slated for demolition but saved at the last minute.
Reflecting on her grandfather’s legacy, Martha Sumler tells Stacke that revisiting the images made her “realize just how much he really liked people.”
She continues, “I know it was a business for him, and he worked hard, but he had to have really enjoyed it and enjoyed meeting the people ... to show the way life was back then."
If nothing else, Stacke’s book, the Nasher exhibition and Duke’s digitized collection of Mangum photographs offer an unusually vibrant portrait of both the man behind the camera and the subjects in front of it.
As the self-portraits Stacke features on the volume’s title page attest—Mangum is alternately depicted in serious thought and playful costumes accentuated by such props as a parasol—life in the early 20th-century wasn’t nearly as serious as most studio shots suggest. In fact, sometimes, it could even be downright fun.
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