Stepping Into the Light

At the turn of the century, and into the early decades of the one that followed, Black men and women in the segregated South began to step into the light of the photographer’s studio.

The young and the old. The birthday boy. The soldier home from the killing fields of France. The graduate. The newlyweds.

For the first time the camera was not pursuing its subject.

There is a long tradition of the lens going after the body — the anthropological portrait, the cataloguing of the exotic, the specimen pinned to its plate. The subject is studied. The subject does not consent so much as submit.

Here the relation reverses.

These men and women came to the studio. They chose the suit, the posture, the tilt of the chin. They paid. The likeness was theirs before the shutter closed.

And the act cost more than the sitting fee.

On streets where Black residents were confined to a single sidewalk, where crossing to the other could draw a fine or an arrest, to commission your own image was to insist — quietly, formally, in your best clothes — that you were a person worth recording. bell hooks understood the camera in Black life as a political instrument, a means of resisting how others would have you seen.

You do not find Jim Crow in these faces. That absence is the argument. The oppression is off-frame because the sitters refused to let it sit for the portrait.

This is what survives in the Holsinger Studio Collection in Charlottesville — some ten thousand glass-plate negatives made between the 1890s and the 1920s, more than six hundred of them portraits of Black citizens of central Virginia, held now at the University of Virginia.

A measure of that record reached the walls in Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift, mounted at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library and curated by John Edwin Mason with Holly Robertson.

The studio belonged to Rufus Holsinger, a white photographer on West Main Street who, like any small-town tradesman, took whoever walked through the door.

He could not have known what he was keeping.

The defiance was never his. It belonged to the people who paid to be seen, and it echoes still, through every face that declined to look away.