Digital Snapshots

Understanding the significance of the Montgomery Family Photography Album, constructed over the course of the 1870s and 1880s and currently held at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, first requires a brief overview of the family’s exceptional history. Benjamin Thornton Montgomery was an accomplished engineer, machinist, and agronomist. Born into the institution of chattel slavery in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Montgomery was enslaved by Joseph E. Davis, the older brother of the future President of the Confederate States Jefferson Davis. He ran a small dry-goods store on the Davis plantation, even establishing a line of credit with wholesalers in nearby New Orleans. After the Civil War, Montgomery leased the Davis plantation lands from their largely insolvent owner, before purchasing them outright in 1867 and establishing a cooperatively run agricultural enterprise and instantly becoming one of the largest cotton producers in the region. Despite Montgomery’s early success, the Davis family reacquired the land in 1881, yet another reversal that was all too common among Black landowners in the post-Reconstruction south. Undeterred by the setback, in 1887 Montgomery’s son, Isaiah T. Montgomery, along with his cousin Benjamin Green, founded the all-Black town of Mound Bayou, a self-governing and economically self-sustaining town in the Mississippi Delta where Black rural life thrived.[i]

Against this historical backdrop, a family album filled with ninety photographs of the Montgomery family provides an exceptional point of entry into what art historian Sarah Lewis refers to as the “centuries-long effort to craft an image to pay honor to the full humanity of Black life.”[ii] The Montgomery family photography album represents a powerful symbolic artifact by constructing an extended familial kinship network. A close study of the album’s material, aesthetic, and political dimensions will reveal the centrality of photography in the struggle for social and representational justice.

Upon opening the album’s ornately tooled leather cover, a manufacturer’s stamp printed in red ink announces that this album was patented in 1865 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by William W. Harding, the proprietor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a publisher of photographic albums. The proliferation of similarly manufactured albums followed the exploding popularity of cheaply produced paper photographs mounted on cardstock called cartes-de-visite, a production format introduced to the United States from France earlier in the decade. Individual photography studios often stamped these prints with the name and location of their business as a means of advertisement. Following the patent page, an index written in blue ink in neat, cursive script lists the portrait subjects that appear throughout the album. Unfortunately, the author and date of the index is unknown, a common occurrence in albums primarily viewed by a private audience of family and friends.

These photographs offer many of the conventional features of nineteenth century studio practice and middle-class portraiture. The first photograph to appear depicts a young Martha Robb Montgomery, the wife of Isaiah T. Montgomery. She sits in three-quarter profile wearing a full patterned dress with a white lace collar and dark trim, a shining braid of hair crowning her head, with her folded arms resting neatly in front of her on a piece of studio furniture. Another photograph of Susan A. Lewis shows her standing in front of a painted backdrop that depicts an outdoor garden scene. While such painted backdrops were commonplace in most studio settings, the intricately gnarled and twisted tree trunk on which Lewis delicately places her gloved hands may have been unique to M. T. Frederichs Vicksburg, Mississippi studio, where the photograph was taken. Frederichs also produced a magnificent portrait of Louesia Green seated in front of another painted backdrop, this one suggesting an interior setting filled with natural light pouring in from an open window. The book held in Green’s lap signals her status as a middle class educated woman. A half-length portrait of William Thornton Montgomery produced by Shreves & Murray in Palestine, Texas shows him wearing a neatly fitted wool suit, a pair of spectacles, and a gold chain that loops from his vest button to the inside of his coat, presumably attached to a pocket watch. When considering such portraits against the pervasiveness of racist caricatures in the popular white press and the emergence of lynching photographs as an element of racial terror in the post-Reconstruction era, we find in these pictures cultural critic bell hooks’ claim that “the camera was the central instrument by which Blacks could disprove the representations of us created by white folks.”[iii]

Departing from the images themselves, a focus on the proprietor’s stamps found on individual photographs conveys the surprising geographic network of the Montgomery family. The studios of H. J. Herrick and M. T. Frederichs, both located one hundred miles south of Mound Bayou in Vicksburg, Mississippi, appear most frequently. However, photographs of friends and family members produced in Jackson, Mississippi, Oberlin and Cincinnati, Ohio, St. Louis, Missouri, Nashville, Tennessee, Evansville, Indiana, and Palestine, Texas are also found inserted into the album’s pages.[iv] These locations attest to historical and familial circumstances. For instance, after a brief period of employment on Union naval vessels during the Civil War, Benjamin Montgomery was able to relocate to Cincinnati in 1862 or 1863, as was his son, Isaiah, while the Montgomery daughters attended college in Oberlin after the war’s end. The album format therefore represents a powerful technology for constructing a space of familial intimacy among loved ones separated by time and space. This is particularly so in the immediate aftermath of chattel slavery, an institution that systematically disrupted the structures of Black families across the Americas.[v]

Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, orator, and most photographed man of the nineteenth century, also makes an appearance in the Montgomery album. Two appearances, in fact: prints of Douglass from sometime in the 1880s can be found on subsequent album pages. In the first, Douglass’s carte-de-visite occupies an entire page, whereas in the second his image sits alongside a portrait of Isaiah Montgomery and two unidentified subjects. During his lifetime, Douglass delivered multiple public lectures on the power of photography. He viewed the technology as a supremely democratic art that could truthfully reveal the humanity of its subjects while inspiring viewers to overcome the prejudices of their society. Douglass claimed that the power of what he called “picture makers” derived from their ability to “see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.”[vi] Despite Douglass’s vehement public criticism of Isaiah Montgomery’s participation in the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890, which effectively ended the state’s brief experiment in multi-racial democracy, his appearance in the Montgomery album signals the two men’s shared belief in the significance of photography for Black self-representation.[vii]

The Montgomery family photography album is a remarkable artifact that rewards close study and repeated viewings. From the perspective of an art and photographic historian, the album underscores a keen awareness on behalf of its makers that photographs formed a key element in the ongoing struggle for social, democratic, and representational progress.