Augustus Washington, Daguerreotypist

Subject

Augustus Washington; Photographs; Portraits

Description

Strange as it may appear, whatever may be a colored man’s natural capacity and literary attainments, I believe that, as soon as he leaves the academic halls to mingle in the only society he can find in the United States, unless he be a minister or lecturer, he must and will retrograde.
–Augustus Washington, letter to the New York Tribune, 1851

Imagine you are a young man of mixed-race heritage (African-American father and Asian mother) in 1840s America who wants to attend college but lacks the financial resources. What might you do to bring in money to support yourself? Augustus Washington (born 1820/1821) decided to try his hand at the new art of daguerreotype photography. Little did he realize that he was making a major career decision which would affect the rest of his life!

In the winter of 1843, Augustus Washington was enrolled in his freshman year at Dartmouth College when he turned to photography to earn some income. He soon left Dartmouth, and within five years had a thriving studio in Hartford, Connecticut. By 1850, he was a prosperous photographer and a husband. For many a man, the story might have ended there with the coda that he lived happily ever after. But, for Washington, it was just one chapter in an amazing man’s story.

In the 1850s, Washington realized that for the foreseeable future, despite his talents and accomplishments, he would be relegated in America to second-class citizenry at best, and possibly much worse in the climate of fear during the era of the Fugitive Slave Act. He began to consider emigration and decided to settle in Liberia under the auspices of the American Colonization Society. In November 1853, with his wife and two small children in tow, he sailed for Monrovia, Liberia.

With money saved from his business in Hartford, Washington set up a daguerreotype studio in Monrovia. In the two examples above, Chancy Brown the Liberian Senate’s sergeant at arms, is one of several portraits Washington took of Liberian legislators and executives. On the right is an unidentified woman, likely a member of the Urias McGill family, a rarity in the fact that it portrays a woman of color and interesting as she holds a daguerreotype case in her lap. In both portraits, it is striking how the subjects gaze seemingly unblinking, looking directly at the camera without an iota of self-consciousness or discomfort apparent.

Creator

Posted by: Jeff Bridgers

Source

https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2013/02/augustus-washington-daguerreotypist/

Publisher

loc.gov

File