Introduction
Inside his photo studio, Hugh Mangum created an atmosphere -- respectful and often playful -- in which hundreds of men, women, and children felt both at ease and aware of themselves in front of the camera. Hugh Mangum on Main Street: Portraits from the Early 20th Century, features a selection of images from the Post-Reconstruction South that shows personalities as immediate as if they were taken yesterday.
Born and raised in Durham, Mangum began establishing studios and working as an itinerant photographer in the early 1890s, traveling by rail through North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Mangum attracted and cultivated a clientele that drew heavily from both Black and white communities. Though the era in which he photographed was marked by disenfranchisement, segregation, and inequality -- between Black and white, men and women, rich and poor -- Hugh Mangum portrayed all of his sitters with candor, humor, and spirit. Above all, he showed them as individuals, and for that, his work -- though largely unknown -- is both historically vital and personally mesmerizing. Each client appears as valuable as the next, no story less significant.
Though Mangum's life was brief, it encompassed momentous shifts amid a turbulent and complex period in American history. Born in 1877, the year Reconstruction ended, Mangum died at age 44 from influenza in 1922, only three years after the end of the First World War.
The Penny Picture Camera that Hugh Mangum used was ideal for creating inexpensive and accessible novelty portraits. Anywhere from six to twenty-four sitters could be photographed on one negative, reducing cost and labor. As a result, the order of the individual images on a single Penny Picture print (as presented here) reflects the order in which his diverse clientele rotated through the studio, the prints reasonably representing an afternoon or a day's work for this gregarious photographer.
A century after their making, Mangum's portraits -- preserved within Duke University's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library -- allow us a penetrating gaze into individual faces of the past, and in a larger sense, they offer an unusually insightful and unorthodox glimpse of the early 20th century American South.
The Mangum Family and Durham share a significant history
The photographer, Hugh Leonard Mangum, was born on June 3rd, 1877, on East Main Street, where the Alexander Ford building stands today. His father, Presley Jackson Mangum, was a talented furniture maker and an early Durham postmaster, possibly the first. His mother, Sally Farthing Mangum, was a notable cook and gardener. Mangum, the oldest of six children, was followed by his brother, Leo, and sisters, Pattie, Lula, Allie, and Sallie. In 1891, the family bought the McCown House on the Eno River as a rural summer escape; it was roughly six miles from their home downtown. Two years later, when Hugh was 16, they moved to the Eno home permanently.
Background Photo: Hugh Mangum (bottom center) with his sisters
It was there beside the Eno River that the photographer built a narrow and intimate darkroom -- his first -- in the southeast corner of the tobacco pack house on the Mangum family property, today known as West Point on the Eno. Inside, he developed glass plate negatives exposed at his downtown Cottage Studio, located near the Jourdan Transfer building which once stood on the corner of Main Street and South Corcoran. A curious and charming soul, Mangum traveled throughout his career, setting up hundreds of temporary studios for days or weeks at a time. Along the way, he also partnered with colleagues to maintain permanent studios in the Virginia towns of Pulaski, Roanoke, and East Radford. Despite the distance, Mangum often returned to his hometown. He married Annie Carden of East Radford, Virginia, in 1906, and the couple, soon joined by their daughter, Julia Elizabeth Mangum, frequently visited Mangum's family at their home on the Eno.
Mangum Street, which intersects both East Main Street and West Main Street, was named after William Person Mangum (1792-1861), an attorney and politician elected to the US Congress in 1823 and to the US Senate in 1831. A founding member of the Whig party, he was an 1836 Presidential candidate on the Independent ticket. William Mangum's exact relation to Hugh Mangum is not clear.
The Essence behind Mangum's Work
There are no indications that Mangum intended for his photographs to serve any political purpose, but it's likely they did for many of his sitters. By the turn of the 20th Century, Black Americans were well practiced at engaging the power of photography to challenge racism, as well as to visually create and celebrate Black identity. For Mangum's Black clients, a studio portrait was one way to emphasize and attest to their accomplishments, prosperity, beauty, and individuality. They shared the pictures with friends and made them the foundation of family photo albums, ultimately using them to shape their own identities and those of future generations.
The decades in which Mangum lived included both acclaimed Black thinkers, like Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, and Zora Neale Hurston, and many brutal years of 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, and lynching peaked in the 1890s. Yet, at the same time Hugh Mangum was making portraits, members of the Black community were building on the strength of their own values and institutions. Durham was known to have an unusually prosperous Black community. Black-owned businesses included furniture, cigar and tobacco factories, textile and lumber mills, brickyards, churches, a library, schools, and a hospital. The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company was founded in 1898 under the leadership of John Merrick, a freed slave, and Dr. Aaron Moore. In 1907 Richard Fitzgerald, the most prominent Black businessman in Durham, founded the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, which still operates today. North Carolina Central University was founded by Dr. James E. Shepard in 1910 as the National Religious Training School, an institution that, throughout the Jim Crow era, provided professional development for Black residents of Durham and beyond.
A Quest to Identify Individuals Portrayed in the Collection
As anonymous sitters, the personalities in the portraits collectively symbolize the triumphs and struggles of a pivotal era in American history that encompasses Post-Reconstruction, the First World War, Women's Suffrage, and debilitating legislation aimed at immigrants and Native Americans. Yet at heart, this is a collection of individuals, all with their own remarkable and unique stories. Many hundreds of distinct biographies are preserved in Mangum's glass plate negatives, waiting to be found and named, yearning to enrich the understanding of our history and our present.
During Mangum's lifetime, he likely exposed thousands of glass plate negatives. Sadly, most of these were destroyed through benign neglect after his death or are now lost, as were any records of the names and dates associated with them. The glass plates that survived -- just over 1000 -- were salvaged from a Durham attic and the tobacco pack house where Mangum built his first darkroom. For decades, the forgotten negatives in the attic decayed and those in the pack house caught the droppings of chickens and other creatures. Today they are in various states of an unfortunate, yet often poetic, deterioration. Some plates are broken and on others the emulsion is peeling away, but the hundreds of vibrant personalities in the photographs prevail, engaging our emotions, intellect, and imagination.
Hugh Mangum on Main Street: Portraits from the Early 20th Century was curated by Sarah Stacke and was on display at the Museum of Durham History in 2014.
This digitized display was created by Clay Harrison in 2022 for use on the Museum's website, through Adobe Express.
All photos courtesy of Duke University's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Credits:
All photos courtesy of Duke University's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library