In honor of Black History Month, I thought it might be interesting to present some biographies of prominent African American photographers. In 2003, there was a three part exhibition presented by the Oakland Museum of California entitled Reflections in Black: Smithsonian African American Photography. Separate exhibits broke down the history into segments. The First 100 Years (1842-1942), Art and Activism (1950's & 60's), and A History Deconstructed (contemporary photographers). I'll follow the same format to present some of these groundbreaking photographers throughout the month of February.

The First 100 Years


James Presley Ball( 1825-1904)

J P Ball

The daguerreotypist James Presley (J.P.) Ball was born in 1825 in Virginia, probably a freeman. As a young man he learned daguerreotyping and opened his first studio in Cincinnati at age twenty. The city was a center for anti-slavery activity as well as the photographic arts, and Ball became a leader in both. He wrote and published a pamphlet depicting the horrors of slavery to accompany a large panorama in his gallery, and served as the official photographer for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. By the 1850s, his business had achieved tremendous success. Frederick Douglass, Jenny Lind, and the orator Henry H. Garnet, among other notables, sought out his services, and he became quite affluent.

Ball was a lifelong entrepreneur. After more than three decades in Cincinnati, he moved to Minneapolis and ran a studio there; and in about 1887, went to Montana with son James Presley, Jr. Now well into his sixties, he opened another busy daguerreotyping studio in Helena. Among other projects, he photographed the building of the state capitol. Ball was elected a delegate to the Republican convention in Montana territory in 1894, and nominated to run for county coroner (he declined this nomination, citing the demands of his business). Ball’s son edited a newspaper, the Colored Citizen, which is a very valuable source on African Americans in territorial Montana.

The information about J.P. Ball’s personal life is sketchy. Besides James Presley, Jr., he had at least one other child, Estella Ball. In 1887 he married a schoolteacher named Annie Ewing, who was probably his second wife. It appears that he moved to Seattle in about 1900 and, now in his seventies and suffering from rheumatism, opened his last studio called Globe Photo. Records suggest he moved to Hawaii for his health within a few years, and died there in 1904.

James Presley Ball’s extensive body of photography is housed at the Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati Art Museum, Montana Historical Society, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, as well as in private collections.

*Biography of J P Ball is from www.blackpast.org


Portrait by J P Ball (c. 1850)

Reflections in Black:Smithsonian African American Photography