Black Artists Behind the Lens
An exhibition in New Orleans explores the work of studio photographers since the 1840s.

When curator Brian Piper of the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) began to study the work of early Black commercial photographers in the 2010s, the subject was largely terra incognita. With very few exceptions, "their photographs were not included in the narrative of art photography," he said. Now Dr. Piper is helping to close that gap with a new exhibition, "Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers," the first museum show to focus on the artistry and social significance of these little-known men and women.

Sisters of the Holy Family, by Bedou

Opening at NOMA on Sep. 16, "Called to the Camera" includes more than 170 images by 41 photographers from the 1840s to the 1960s. "It highlights that Blacks were active in a very creative endeavor—good studio photography requires real skill and artistry—very early in the history of photography," said Bruce Barnes, the director of the George Eastman Museum, the world's oldest photography museum.

Alexander S. Thomas, by Ball

Their story begins soon after daguerreotypes were introduced in the U.S. in 1839, when "a small number of Black Americans began to make and sell daguerreotypes, in businesses that initially were called 'parlors' or 'galleries,'" Dr. Piper writes in the exhibition catalog. Portraiture was the prime subject, at least at first. Black patrons commissioned photographs for the same reasons whites did—as keepsakes and to convey their place in life, their respectability and their aspirations.

"Called to the Camera" features several portraits by this first generation of Black photographers, such as James Presley Ball, who operated a successful studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1850s and would photograph a number of celebrities during his long career, including Queen Victoria. In a portrait of Ball's brother-in-law Alexander S. Thomas from the late 1850s, the sitter strikes a dignified pose, formally dressed in a suit and tie, arm on a side table.

Ball's "Two Young Girls"

Black photographers sometimes made portraits for white customers, often creating warm depictions, like Ball's "Two Young Girls" (ca. 1891-1900), shown in a rural setting. Augustus Washington, who opened a studio in Hartford, Conn., in the 1840s, photographed Sarah Taintor Bulkeley Waterman, the young wife of a sea captain, in a formal pose. Washington soon would emigrate to Liberia, where he established a daguerreotype studio in Monrovia.

But Black photographers had an edge when working with Black clients, thanks to their experience with lighting dark skin shades and tightly curled hair. As if to document that, a 1940 photograph shows Morgan and Marvin Smith, largely self-taught twin brothers who were famed for photographing life in Harlem, lighting and fixing the hair of Sara Lou Harris Carter, one of the first Black fashion and advertising models.

After about 1910, some Black photographers joined white peers in adopting the techniques of pictorialism, using soft focus, short depth of field and relaxed poses to produce more artistic, expressive images. The show offers an example in the New York photographer C.M. Battey's 1915 portrait of Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington.

Marvin & Morgan Smith With Sarah Lou Harris Carter

Beyond portraiture, Black photographers also began to create more ambitious and sophisticated images. James Van Der Zee, a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, frequently manipulated negatives and assembled photomontages. His "Wedding Day, Harlem (Future Expectations)," from 1926, depicts the happy couple in an elaborate columned setting; in the foreground, Van Der Zee overlaid another negative to produce the vague image of the child they dream of having. "Family Album (Memories)," from 1938, inserts a ghostly image of a deceased girl hovering over her father and siblings as they peruse an album, a dog at their feet.

Photographers who started off in a studio often went on to create more artistic documentary images. Dr. Piper points to "Sisters of the Holy Family, Classroom Portrait" (1922), a crisp, highly stylized photo by Arthur P. Bedou that shows a group of New Orleans nuns reading, their habits creating an alternating pattern of black and white.

Austin Hansen's Eartha Kitt Teaching a Dance Class, c. 1955

Black photographers memorialized important occasions like birthday parties or the purchase of a new home or car. They chronicled basketball and football games, art and dancing classes, assembly lines and medical conventions. "Called to the Camera" includes photographs of the Glee Club of Tuskegee Institute in 1909 and a meeting of Collegiate Deans and Educators in Negro Schools at Howard University, around 1930.

From the beginning, Black photographers captured celebrities, too. The show includes four images of Frederick Douglass, including a daguerreotype made around 1855 by an unknown photographer and one by B.F. Smith and Son of Portland, Maine, from 1864. Later pictures include Austin Hansen's "Eartha Kitt Teaching a Dance Class at Harlem YMCA" (ca. 1955) and "Al Green in the Hooks Brothers Studio" (ca. 1968), a long-established photo studio in Memphis, Tenn.

"What's wonderful about the show is that we usually tell stories of social phenomena with a white cast of characters," Mr. Barnes said. "This show uses a different cast of characters to tell a story that's a universal story."