Hugh Mangum

Hugh Mangum - Untitled #4

Technique: Archival inkjet print

Artist Biography: Hugh Mangum was an American photographer of the 19th and early 20th centuries who specialized in portraying people of various races and social classes. He was born in 1877 in Durham, North Carolina, and began photographing in his teens. He worked primarily in North Carolina and Virginia, and was noted for his ability to capture the personality of his subjects and his interest in human diversity.Throughout his career, Mangum photographed a wide range of people, from farm workers to prominent African American and white leaders. His images are notable for the way they present people of different social and ethnic backgrounds with dignity and respect. He often photographed his subjects in spontaneous poses and casual interactions, reflecting his interest in human connection.Mangum also experimented with creative photography techniques, such as overprinting and manually altering photographic plates, which gave his images a unique and artistic quality. Although he was not widely recognized during his lifetime, his work has been rediscovered and valued in the modern era for its contribution to the history of photography and its depiction of human diversity.Today, his work has been exhibited in several galleries and museums in the United States and has been the subject of several books and documentaries. His work has been described as an example of photography's ability to connect people and create a historical record of the cultural diversity of an era. In short, Hugh Mangum was an innovative photographer who captured the human diversity and dignity of his subjects through his ability to connect with them and his photographic creativity.

 

In this landmark project we have collaborated with Duke University to bring the work of Hugh Mangum (1877-1922) to light for the first time in Europe. After his unexpected death in 1922 at the age of 44, Mangum's black and white glass plate negatives were stored and forgotten in the barn on the family farm in Durham, North Carolina. Doomed to demolition in the 1970s, the barn was saved at the last minute and, with it, this amazing and extraordinary living document of a turbulent era in the history of the American South. In the late 1890s, Mangum ventured out as a traveling portrait photographer, traveling primarily in North Carolina and Virginia during the rise of the Jim Crow era, a period that saw the push for black and white segregation laws. Despite this, his portraits reveal a clientele that was racially and economically diverse, and depict lives marked by hard work and opulence, all imbued with a strong sense of individuality and entrepreneurship. One of the most profound surprises of Mangum's photography is its freshness, artistically speaking. He had a charm and curiosity that is often reflected in the faces of his models. In other images, their presence becomes invisible and the models seem lost in their inner, private worlds. Mangum's ability to capture these moments of vulnerability and intense self-recognition lies at the heart of his gift as a photographer. The people in these portraits look back at us from a century past, through the indelible marks of loss and indifference. We might think that the difference of a century is considerable, and in many ways it is very true. However, these portraits suggest to us that the distance between the past and the present, between them and us, is far less than we would expect.