Early Photography and the Question of Agency
The National Gallery of Art opens Remember Me in November 2026, gathering roughly 70 early photographs from its own collection through March 2027.
Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography opens at the National Gallery of Art in Washington on 7 November 2026 and runs to 14 March 2027. Around 70 works come from the museum's own holdings and include daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, gelatin silver prints and cabinet cards, many hand-coloured and shown in ornate folding cases. Alongside James Van Der Zee, the selection includes John Plumbe Jr., Joseph D. Marsters, Glenalvin Goodridge, Daniel Freeman and Fred S. Tisdell.
The list of processes is itself a history of cost and access: a daguerreotype is a unique, expensive plate, a tintype is cheap and portable, a cabinet card circulates because it can be reproduced. The show follows dress, family, military service and social standing before, during and after the Civil War. Its real subject is agency rather than representation, since paying to sit for a portrait meant exercising some control over one's own image.
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Source
- Colossal · 10 August 2026
This piece was written by 2C Magazine from the facts in the source above. No sentences were taken or translated from the source; the commentary is our own.
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Illustrative image · Photo: Ekrulila / Pexels — free licence
The image is not the subject’s own photograph; it was chosen from a free-licence archive to represent the topic. No image from the source publication was copied.
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