Browsing by Subject "Photographer"
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Item "Have your photo fine" : picturing complex personhood in John Palmer’s photographic archive(2018-05) Field, Katherine Gregory; Chambers, EddieOver a nearly fifty-year career, John Ellis Palmer created thousands of portrait photos in his Galveston, Texas photography studio. Palmer was an African American photographer who lived in Galveston from 1916 through his death in 1964, and his archive is housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Palmer’s photographic archive contains thousands of portrait and candid photographs of Black Texans, and documents the everyday lives of men, women, and children in his city. This archive has not been previously studied, and presents a rich and diverse body of images that picture Black life in the early through mid-twentieth century. Analyzing a subset of portrait and snapshot photographs labeled “Palmer’s Studio,” my thesis argues that this photographic archive visualizes “complex personhood” in Galveston’s Black community. Using “complex personhood” as a conceptual framework, I stress the fact that Palmer’s archive depicts real, complicated past people, and that we cannot not reduce his photographs to mere historical illustrations. Instead, we must recognize that lived experiences have and always will exceed simple historical categorization