Papers

Elizabeth Arnold-Hull

Elizabeth
Arnold Hull received a bachelor’s degree in archaeology from
Appalachian State University in 1999, and is currently pursuing a
Master’s in Public History, Museum Studies concentration, part-time at
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Employed until recently
as a manuscripts processor in Duke University’s Special Collections
Library, she has begun a new position as archivist/librarian for the
Forest History Society in Durham, NC.

Family photography
is a medium which has been approached from a variety of disciplines —
material culture, social research, art, visual culture, and social
history, to name a few. From these diverse perspectives emerges a
degree of consensus that family pictures function primarily as
reference points for identity formation and maintenance, frameworks for
community-building, signifiers of past achievements and of future
dreams, a means by which to portray families to others, and most
importantly, as documentary records to be preserved as enduring
legacies. These images can serve often overlapping purposes ranging
from intensely individual to defiantly public, even political.

As
a study of the photograph collection kept by the Popes, a successful,
well-educated, African-American family of Raleigh, NC, shows, the
importance of all of these functions was dramatically amplified for
Southern black families living as victims of the Jim Crow system, under
which their claims to identity, community, and other basic rights were
constantly challenged. Because of these ubiquitous threats, the
production, display, and distribution of photographs by families like
the Popes represented political acts of opposition to images of blacks
created by the dominant culture—examples of African Americans taking
control over their own representation in response to white supremacist
stereotypes.

Meanwhile, these photographs also fulfilled
important personal functions, allowing blacks to define and affirm
their own sense of beauty, identity, self-worth, and belonging. Under
the volatile circumstances of segregation, disfranchisement, and the
threat of violence against any black person who dared to step “out of
place,” such affirmation would have been crucial for maintaining
self-esteem.

The Pope family photographs provide an
extraordinary example of the multiple meanings contained within
historical images, and the opportunity they present for a clearer, more
individual picture of how racial identity has been constructed and
maintained through representation. To achieve such an understanding,
this study brings theories from multiple disciplines—history, visual
culture, and material culture—into dialogue, grounding theoretical
discussion solidly within the historical context.

The
range of functions served by family pictures, from personal to
political, takes on increased significance within the historical
framework of race relations in the American South around the turn of
the 20th century. By viewing the images created by “better-class”
African-American families as historical documents, signifiers of
status, personal belongings, and also as larger social and political
statements, our understanding of the black experience under Jim Crow
segregation is dramatically enhanced.