Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography

Upcoming7 November 2026 – 14 March 2027Free

Remarkable early photographs of and by Black Americans that tell powerful stories of identity, resilience, and self-representation. West Building.

Exhibition website

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On now Opening in November 2026

Preview: written before the show opened

One of the soldiers in this show is preserved on a glass plate under two inches tall. He was among the early Black enlistees in the Union army, and he paid extra to have the buttons on his jacket and the knife in his belt picked out in gold.

You start with James Presley Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge and Augustus Washington, Black photographers who opened studios in the 1840s and 1850s and, unusually for daguerreotypists, signed their portraits. Next come largely white-owned studios that photographed free and enslaved sitters around the Civil War, then the Black-owned studios of Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee. Many of the roughly 70 pictures were found at flea markets and antique shows by a Baltimore County history teacher, Ross Kelbaugh, and are on view here for the first time.

Many are cased daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes a few inches across, so expect to lean in close. It's in Gallery G30 on the West Building's ground floor, free with no passes needed.

Editor's pick

Early photographs of and by Black Americans, gathered around identity, resilience and self-representation. In the West Building.

Look for

Goodridge's studio cat
Look for a cat sitting on the studio chair, caught by Glenalvin Goodridge around 1858 despite the long exposure times of early photography.
The boy with a school bag
A small hand-coloured tintype shows a young boy standing with a school bag over his shoulder, a claim on the education African Americans had been denied.
The woman holding a book
In a tintype about two inches tall, a woman prominently holds a book, the same point about education made in a single prop.
The Hercules Family
A hand-coloured family portrait from James Presley Ball's Cincinnati studio, which he ran as Ball's Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West.
"Remember Me, Annie"
The show's lead image: a hand-coloured tintype of a young woman, set in a gold frame inside its small case.