Exhibition

The Paris Albums 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois

17 Sep 2010 – 27 Nov 2010

Regular hours

Friday
11:00 – 18:00
Saturday
12:30 – 18:00
Wednesday
11:00 – 18:00
Thursday
11:00 – 21:00

Cost of entry

free

Save Event: The Paris Albums 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois2

I've seen this

People who have saved this event:

close

Autograph

London, United Kingdom

Event map

The Paris Albums 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois

About

At the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, W.E.B. Du Bois, the leading black intellectual and civil rights activist, and Thomas J Calloway strategically employed 363 photographs in the American Negro Exhibit. It was during the same year in London, at the Pan-African conference in July 1900, when Du Bois would famously declare, ‘The population of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line'. Exhibited in the UK for the first time, The Paris Albums present a selection of 200 portraits that Du Bois compiled for the volume, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. Retrospectively, Du Bois' remarkable collection of photographs can be read as the origins of a visual construction of a new African-American identity. As such, it provides an extraordinary insight into the conditions of black culture at the end of the nineteenth century, only thirty five years after the abolition of slavery. According to the historian Shawn Michelle Smith, these photographs functioned as a counterarchive, one that contested the logic of scientific racialism popular in the late nineteenth century, and thus transforming the photographic portrait into a site of African-American resistance. Ranging in genre from mug shot aesthetic to bourgeois theatrical portrait, Du Bois' intention was to produce a comprehensive, alternative view of the black subject, ‘an honest straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.' One-hundred and ten years later, Autograph ABP presents a selection from this important archive to re-examine the critical question of representation in the 21st Century.

What to expect? Toggle

Comments

Have you been to this event? Share your insights and give it a review below.