Getty Museum

[Portrait of a Black Man]

Date

about 1856

Medium

Daguerreotype

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

A proud young man sits for his daguerreotype portrait, with his right hand confidently clutching the label of his jacket. He is well dressed for the occasion in a light-colored top hat and bow tie. He gazes intently outward, concentrating on the act of being recorded by the camera, possibly for the first time. He is unidentified, but his dress and bearing, coupled with the early date of the photograph--some seven years before emancipation came for African Americans at the end of the Civil War--suggest that he was a free man of color.

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