Everyday Black Photography at the International African American Museum

By Parker Thompson

On our recent trip through (some) of the American South, I had the unique opportunity to see a dream come to fruition: my work on a major museum wall.

Five years ago, I established something called the “Always Been Project,” which focuses on collecting, preserving, and curating vernacular photography from Black life. Essentially, vernacular photographs are the kind of images which are born from and occupy everyday life. Think of snapshots, hand-assembled photo albums, photo booth strips, and the like. Geoffrey Batchen, an art historian and scholar who helped popularize the term, defined the sub-category as “what has always been excluded from photography’s history: ordinary photographs, the ones made or bought (or sometimes bought and then made over) by everyday folk from 1839 until now, the photographs that preoccupy the home and the heart but rarely the museum or the academy.”¹

But why study and exhibit vernacular photos, especially with regard to Black life? Reflecting on the history of photography, we find that the arrival of most vernacular forms—especially the snapshots of the twentieth century—marked a major democratic turn in the medium. Throughout the nineteenth century, photography was primarily the domain of professionals and wealthy amateurs. Not only were costs high, but technical expertise was required, particularly to make photographs. Still, Black or otherwise, many people had photographs made on their behalf, usually in studio portraits. However, to make a photograph for oneself was significantly more complex.

However, the arrival of Kodak’s first snapshot camera in the late 1880s signified the beginning of a new era in photography, one which could be understood by Kodak’s once-popular snapshot motto: “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest.” The introduction of the snapshot camera revolutionized photography’s accessibility and popular appeal. Within a few decades of the snapshot’s arrival, folks from diverse backgrounds, both racial and economic, had the power to create images, relatively easily and affordably.

On snapshots, the popular Black feminist scholar and social critic bell hooks wrote of their power for everyday Black folks, who were all too familiar with the popular caricatures and violent imagery that dominated Black representation, especially in Antebellum America. In her essay “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” hooks explained that the snapshot camera became “a political instrument, a way to resist misrepresentation as well as a means by which alternatives images could be produced.” She continued, “For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place … these images, the world they recorded, could be hidden, to be discovered at another time.”² The Always Been Project embraces that notion of rediscovery to showcase the ways in which Black folks chose to imagine themselves and their worlds, particularly in the midst of Jim Crow.

In Charleston, South Carolina, my home city, our cohort had the opportunity to take an early look at the International African American Museum’s new exhibition “re/Defined: Creative Expressions of Blackness from the Diaspora,” which features photographs from Always Been, which have since joined the permanent collection of the museum. To share this with my cohort, a group of thoughtful and talented burgeoning museum professionals, was truly special. Furthermore, the acquisition and display of the images at a new, exciting, and highly respected museum helps validate the unique power of vernacular photography in Black life.

1. Geoffrey Batchen, Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (MIT Press, 2002), 57. ↩︎
2. bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (Penguin Books, 2025), 60. ↩︎