Lucy
One of the first photographs on display in Photography in Tennessee, on view through Nov. 9 at the Tennessee State Museum, is a portrait of a little girl named Lucy. She’s about 9 in the ambrotype, which was made sometime between 1854 and 1860. She has big Christina Ricci eyes, her tidy hair is parted down the middle and pinned back. Her expression is disarmingly contemporary and inquisitive, closer to Rudy Huxtable than the stiff Victorian archetype we might expect. But the details matter — installed next to Lucy’s ambrotype is her bill of sale. In 1859 she was sold for $647 to Thomas J. Waggoner of Davidson County.
The exhibition of early photography is brimming with examples from the medium’s first 100 years. They remind us that representation is never neutral, and that the lives of those behind and in front of the camera continue to reverberate — shaping not only how we read these pictures now, but how they once worked in the world.
Tranae Chatman is the museum’s curator of social history, and she explains how valuable Lucy is to the museum’s collection.
“It’s rare to have photos of enslaved people, period — but to have the photo and the bill of sale together is so rare, and it just sticks with people.”
The Tennessee State Museum holds more than 100,000 artifacts, and Photography in Tennessee includes only a fraction of that collection. Even so, the exhibition feels expansive, its range rewarding both repeat visits and extended contemplation. Alongside photographs, ambrotypes, tintypes and cartes de visite (CDVs), the galleries display antique cameras, clothing, stereoscopes, letters and other ephemera. Together they form a layered education — in history and photography, representation and politics, religion and cultural memory.
The exhibition began as an examination of Tennessee’s earliest photography studios. “We really wanted to tell the story of the photographers who were taking these pictures,” Chatman explains, “but also the stories of the people who were being depicted.”
A section called “Shifting Focus” includes photos of servants and enslaved women who are supporting the white babies they care for. One photograph is mounted in a case that, when closed, puts a filigreed frame around the face of the child — the servants in the background disappear as if they were removed by an early Photoshop eraser tool.
There are dozens of photographs and other objects to look at, and each has well-sourced information — the show is complex but goes down easy. A CDV from around 1870 shows a formally dressed couple outdoors, sitting atop the striking vista of Lookout Mountain. A view camera built by McMinnville-based photographer W.S. Lively is about the size of a washing machine and yields similarly massive glass plates. A cabinet card from around 1880-1910 shows two young women in Japanese kimonos, posing with paper fans splayed out behind their heads. A staged photograph of two in-uniform policemen from around the 1890s demonstrates how important a person’s occupation can be to their identity.
“There’s a preemptive nature to photography,” says Chatman. “Because this thing is going to exist, and you’re going to have to share it with people, and you want people to perceive you in a very specific way. … What’s the difference between how you’re being depicted and how you really are? It’s complex. Like, yes, it’s who they are, but it’s also how they want to be perceived.”
Chatman has been at the Tennessee State Museum for three years. A Nashville native, she went to Hume-Fogg high school downtown, and has an undergraduate degree from MTSU in history, as well as a master’s in business. This is her first museum job, and although she’s worked on multiple exhibitions, Photography in Tennessee is the first she’s led. It’s an overwhelmingly positive start to her curatorial career.
Little Betty
“When I look at history,” she says, “especially through photographs, I think of how much people have endured, how much this country has endured, and how much we’ve already gotten through.”
Toward the end of the exhibit is Betty, a photograph on a postcard from around 1940 that has a handwritten note addressed to Aunt Lizzie. Betty looks a little younger than Lucy, the enslaved girl from the museum’s opening vitrine, and she wears a knit hat and sweater paired with matching pants that are already frayed at the knee. The picture was made at Horace Brazelton Studios — Brazelton was a Black photographer working in Chattanooga — and entered the museum’s collection just last year. After its acquisition, curators sifted through the scant evidence on the front and back of the card, following the clues like breadcrumbs. Eventually, a census from West Chattanooga in the 1950s provided a match, a small window back into the life of the girl in the frame.
Betty works like Lucy’s counterpoint, and the two images offer a kind of keyhole view into the show’s larger argument. They are two little girls at opposite ends of the exhibition, each staring into the lens of a camera that fixes them in place and carries their stories forward.
