A black family’s photo album

The pages of the photo album had been soiled by water, making them both coarse and puffy. The front and back covers were missing, and some photos had been deliberately cut out. It was lying in a glass case ready to be sold at one of my favorite auction houses.  

The small-to-large snapshots in the black-construction-paper album formed a photographic history of one particular family, but it reminded me of my own. I remembered gluing those same types of photos to the same type of album decades ago as keepsakes. That was the time of Kodak cameras that made it easy for anyone to record their fun times.  

 

We weren’t the only ones. Countless families undertook the ritual, and some of those photos – either singly or in albums – show up pretty often on the auction tables. I have a stash of old photo albums myself, taken decades ago. Inside are even some pictures from my childhood. Will my family members just toss them when I’m gone? What about yours?   

For black people, photos like these were the chronicles of how we actually lived and not how we were stereotypically portrayed. In our real world, we got married, worked at jobs, bought cars and houses, lived in caring neighborhoods among good people and enjoyed ourselves.   

 

The photos in the album covered many areas of these people’s lives. You can see them walking their street of rowhouses and standing outside a single-family home with Adirondack chairs in the front yard in a city that could easily be Philadelphia. You can see children in their Halloween costumes trick-or-treating (one child looks like he’s wearing black face!). You can see them in swimsuits at the beach. You can see a teenager fresh from a fishing trip holding up about a half-dozen fish. You can see a young man posing in his khaki Army uniform with the date 1959 imprinted on the photo.   

At the auction house, I decided to bid on the album. I wasn’t the only one: Someone else had already tried to lay claim to it. An auction-goer had left a bid, which wasn’t surprising. Anything resembling black memorabilia produces much interest and sparks spirited bidding.  

I got the album for $22.50. I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it yet, so I put it aside. Recently, I decided to take a closer look. The people in the photos were obviously middle class, and were living a good life.  

 

 The photos reminded me of some that had been auctioned off a couple months ago at another auction house. Those were from the 1920s, and showed a family both middle-class and politically aware. I was outbidded on those photos, which also shattered the myth about what and who African Americans were and are.  

Both groups of photos were much like those included in an exhibit mounted by W.E.B. DuBois and Thomas H. Calloway at the Paris Exposition in1900. They assembled an exhibit showing the diversity of black people in the United States. The Exhibit of American Negroes included 500 or more photos of prosperous black people at home, church and in their businesses.  

Here are photos from the album I bought at auction, a sampling of a family’s life. Click on the first photo to start the show:  

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