Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897 – 1922

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Photo courtesy of Duke's Rubenstein Library

A Hugh Mangum negative from Where We Find Ourselves

Hugh Mangum, born in a newly incorporated Durham in 1877, was a traveling portrait photographer in North Carolina and Virginia whose open-studio policy resulted in an unusually diverse array of subjects during the Jim Crow era. After Mangum’s death in 1922, his glass-plate negatives were forgotten in a tobacco barn on his family farm for half a century, only to be rediscovered when the barn was about to be torn down. Now Mangum’s portraits, worn by time in aesthetically surprising ways, are the subject of the new book Where We Find Ourselves: The Photographs of Hugh Mangum, 1897-1922. Coauthored by Center for Documentary Studies faculty members Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris, the UNC Press publication (forthcoming in early February) is coordinated with an exhibit opening at The Nasher on January 19, preceded by this January 18 kickoff event featuring a talk and book signing by the coauthors. —Lucy Marcum