Exceptional Cameraworkers: Early Black Photographers in New Jersey

Abstract

The few known African American photographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced significant challenges, including racial prejudice and competition from white photographers for both white and the relatively few Black customers. The New Jersey photographers examined here were no exception and this may help explain why images by an artist with a long career, William M. Dutton, are so hard to find today and why others, like Isaiah Burton and Levi Bankson, worked only briefly in the medium before moving on to other, more remunerative occupations. Beginning his photographic career at the end of the 1800s, Albert Thomas Moore achieved considerable success in the first part of the twentieth century in New Brunswick and South River but less so in Atlantic City. For additional illustrations to this article, see http://saretzky.com/download/black-photographers-keynote.pdf.