Hugh Mangum
Hugh Mangum (June 3, 1877 - March 12, 1922) was an American photographer who worked in the American South from the 1890s through 1922 at the height of Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation and discrimination. Like a few other photographers in the South at the time, Mangum seemed to have maintained an open door policy in his itinerant and studios, and welcomed blacks and whites alike. His glass plate negatives, found in a family barn slated for demolition, were brought to light almost fifty years after his death. Biography Hugh Leonard Mangum was born June 3, 1877, on Main Street in Durham, son of Presley J. Mangum, a Durham postmaster, and Sally Mangum nee Farhting. In 1891, wishing to escape the bustle of a growing Durham, Mangum's father bought a house six miles North of the city, on a property of mills and tobacco barns, known as the McCown House at West Point on the Eno. The family used the house as a summer home for two years and moved to this more rural spot permanently in 1893. As told by his brother Leo, who outlived Hugh by more than four decades, Hugh was invited at the age of sixteen to attend Trinity College (later Duke University) but chose instead to study fine arts in Winston-Salem at Salem College, the oldest women’s educational institution in the United States. There is, however, no record confirming Mangum's studies at Salem College. A box of Hugh Mangum's photographs with the date 1897 was found in 2016. Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris used this information to guess that Mangum began making professional portraits in 1897, though many of his images were made earlier. His traveling studio had a straight-forward approach: affordable pictures, quickly produced, and as far as is known –– no records kept of the persons portrayed by his camera. Using mostly simple backgrounds and natural light, the pictures sharply delineate hair, clothing and body language. Though he may have begun traveling earlier, Mangum was riding the rails by 1899, the year he began a handwritten log of the towns he visited. That log, begun on the inside of a suitcase, eventually migrated to the inside lid of a large traveling trunk, and provides us with some of the best clues we have about where he worked. The beginning of Mangum’s itinerant career also coincides with legalized segregation in North Carolina, beginning with the mandated separation of Black Americans and whites in railroad cars and passenger waiting rooms. As the oppression of Jim Crow worsened, Hugh Mangum continued to travel, photographing people of all colors and from all walks of life at prices that allowed even the most humble to afford his services. Hugh Mangum visited eight to ten different towns a year, some more than once. He usually remained in a town for one to seven days and would visit several in a row before returning to Durham for a stay of several weeks to months. By matching the towns in