Exceptional Camera Workers: Early Black Photographers in New Jersey

African American photography dates back to 1840, the first year that daguerreotype portrait studios opened in the United States, when Jules Lion, a free mixed race painter who had studied in Paris, began offering daguerreotypes in his birthplace of New Orleans. Later in that same decade, Augustus Washington, born in Trenton, New Jersey, of African American-South Asian parents, opened a photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, but he apparently made only a few daguerreotypes in his home state where he learned the process. Other than Augustus Washington, New Jersey’s early Black photographers are not listed in bibliographies and encyclopedias about the medium’s African American pioneers. This program examines four selected photographers of color who operated in the Garden State in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: William M. Dutton in Jersey City, Isaiah Burton and Levi W. Bankson in Camden County, and Albert Thomas Moore in New Brunswick, Atlantic City, and…