by Emily Price
In The University of Akron Archives and Special Collections, there is a plethora of negatives and studio pictures from the Evelyn and Horace Stewart Collection. I was curious why a lot of the photos were black and white negatives, inversions of photos, rather than in color when the technology was available at the time to create photos in color.
Not to mention, Dr. Nunn presented an interesting angle to my research about the representation of Black individuals in photography during this time. Evelyn and Horace Stewart often showcased the Black community–their lives and activities–in Akron, OH. They owned a photography studio on 11 ½ N. Howard Street starting in 1934, and were stationed there for decades. How could they capture the lives of the Black community with technology that “idealized white subjects,” according to Leslie Wilson in USA Today’s article, “Fact check: Civil rights-era images weren’t intentionally made black and white?”
The Stewart Collection – and this post – features images of Black Akronites whose names aren’t attached to their images. If you recognize any of these people, please let us know, at roundhowardstreet@gmail.com.
Interestingly, these negatives such as the one above can be inverted through the use of your phone if you are looking at archival collections like the Evelyn and Horace Stewart Collection. To learn more about this technology, check out Sophie Sennings’s “Tech Talk” article here.
First, what are negatives? Negative photography dates back to 1826. Nicephore Niepce created the photograph titled “View From the Window at Le Gras” where the Frenchman “captured this image on a piece of metal using a camera obscura and light-sensitive silver salts scrubbed on the surface” (“History of Negative Photography”). Now, negatives are used in contact printing, whereby they are developed from film to create a print. Therefore, it is more likely that Evelyn and Horace Stewart, as photographers, simply have the unprinted negatives that they had kept from their clientele. Dr. Nunn suggested that it was possible that there are printed versions of these photos, but not in the Archives.
Now that it is more clear as to why the collection is mostly negatives, color photography is another matter of importance for the subjects of Horace and Evelyn Stewart’s photography. According to the same “History of Negative Photography” article, 1935 marked the beginning of color in photography “with the introduction of Kodachrome, a color reversal film created by Eastman Kodak.” However, as mentioned before, color photography often did not serve Black individuals in the way that it did white people.
The article “The Racial Bias Built Into Photography” by Sarah Lewis explores the aspects that have complicated capturing certain races in film, stage, or in photography. Lewis states:
“Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market. For example, developing color-film technology initially required what was called a Shirley card. When you sent off your film to get developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman with brown hair named Shirley as the measuring stick against which they calibrated the colors. Quality control meant ensuring that Shirley’s face looked good.”
Lewis mentioned that it was not until the mid 1990s that there was a multiracial “Shirley” from Kodak to use for film but it was not implemented universally because of digital photography emerging.
With all this in mind, it would be interesting to explore more about the methodology in the Evelyn and Horace’s photography studio to uncover how they would try to do justice for their clientele and capture their features and skin tone most accurately.
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