Photographing the race: The cultural politics of race, memory, and meaning in the photography of Richard S. Roberts, 1920--1936

African American studio photography exists as an important component of creative expression that affected the lives of early twentieth-century blacks regardless of socio-economic status by affirming the substance of African American life through the creation of a photographic record. A vast number of African American photographers enabled their black patrons to present themselves as historical subjects. This study focuses on the photographic work of Richard Samuel Roberts (1880-1936) of Columbia, South Carolina, and how photographs-as-visual memory exist as both a private and public terrain through which black identity has been historically negotiated. It is concerned with how the cultural politics of memory and remembrance worked to keep African Americans in a subsidiary position in the Jim Crow South, and of how the continued persistence of those memories operate to make an indelible impression of how southern blacks from that era are perceived and interpreted through photographic representations; it is equally concerned with the manner in which black self-imaging created a cultural barrier against structures of oppression by emphasizing the integrity of family, community, and black personhood.; Photographs of blacks as labor, as the depraved poor, and as objects of southern mythology shape the contours of popular memory and influence how southern African Americans are understood and categorized as a racial group. Images that do not portray black oppression are dismissed as positive propaganda and reactive self-imaging. Rather than being a reactionary form of cultural expression, this study argues that photography played a centralizing and regenerative role for southern black folk by addressing the cultural need to express the realities, hopes, and aspirations within their daily lives through the creation of visual memories.