The names James P. Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington may not be widely known, but each man was a pioneer from the dawn of the photographic era, and each produced images that tell a story of Black life before the Civil War, as well as the role artists played in abolition. For 45 years, a collector named Larry West searched for the works of these three Black daguerreotypists who were active in the 1840s in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New England, respectively. The Smithsonian American Art Museum recently acquired West’s…
