The “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style and Racial Uplift” exhibit — on display at the local Trinity Episcopal Church until March 11 — features a series of portraits capturing African American Charlottesville residents from the 1920s. According to John Edwin Mason, curator of the exhibit and professor emeritus of history, the portraits showcase the dignity and pride of their subjects amidst heightened oppression at the time.
The portraits come from a collection of 10,000 glass plate negatives — glass sheets that were the main method of capturing images before film — given to the University in 1978 from the Holsinger Studio, Mason said. As the primary Charlottesville portrait studio of the late 19th and early 20th century, the negatives provided by Holsinger were all taken between the 1890s and 1920s. The exhibition chose a small sample from the over 500 negatives that captured African Americans, and was originally displayed in the University’s Special Collections Library in 2022 and 2023, drawing record numbers of visitors.
Mason said he sees the existence of these portraits as an extraordinary act of refusal of exclusionary historical narratives. According to Mason, the portraits were a way for African Americans to demonstrate agency in telling their own story instead of accepting the depictions thrust upon them by society…