Thomas E. Askew
Thomas E. Askew. Self-Portrait. 1890-1900.
Thomas E. Askew (1847 – 1914). American.
Never heard of Thomas E. Askew? Don’t be surprised. Most people haven’t. But tens of thousands of people saw his photographs at the Paris Exposition (world’s fair) of 1900.
Little is otherwise known about Thomas E. Askew. He was born in 1847. For a time he was a slave. He married a young woman named Mary in 1869, and they eventually had nine children together. He worked as a photographic printer for the C. W. Motes Studio in Atlanta before opening his own studio in 1896.
Thomas E. Askew. 1890-1900.
We know, too, that his original home, studio, and equipment were destroyed in the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917, three years after the artist’s death.
What we can tell from the images that survive is that, while a large, educated, black middle class grew up in the ashes of post-Civil War Atlanta, it appears that Thomas Askew became the community’s most prolific, and perhaps first, photographer. His portraits, group shots, and photographs of his own family help tell a story of a flourishing, albeit segregated, African American middle class culture in Atlanta.
Thomas E. Askew. 1890-1900.
We also know that, for the 1900 Paris Exposition, W.E.B. Du Bois joined Daniel Murray, Assistant Librarian of Congress, and Thomas J. Calloway, primary organizer, in creating The Exhibit of the American Negroes, which included hundreds of uncredited photographs. Several of these images have since been attributed to Thomas E. Askew.
The exhibit was a seminal event in which African Americans took the lead in depicting themselves through an effort that was organized, curated, written, and photographed by African Americans. The purpose of Du Bois, Murray, and Calloway was to show the accomplishments and progress made by African Americans since the end of slavery 40 years earlier.
Thomas E. Askew. 1890-1900.
To accomplish this, the exhibit included statues, books, a bibliography, a collection of patents, charts, graphs, and 500 or more photographs of African American men, women, schools, homes, families, businesses, and churches.
Sadly, we will never know exactly how many of the photographs were made by Askew, but we do know that Du Bois conducted his research for the exhibit in Georgia, where he apparently collected the photographs. And indications are that Askew’s contribution was significant.
Thomas E. Askew. 1890-1900.
In describing the impact of photographers like Askew, Deborah Willis says, in her book A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress:
“I would argue that black photographers and their subjects believed that defining their own identity was a significant step in the fight against negative representations. Photography played a role in shaping people’s ideas about identity and sense of self; it informed African American social consciousness and motivated black people by offering an “other” view of the black subject. In a sense, photography was used as what I call ‘subversive resistance.’”
Thomas E. Askew. 1890-1900.
Nothing, in the end, is more subversive than taking back the narrative from the dominant culture and telling one’s own story. The photographs attributed to Askew continually speak to the dignity and self-determination of Atlanta’s African American community in the face of Reconstruction and Jim Crow—as documented by a former slave.