P. H. Polk: Carry Me Home

He was called Mister Polk, even by people who had known him for many of his 85 years. It seemed, in these casual times, an odd formality. But it was an indication of the respect many residents of Tuskegee, Alabama, shared for the photographer who documented nearly seven decades of their history. 

Portraits of great Americans hang in Polk's studio. Dr. George Washington Carver, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Martin Luther King, Jr., W.C. Handy, Paul Robeson, Eubie Blake, and Will Rogers are among the history-makers who posed in front of the view camera that Polk said was "as big as a piano." 

Among the celebrated were others, equally important for the pages of history written on their faces, the faces of the common folk Polk fondly referred to as his "characters." In photographs taken "just for myself," The Cotton Pickers toil under a sky filled with clouds as plump and white as cotton bolls; the grinning, snaggle-toothed Trash Man poses proudly with his shabby mule; The Boss, a formidable woman in threadbare clothes, glares defiantly, hands on hips, wearing her awesome hauteur and dignity like a battle shield. 

Polk's modest studio, little used after cataracts began to cloud his vision several years ago, once attracted a steady stream of middle-class blacks from the Macon County area where he was the only black photographer for 35 years. A rosewood bench, its floral fabric now faded and dusty, once held graceful young women in delicate dresses, and restless children squirming in their Sunday best. A plywood panel painted with stately oaks once stood behind dapper, self-conscious young men and solemn patriarchs. 

Of Polk's bread-and-butter portraiture, Lee Fleming wrote, in an Art in America review: "When we take into account the society of which he was a part and from which he drew, a society restrained by convention, [Polk's] talents for converting mundane family pictures into records of mood and personality is all the more startling. His is a style generated from gentle attempts to discover his sitters. . . ." New York Times photography critic Gene Thornton added, "Polk shows the descendants of slaves to be as refined and accomplished as the descendants of their masters." 

Three years ago Prentice Herman Polk sat in a worn armchair in his Tuskegee living room, surrounded by hundreds of photographs, all 8 X 10 silver prints. Piled on a long couch, propped against tables and chairs, packed into cardboard boxes on the floor — the products of 66 years of work. 

Leaning forward in his chair, his brown eyes made enormous by thick-lensed glasses, he spoke in a soft, halting voice: "I came to Tuskegee [Institute] in 1916 to become an artist, a painter, but they didn't have art classes then. I was afraid I'd wind up painting houses. Then, one day at a meeting in 1917, a man stood up and said that any young man who thought he had an artistic temperament should come see him in his office." 

The man was C.M. Battey. Battey had been summoned from New York to serve as personal photographer to the Institute's founder Booker T. Washington and, more importantly for the young Polk, to teach photography. Polk enrolled in Battey's class. 

"I knew right away I'd found the thing I wanted to do," he recalled. "After that first day in Battey's class, I never drew another picture. I made all my pictures with a camera." 

Polk, however, described his teacher as a selfish man, adding, "He didn't want to teach us all he knew. His dream was to be remembered as the greatest Negro photographer who ever lived and maybe he was afraid if we knew all he knew we'd be better." 

Only a handful of Battey's glass-plate negatives survive. The hundreds he took at Tuskegee were accidentally destroyed, an event Polk believed was the elder photographer's due for withholding information from his students. "Now," Polk said, shaking his head, "no one will ever know if he was great or not." 

Eager to learn what he suspected Battey was omitting from his lectures and demonstrations, Polk supplemented his classroom education with a five-dollar correspondence course. Through it he was exposed for the first time to the works of Rembrandt. Fascinated by the painter's skillful use of light and shadow, he began trying to duplicate the effect in his photographs. 

"The shadow's the thing," he said, moving one hand over a portrait of Dr. Carver amid gleaming glass beakers and test tubes in his cramped Tuskegee laboratory. "Without it, every face is just another face. The fellow who put together that correspondence course may not have been a photographer. He may just have been a researcher. But he gave me a greater understanding of photography and made me want to go on. 

His experiments with light and shadow produced portraits far removed from the slick, homogeneous works of most commercial studios. In a portrait of son Theodore, taken in 1952, the young man's handsome profile is separated from surrounding shadow only by a shallow light curving along the edges of his forehead, nose, and faintly smiling lips. He holds a cigarette in an attitude that should seem theatrical but which seems instead completely artless. The pose is diagonal, starkly formal, and yet Polk's ability to create an almost palpable atmosphere conveys the impression that the viewer is intruding on this young man in an intensely personal moment of reverie. 

After a two-year apprenticeship in Chicago and an unsuccessful attempt to set up a studio in Atlanta, Polk returned to Tuskegee. In 1928 he became Tuskegee Institute's chief photographer, a position he would hold for more than 50 years. There he photographed thousands of students, faculty members, administrators, and distinguished visitors. In his own studio, he made portraits of the Tuskegee elite — debutantes, prom queens, brides, businessmen — charging three dollars for each 8 X 10 silver print, the same price Dorothea Lange was then being paid for her negatives by the Farm Security Administration. 

Like Lange, Polk's preference was for photographing "characters." "You don't have to search for character in these faces," he explained, pointing to the lined, weary faces of two elderly men who posed for him in the 1940s. "It's staring right at you. That's why I call them my 'characters'. They're not worried about how they look like younger or wealthier men and women are. They know who they are and it shows in their faces." 

In 1974, 61 years after Polk enrolled in C.M. Battey's class, his work began to attract national attention. Exhibitions were organized at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Museum of American History in New York, and at galleries and museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Birmingham. Life magazine published a two-page photo essay. Articles in other magazines and newspapers followed. In a 1980 ceremony in New York City, photographer Gordon Parks presented Polk with the International Black Photographers Award. 

Polk recognized that his work might have received attention long ago if he were not black, but he refused to dwell on what might have been. Back then, he said matter-of-factly, blacks weren't allowed to do anything. 

"Oh, there were a few doctors and then there was Carver," he continued. "But he was a genius. The ordinary Negro was ignored. Now our chances of doing rewarding things are better." 

This odyssey is well-documented in Polk's work. He did not set out to record the Southern black's long, bitter journey from the cotton fields and the white man's kitchen to Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge and beyond. Nevertheless, that is an important part of what his work has to offer present and future generations. 

Polk's photographs reveal too his ability to communicate with his subjects, to put them at ease with his mischievous wit, to find in each the particular quality that is theirs alone. Polk seems to understand his subjects just as far as they want to be understood, to believe in them as they would like to believe in themselves. As a result, the radiant elegance of affluent young brides, the careworn pride of impoverished rural folk, the uninhibited grace of children are enhanced rather than diminished by the intervening camera. 

Author Pearl Cleage Lomax, in her book P.H. Polk (Nexus Press, 1980), describes the humanity of his art: "His photographs give us a look inside his heart, a look in the mirror, a glance over our shoulders. His photographs give us a look through his inner eye and let us see that yes, oh yes, we're just who we thought we were. Who we hoped we were." 

Polk rarely took photographs after 1980. He joked that he already had enough to last a lifetime. A book about Dr. Carver and one about what he called "the vanishing Negro" were to be his final contributions to history. But thoughts of retirement were far from his mind. A reporter once asked him when he planned to stop working. Polk, then 83, responded: "When I'm 93 I'll stop and wait until they carry me home." 

PH. Polk died in January 1985, at age 85, leaving a photographic legacy that will enlighten generations seeking insight into the human spirit.