Hand-Painted Photography
Black women in photography – as camera operators, studio owners, portrait subjects, and hand-colorists – have engaged with both visual and racial dimensions of color. The hand-painted photographs produced in Florestine Perrault Collins’s studio are particularly interesting in how they challenge conventions of gender, race, color, and photography. Analysis of her work hinges on the intersections of mediums and identities – Collins worked with colored pigment and black-and-white photography, and she held a unique social position as a Creole woman. Collins’s hand-colored photographs claimed agency and respect, while also subverting visual conventions and social hierarchies. Exploring these images reveals how Black women have practiced hand-coloring to transcend racial boundaries, reclaim the medium of photography, and overcome gendered limitations to artistic and entrepreneurial success.
McCarthy-Labostrie Wedding Party, 1946.
This wedding party is rendered in a variety of bright colors. Interestingly, only the women’s dresses have been hand-colored. Three of the female figures are in pink, two in blue, and one little girl to the far left wears green. It is unclear whether the colors serve as markers of familial relation or role in the wedding, but the resulting tone is joyous. The excited atmosphere of a wedding, lost in the stillness of the photograph, is regained through the variety of vibrant colors painted on afterward. The bright pink flowers, green foliage, blue backdrop, and warm yellow ground enhance the festive mood. More subtle, the touch of color on the lips and cheeks display an attention to detail appropriate for such a special occasion. Created for the very people it pictures, this photograph captures communal celebration.
Mildred Perrault, mid-1930s.
Collins used dress and accessory, accentuated by bright color, to embrace the disruptive nature of gender performance for the camera. Under typical conditions of employment, black women were forced to wear uniforms displaying deference to their white employers. Collins’ studio gave her clients the ability to showcase their status as working professionals, with the freedom to express themselves in front of a camera.
In this photo, Mildred’s stylish waved hair, hat, and thick patterned collar present her as up to date with the latest trends. Her red painted nails wrap around her collar, deliberately calling attention to her fashionable beauty choice. Presenting women with blushed cheeks along with bright red lips and red nails was fairly common.
Collins extended the agency she possessed to her broader community by portraying them freely and vibrantly in hand-painted photographs.
Jeannette Warburg Altimus, late 1920s.
For black women in the United States in the early 20th century America, hand-coloring could be used to achieve racial mutability: a strategy with tangible effects. Collins worked to establish her credibility and widen the opportunities available to her by highlighting her proximity to whiteness. This concept is embodied in this hand-painted photograph of Jeannette Warburg Altimus, one of Collins’s close friends. The headshot depicts Altimus in profile view. The contours of her cheeks and eyes are defined by deep shadow. The photograph is minimally retouched so that her lips are deep red and her cheeks are blushed. Lightness dominates this portrait, and Altimus’s fair complexion is emphasized. The light tone of her skin fades into the white of the background, a conscious choice which Dr. Anthony describes as a “racial sleight-of-hand” in Picturing Black New Orleans.
Collins navigated the racial boundaries of New Orleans, leveraging light skin tone to increase her credibility. She brought Altimus with her when she went to sign the lease on her new South Rampart studio building. Adopting this strategy made sense given Collins’s Creole background. She belonged to a family, community, and space where the classic “binary opposition” of black and white did not apply. Racial boundaries were complicated by differences in culture, language, religion, and politics. The fluidity of Creole identity came with anxieties surrounding social status and appearance. By employing photography and color, Collins and other Creole individuals were able to control their own visual representation. They moved in and among racial boundaries, claiming respectability based on social signifiers like skin tone.
Ideals of Hand-Coloring: Race and Color
When practiced by black women, hand-coloring became a provocative visual feature that challenged racial categorization. Hand-colored photographs of Creole and African American subjects reveal anxieties surrounding visual representation of skin color, threatening the black and white medium of photography as well as the black and white racial world.
By using color to evoke joy, Collins subverted the historic use of color to degrade. David Batchelor’s Chromophobia (2000) explains how color was devalued in Western culture: “it was made out to be property of a ‘foreign’ body– usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer, or the pathological.” The prejudice of color was racialized, making it particularly powerful to employ color in the presentation of the African American community.
Alfred Wall’s 1861 Manual of Artistic Coloring operates under the assumption that the skin to be colored is light. The ideal model said to be “lady” with a “fair and delicate” complexion. Even discussion of “darker skin tones” is accompanied by the warning that color should be kept “clean and bright, and not too deep in tone.”
An 1864 article published in twelfth volume of the weekly literary journal All the Year Round advises readers interested in having their portraits made to “keep [their] complexion clear, and free from tan and freckles whilst taking [their] delightful rambles at the sea-side.” Photographic coloring privileges whiteness. Blackness is completely erased from these manuals, referred to as “shadow” or “tan.”
Color in Collins’s photographs is a signifier of prosperity, celebration, and care. Her hand-colored photographs challenge the conventional use of photography and color, developing a new tradition of visual expression that caters to her community.
Image Credits
Lorraine McCarthy and Morris Labostrie Wedding, photograph by Florestine Perrault Collins, mid-1920s, by permission of Sonja McCarthy, courtesy of Dr. Arthé A. Anthony.
Mildred Perrault, Florestine’s sister, wearing a hat and with hand-painted fingernails, photograph by Florestine Perrault Collins, mid-1930s, courtesy of Dr. Arthé A. Anthony.
Jeannette Warburg Altimus, Florestine’s friend, wearing a hat, photograph by Florestine Perrault Collins, late 1920s, courtesy of Dr. Arthé A. Anthony.
Advertisement for Marshall Photo Oils, Sears Camera Catalog, 1961, https://www.flickr.com/photos/nesster/5890594922/in/album-72157627090216500.