A 19th-century carte de visite portrait of Jack Garrison, a formerly enslaved African American man who made his life in Concord.
Tiny, black dots speckle the surface of the sepia-toned portrait. The man in the picture sports a collared jacket over a work apron, his countenance framed by thin-rimmed spectacles, a beard, and tufts of hair that just about blend into the background. In his hand, he holds a walking stick so prominently displayed that it almost becomes the focus.
This rare photographic image of a formerly enslaved man named Jack Garrison was taken between 1855 and 1860, a period when portraits of African Americans were uncommon. The carte de visite is the focal point of “Portrait Mode,” an exhibit at the Concord Museum that asks viewers to consider whose memory gets to be preserved.
“We’re really taking up this question of whose faces become part of history,” said Reed Gochberg, associate curator and director of exhibitions at the Concord Museum. “And I think really considering the power of portraits to make an individual life visible.”
The exhibit, on view until Feb. 23, 2025, includes a variety of other portraits of different scales and sizes. Garrison’s carte de visite measures 4.25 by 2.5 inches. But the collection also includes even smaller images that may have been kept in lockets and larger ones in the form of oil paintings.
The diversity of photo types showcases the history of picture-making in the 19th century and the evolution of technologies for creating portraits, Gochberg said.
Hollow-cut silhouettes, in which the profile of a subject was cut and mounted on a black background, became a favored, inexpensive form of portraiture. Decades later, daguerreotypes and ambrotypes
gained popularity. Because these forms of photography were fragile and
light-sensitive, they often became keepsakes housed in containers or
cases, highlighting their use for circulation among family and friends.
All
of the photos in “Portrait Mode” are connected to Concord somehow, but
they all symbolize different lives, experiences and moments.
The
Concord Museum’s collection includes three copies of the portrait of
Garrison, who was born into slavery and moved to Concord in the early
19th century where he lived as a free man, got married and had children.
The one on display in “Portrait Mode” was donated in 1913 by a woman
named Olive Brooks Banks.
Before
donating the image, Brooks Banks inscribed it with Garrison’s story.
Although questions remain, the tale goes that when relatives from the
South visited Concord in the 1850s, Garrison hid until they left. It was
shortly after the passage of the
Fugitive
Slave Act, which required that enslaved people be returned to their
owners even if they lived in a free state. By then Garrison had called
Concord home for over four decades. His relatives’ visit seemed to
threaten the sense of security he had built for himself and his family.
“It’s
even more powerful to think of him sitting for this portrait at that
moment in time,” Gochberg said, “and choosing to make himself visible,
and choosing to meet the gaze of the camera.”
The
portrait invites audiences to imagine what Garrison’s life might have
been like at the time the picture was made. He was in his late 80s and
would have had to travel to Boston to have the photo taken. How did he
get there? What was the weather like that day? Had he been working
before sitting for the portrait, as evidenced by the apron? Did the
jacket belong to him or had he borrowed it for the portrait?
“Looking
more closely raises these questions about the kinds of intentional
choices that he was making in terms of how to represent himself,”
Gochberg said.”
The
fact that Garrison’s walking stick — a gift and the commemoration of
which is speculated to have been the reason for the portrait — and carte
de visite were collected speaks to his status as a respected part of
this community.
Some
photos in “Portrait Mode” were passed down through family members, such
as a portrait of William Johnson Damon, a 21-yearold man who was killed
in the Civil War. The portrait, created posthumously decades later
likely from a daguerreotype, was donated to the museum last year.
Objects such as this emphasize the idea of memory and loss, Gochberg
said.
While some
subjects had their names etched in history, some portraits remain
unidentified. Yet Gochberg chose to include them in the collection.
“We may not know the name of the person whose face we’re looking at from say, 1840, but at one point in time somebody did.”
Including them in the exhibit presents an opportunity to restore their place in history.
“Portrait
Mode” is in conversation with other similar exhibits at the Concord
Museum and aligns with the organization’s broader initiative to expand
the stories it tells about American history and the figures who are
considered a part of Concord’s history, Gochberg said. The special
exhibit currently on view, “What Makes History? New Stories from the
Collection,” opened in the spring and asks similar questions about what
objects are collected and how museums choose to tell stories.
“Portrait
Mode,” she added, was also informed by other historical projects at
institutions in Massachusetts and nationally, such as “Framing Freedom,”
an exhibit at the Boston Athenaeum that showcased the albums of Harriet
Hayden and other African American abolitionist figures in the 19th
century, and last year’s “Unnamed Figures” at the American Folk Art
Museum.
Exhibits such
as these encouraged Gochberg and her colleagues to look at familiar
objects from the Concord Museum’s collection in new ways and consider
the different stories that can emerge from a single object as in
“Portrait Mode.”
“By
putting these portraits of well-known subjects in conversation with
portraits of lesser-known figures like Jack Garrison, or even of figures
who are now identified or whose names were never recorded, I think that
it, in many ways, is showing how all of these people are part of
history,” Gochberg said. “It is expanding the story of who gets to have
their life recorded. So even if we don’t know the name of the subject,
we can meet their gaze looking at a small portrait of them that was
preserved in a locket or in an album.”