José María Mora, Napoleon Sarony, and the Migrant Surround in American Portrait Photography
Description:
Presented by Erin Pauwels, assistant professor of art history at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Leslie Ureña, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, moderated the Q & A. This presentation considers how the spaces of photographic portrait studios were constructed to facilitate the performance of diverse American identities during the late nineteenth century. José María Mora, a Cuban-born U.S. photographer, and his mentor Napoleon Sarony, a native French speaker born in Quebec, rose to prominence during the Gilded Age for staging lush portrait tableaus that deployed hand-painted backdrops and richly theatrical studio effects. Conventionally, the vivid artifice of their work has been connected to the commercial excesses of the period. Deeper consideration of both photographers’ immigrant status, however, helps illuminate how publicly circulated portraiture participated in the renegotiation of national types at an historical moment when more than 12 million new arrivals to the United States were reinventing and revitalizing what it meant to be American. The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the recent passing of Daniel B. Greenberg, whose generosity and that of his wife, Susan, makes the Greenberg Steinhauser Forum in American Portraiture possible. The program is hosted by PORTAL, the Portrait Gallery’s Scholarly Center.
