J.W. Black

James Wallace Black (February 10, 1825 – January 5, 1896), known professionally as J.W. Black, was an early American photographer whose career was marked by experimentation and innovation.Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century photography, Volume 1. CRC Press, 2008; p.164+

Biography

He was born on February 10, 1825 in Francestown, New Hampshire.

After trying his luck as a painter in Boston, he turned to photography, beginning as a daguerreotype plate polisher. He soon partnered with John Adams Whipple, a prolific Boston photographer and inventor. Black's photograph of abolitionist John Brown in 1859, the year of his insurrection at Harpers Ferry, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

In March 1860, Black took a photograph of poet Walt Whitman when Whitman was in Boston to oversee the typesetting of his 1860 edition of ''Leaves of Grass''. Black's studio at 173 Washington Street was less than a block from the publishing firm of Thayer and Eldridge, who apparently commissioned the photograph to promote the 1860 edition.

On October 13, 1860, two years after the French photographer Nadar conducted his earliest experiments in balloon flight, Black made the first successful aerial photographs in the United States in collaboration with the balloon navigator Samuel Archer King on King's hot-air balloon, the ''Queen of the Air''. He photographed Boston from a hot-air balloon at 1,200 feet (8 plates of glass negative; 10 1/16 x 7 15/16 in). One good print resulted, which the photographer entitled ''Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It''. This was the first clear aerial image of a city.

Almost immediately, aerial reconnaissance would be put to use by the Union and Confederate Armies during the American Civil War, though there is no credible evidence that aerial photography was successful.

Black later became the authority on the use of the magic lantern, a candlelight-powered projector that was a predecessor of today's slide projectors. By the late 1870s Black's business largely consisted of lantern slide production, including his famous images of the Great Boston Fire of 1872, published a photographic album titled ''Ruins of the Great Fire in Boston, November 1872''.

He died on January 5, 1896 and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Collections of his work

* Boston Athenaeum
* Boston Public Library
* George Eastman House
* Historic New England
* Massachusetts Historical Society
* Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

References

Further reading

* In Memoriam: JW Black. Wilsons Photographic Magazine, March 1896
* Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century photography, Volume 1. CRC Press, 2008.

External links

*

Boston Public Library
on Flickr. James Wallace Black Photographs

Cambridge Historical Society
on Flickr

Image gallery

File:Sarah Fuller by James Wallace Black c1860s.jpg, Sarah Fuller, c1860s
Image:John_Brown_portrait,_1859.jpg, John Brown, 1859
File:Aerial photograph of Boston, 1860.jpg, 1860 photograph of Boston taken by Wallace from a tethered balloon
Image:Walt Whitman, by Photographer James Wallace Black, Boston, March 1860.jpg, Portrait of noted American poet Walt Whitman, by photographer James Wallace Black, March 1860
Image:1862 JW Black Photographist BostonDirectory.png, Advertisement, Boston Directory 1862
Image:GloryOfTheSeas 1869 byJWBlack PEM.png, Glory of the Seas in shipyard of Donald McKay, 1869
Image:1872 AfterFire Boston byJWBlack SmithsonianAmericanArt 1994.91.27 1a.jpg, After the Boston Fire, Washington Street. 1872

{{DEFAULTSORT:Black, James Wallace
American portrait photographers
1825 births
1896 deaths
Photographers from Massachusetts
Artists from Boston
Burials at Mount Auburn Cemetery
19th century in Boston
19th-century American photographers