James A. Palmer

James A. Palmer, who signed his work J. A. Palmer (c. 1825–June 1896), was an Irish-American photographer who produced thousands of stereographs about life in Aiken, South Carolina and Georgia.

Personal life Palmer was born in Ireland and he moved with his family and settled in Rochester, New York when he was young. Teal states that son Charles was born in New York,

Career

Palmer specialized in photographs of the African-American community. He took family and personal portraits as well as images of their homes and scenes from cotton fields and other locations where they worked. Palmer's stereographs of the lives of African-Americans at work provide important information about how both white South Carolinians and African-Americans adjusted to the new reality. In 1864, he advertised this collection as illustrative of "Southern plantation life" in The Philadelphia Photographer.

In 1866, Palmer moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he worked as a photographer. Palmer's continuous documentation of the lives of African-Americans before and during the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877) placed him in a rarefied company.

At that time, African Americans who were freed from slavery due to the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) or who had been soldiers fighting for their freedom during the Civil War tried to assimilate into a society that did not welcome them. Schools and churches were established to provide a means to gain education by people of all ages and establish places of worship. During this period, citizenship of African-Americans was to be resolved, but they had the right to vote, purchase property, and gain employment.

quote|For we colored people did not know how to be free and the white people did not know how to have a free colored person about them.|Houston Hartsfield Holloway, a freedman

His stereographs also expose his own mindset. In 1882, he produced two stereographs, one entitled "The Wilde woman of Aiken" and the other "The Aesthetic Darkey", as a response to Oscar Wilde's assertion that anything could be beautiful. Palmer apparently staged a satirical photograph based on things he found repugnant and beyond the ability to be beautiful. To him, a black woman and a young black boy as well as a number of objects embodied that trait. He titled another image of children from the same family " We are all, all hue."

The way the Negro race is dying out. Whittaker family, 1874.

While he lived in Aiken, Palmer took advantage of its status as a winter resort and produced images of everything from the exteriors and interiors of churches to homes, public buildings, railroads and textile mills. In 1889, he contributed sixty-three photographs to illustrate Aiken, South Carolina as a Health and Pleasure Resort.

He worked as a photographer until his death in 1896.

Palmer's stereographs can be found in a number of collections, Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the International Center of Photography museum.

Gallery