Addison Scurlock
1883 — 1964 · The lens of Black Washington; Howard University's photographer; the Scurlock look, kept now by the Smithsonian
Addison Norton Scurlock was born on the nineteenth of June 1883 at Fayetteville, North Carolina, son of George Scurlock, a Reconstruction-era politician and businessman who moved the family to Washington in 1900. Apprenticed around 1900 to the photographer Moses Rice, he opened his own business from his parents' home in 1904, and in 1911 hung his name over 900 U Street: the Scurlock Studio, which would fix Black Washington's image for the better part of a century.
His craft had a name — the Scurlock look: patient lighting, careful posing, the retoucher's discretion, every sitter rendered in full dignity. Booker T. Washington sat for him in 1910; Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Madam C. J. Walker, Duke Ellington, and Marian Anderson followed, along with the panoramas of banquets, congregations, and commencements that are now the ledger of a community's self-regard. From the early 1900s until his death he served as Howard University's official photographer.
The studio was a family seat: sons Robert and George joined in the 1930s, the studio's press service and newsreels carried Black current events to the Lichtman theaters, and in 1948 the sons founded the Capitol School of Photography for returning veterans. The studio worked on until 1994, thirty years past its founder.
Addison Scurlock died in Washington on the sixteenth of December 1964, at eighty-one. In 1997 the Smithsonian acquired the studio's archive — some quarter million negatives — so the look he made is now a national keeping. Honored be Addison Scurlock, who showed a people to itself with the dignity the age withheld.
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