Cornelius Marion Battey

Cornelius Marion Battey was born on 26 August 1873 in Augusta, Georgia, and was raised in the North, where he first entered the craft that would define his life. He began his photographic training in a studio in Cleveland, Ohio, before moving to New York City, where his skill carried him upward through the trade.

In Manhattan he worked for six years at the Bradley Photographic Studio on Fifth Avenue, rising to superintendent, and later headed the retouching department at Underwood & Underwood, one of the era's foremost studios. He eventually opened his own house, the Battey and Warren Studio on Mott Street. Working in the pictorialist style, he produced some of the most accomplished portraits of prominent African Americans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

His camera became a chronicle of Black leadership. He photographed Frederick Douglass in 1893, extensively documented Booker T. Washington until Washington's death in 1915, and composed "Five Negro Immortals" in 1911. His portraits reached the public on the covers of The Crisis, The Messenger, and Opportunity, shaping how a nation pictured its Black statesmen and thinkers.

In 1916 Battey became the official photographer of Tuskegee Institute and, with founding support from George Eastman of Kodak, established and led its photography department until his death at Tuskegee, Alabama, on 14 March 1927. Through his lens, a generation of Black Americans was rendered with dignity and permanence — honored here as the artist who taught a people to see itself in beauty.