P. H. Polk

Prentice Herman Polk was born on November 25, 1898, in Bessemer, Alabama, in the mining and steel country of Jefferson County. He was the son of Jacob Prentice Polk, a miner, and Christine Romelia Ward, a seamstress, and he grew up in the segregated Black South at the turn of the century.

In 1916 Polk enrolled at Tuskegee Institute intending to become a painter, but he was drawn instead to the camera by C. M. Battey, who led the school's photography department. He apprenticed, honed a studio craft, and joined the Tuskegee faculty in the late 1920s. In 1933 he became head of the photography division, and by the end of that decade he was serving as the institution's official photographer — a post he would hold for the rest of his life.

For roughly four decades Polk made Tuskegee's visual record. He photographed George Washington Carver in his laboratory, captured Eleanor Roosevelt seated in a plane beside pilot Charles A. "Chief" Anderson in an image tied to the Tuskegee Airmen, and portrayed visitors such as Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. His lens also turned to the civil rights era, from leaders to the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Beyond the institutional work, Polk's dignified studio portraits — including his celebrated "Old Characters" series of rural Black elders — secured his standing as one of America's essential African American photographers, recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1981. He died on December 29, 1984, in Tallassee, Alabama. He gave a people their likeness rendered with honor, and that gift endures.