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19th Century New Jersey African American Photographers

Presented by Gary Saretzky

This illustrated presentation examines four selected photographers of color who operated in the Garden State in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

African American photography dates back to 1840, the first year that daguerreotype portrait studios opened in the United States, when Jules Lion, a free mixed race painter who had studied in Paris, began offering daguerreotypes in his birthplace of New Orleans. Later in that same decade, Augustus Washington, born in Trenton, New Jersey, of African American-South Asian parents, opened a photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, but he apparently made only a few daguerrotypes in his home state where he learned the process. Other than Augustus Washington, New Jersey’s early Black photographers are not listed in bibliographies and encyclopedias about the medium’s African American pioneers. This illustrated presentation examines four selected photographers of color who operated in the Garden State in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: William M. Dutton in Jersey City, Isaiah Burton and Levi W. Bankson in Camden County, and Albert Thomas Moore, successively in New Brunswick, Atlantic City, and South River.

Gary D. Saretzky, archivist, educator, and photographer, worked as an archivist for more than fifty years at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Educational Testing Service, and the Monmouth County Archives. Saretzky taught the history of photography at Mercer County Community College, 1977–2012, and served as coordinator of the Public History Internship Program for the Rutgers University History Department, 1994–2016. He has published more than 100 articles and reviews on the history of photography, photographic conservation, and other topics, including “Exceptional Cameraworkers: Early Black Photographers in New Jersey,” published in New Jersey Studies, Summer 2023, available online.

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