P. H. Polk

Prentice Herman Polk (born 1898 in Bessemer – died December 29, 1984) was the official photographer for Tuskegee University from 1939 until his death.

Polk, son of a mine worker, enrolled at what was then the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in 1916 with an ambition to study art, unaware that founder Booker T. Washington had made no provision for non-"practical" instruction at the school. He rejected a suggestion to take courses in house painting. In his second year, Polk became the third student to enroll in the institute's newly-created photography program under the leadership of Cornelius Battey.

Polk left Tuskegee to work in a shipyard in Mobile County, but continued to study photography by taking correspondence courses which encouraged him to study how light is used to build up form in painted masterpieces. After completing the course he moved to Chicago, Illinois to join his mother and sisters there. He worked as a painter for the Pullman Palace Car Company during the day and for the telephone company in the evenings, but still found time to apprentice himself to portrait photographer Fred A. Jensen.

Polk married Margaret Blanche Thompson of Brunswick, Georgia in January 1926. Over the course of the next year he began going door to door seeking to find his own portrait clients. Not having much success and dreading the onset of another midwestern winter he moved with his wife and newborn son back to Tuskegee where he joined the faculty and opened his own photography studio. At the institute he assisted photographer Leonard Hyman, who had succeeded Battey as head of the division.

In 1932 Polk was promoted to succeed Hyman as head instructor and in 1939 he was named official campus photographer. Over the course of his career he made portraits of nearly all the faculty members and administrators and their families as well as the innumerable visitors to the campus, both humble and esteemed. He went out of his way to capture photographs of laborers and field hands for his "Old Characters" series even as he posed wealthy ladies in furs and jewels for glamorous portraits in his studio. He photographed Tuskegee scientist George Washington Carver over 500 times and also photographed the Tuskegee Airmen that trained near the institute for flying missions in World War II. His 1932 image, entitled "The Boss", shows an authoritative female farm worker whom he discovered setting up a produce stand near campus. She stands proudly in her everyday clothes, defying the viewer to dismiss her headscarf and apron as comical or picturesque, like the commercial portraits of "black mammies". The breadth and quality of Polk's work led some to label him a "Southern Van Der Zee" (for the Harlem renaissance documentarian James Van Der Zee.)

Polk remained a fixture on Tuskegee's campus for the rest of his life. During the time that collector Paul R. Jones was in Tuskegee to assist president Benjamin Payton with development efforts, he befriended the photographer. Jones purchased more than a hundred of Polk's photographs and instigated the publication of a monograph by Atlanta's Nexus Contemporary Art Center. The renewed attention on Polk's photographs before and after his death in 1984 led to several exhibitions. After Jones donated a large portion of his massive art collection to the University of Delaware in 2001, Polk's work became the focus of doctoral studies.

In 2010 an exhibition of Polk's work curated by Amalia Amaki was shown at the Birmingham Museum of Art.

References

• Weeks, Edward F. (1983) P. H. Polk. Birmingham: Birmingham Museum of Art
• Amaki, Amalia (2004) "Hidden Messages in the Photographs of P. H. Polk" in A Century of African American Art: The Paul R. Jones Collection. Rutgers University Press ISBN 0813534569
• "To Make a Picture: The Photography of P. H. Polk from the Paul R. Jones Collection" exhibit description (2010) Birmingham Museum of Art