P.H. Polk
Mildred Hanson Baker, 1937
Mount: 16 x 20 inches
Provenance
Comes from the personal collection of Lee Beasley who wrote an article on Prentice H. Polk for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine in 1980.
The article's publication in the magazine coincided with the publication of Mr. Polk’s first book, a 1200-monograph by Atlanta’s Nexus Press as well as a major exhibition of his work at Nexus Gallery of Photography that February, followed by inclusion in an exhibition of black photographers that March at the High Museum. The photograph was gifted to Mr. Beasley
Further images
P.H. Polk Biography
Prentice Herman Polk was born on November 25, 1898, in Bessemer, Alabama. After his father's death he took his father's given name, becoming known professionally as P. H. Polk. He arrived at Tuskegee Institute in 1916 at eighteen, intending to become a painter "like Van Gogh or Rembrandt"-but that plan changed when he heard C. M. Battey, then head of Tuskegee's Photography Department, describe the possibilities of the medium. In 1924 he moved to Chicago to continue his training under the photographer Fred A. Jensen. Polk returned to Tuskegee in 1927 and opened his own studio in the town. He joined the Institute's faculty the following year and became head of its Photography Department in 1933, a post he held until 1938. After a brief attempt to run a satellite studio in Atlanta, he returned to Tuskegee in 1939 as the school's official photographer, a role he kept for the rest of his working life while continuing to run his private studio.
Polk developed a sharp, direct style, using strong lighting to foreground the individuality of his sitters rather than smooth his images over. He worked with comparatively modest equipment relative to many of his contemporaries, and critics have noted his technical command of the medium despite these material constraints. He was a practiced user of "Rembrandt lighting"-a technique named for the Dutch painter's chiaroscuro portraiture, in which a single light source and a reflector create strong contrast between the illuminated and shadowed areas of the face and figure against a dark background.
Over nearly five decades behind the camera at Tuskegee, he photographed the Institute's most prominent visitors and faculty-George Washington Carver, Eleanor Roosevelt, Joe Louis, Paul Robeson, and Martin Luther King Jr. among them-alongside the farmers, laborers, and middle-class residents of Macon County who made up his studio clientele.
Polk's photographs were shown internationally, including in an exhibition that traveled to the Soviet Union and Nigeria, and domestically at institutions including the Museum of Natural History in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1981 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and an accompanying exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery; the Birmingham Museum of Art mounted a solo show of his work in 1983. He described his strongest images as "accidents" born of his struggle to get the right shot in the right focus.