Ball, James Presley

Impact on the world

After an unsuccessful first attempt at a one-room studio in 1845, Ball returned to Cincinnati in 1849 and, with his brother-in-law Alexander Thomas, built Ball & Thomas into what contemporary accounts called “the finest photographic gallery west of the Allegheny Mountains,” with nine employees and a clientele that included P.T. Barnum, Jenny Lind, Charles Dickens, and Ulysses S. Grant’s family. A committed abolitionist, Ball published an 1855 pamphlet and 600-yard panoramic painting titled “Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States” depicting the horrors of the African slave trade, and in 1887 served as official photographer for the 25th-anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. After his Cincinnati studio’s assets were liquidated in the early 1870s, Ball worked as an itinerant photographer across the Deep South and Midwest before settling in Helena, Montana, in 1887, where he photographed the territorial capitol’s construction and became a civic and political leader in the small Black community there; he died in Honolulu, Hawaii, on May 4, 1904, having relocated for his health.

Life & background

Born around 1825 in Frederick County, Virginia, to free Black parents, Ball learned the daguerreotype process from Black Boston photographer John B. Bailey and worked as an itinerant photographer through Pittsburgh and Richmond before settling permanently in Cincinnati in 1849. He built his gallery into a nationally celebrated studio through the 1850s and 1860s, then, after financial setbacks, relocated repeatedly over his final three decades — to Mississippi, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, Seattle, and finally Honolulu — continuing to photograph and remaining civically active everywhere he lived; his granddaughter, Alice Ball, would later become a pioneering chemist. He died in Honolulu on May 4, 1904, at age 79.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Cincinnati Museum Center; EBSCO Research Starters