Battey, Cornelius Marion “C.M.”

Impact on the world

Working from studios in Cleveland and New York in the pictorialist style, Battey became, alongside Arthur P. Bedou, one of the two photographers Booker T. Washington relied on most, documenting Washington’s life and travels from around 1900 until Washington’s death in 1915, and his portraits of Black statesmen and writers regularly appeared on the covers of The Crisis, The Messenger, and Opportunity. His 1911 composite photogravure, later published as Our Heroes of Destiny, visually linked Frederick Douglass, Du Bois, Washington, and Paul Laurence Dunbar with George Washington to assert Black Americans’ place in the national story. In 1916, with funding from Kodak founder George Eastman, Battey became head of Tuskegee Institute’s newly created photography department, where he trained a generation of Black photographers including his protege P.H. Polk, also profiled in this collection, while documenting campus life until his death; most of his original negatives were later lost to poor storage conditions.

Life & background

Born August 26, 1873, in Augusta, Georgia, and raised in the North, Battey began his career in a Cleveland photography studio before moving to New York, where he spent six years as superintendent of the Bradley Photographic Studio on Fifth Avenue and later headed the retouching department at Underwood & Underwood. He opened his own Battey and Warren Studio on Mott Street, built a reputation photographing Black and white public figures alike, including Presidents Calvin Coolidge and William Howard Taft, and in 1916 relocated to Tuskegee, Alabama, to lead the institute’s photography program until his death there on March 14, 1927, at age 53.

Sources

1. Smithsonian American Art Museum; African American Registry; Swann Auction Galleries