Bedou, Arthur Paul
1882-1966 · Contribution: 1903-1960s
Studio and documentary photographer
Served as Booker T. Washington’s personal photographer from 1908 until Washington’s 1915 death, then built a nearly six-decade career as one of New Orleans’s leading studio photographers, documenting Black Creole family life, Xavier University, and the city’s Catholic institutions
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Quick facts
- Born
- 1882, New Orleans, Louisiana
- Active since
- 1903
- Category
- Press & Photography
- Best known for
- Booker T. Washington's personal photographer and leading chronicler of Black Creole New Orleans
Impact on the world
Bedou created both an intimate record of Booker T. Washington's life and an irreplaceable visual archive of Black Creole family and institutional life in early-20th-century New Orleans.
An alternative history
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Sources
- Primary recordFind
Tuskegee University Archives
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Related visionaries
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Polk, Prentice Herman “P.H.”
1898-1984
Served as Tuskegee Institute’s official photographer for roughly four decades, developing a sharp-focused, high-contrast portrait style used to document George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee Airmen, and both the campus elite and rural working-class Alabamians in his celebrated “Old Characters” series
Scurlock, Addison Norton
1883-1964
Built the Scurlock Studio into the definitive photographic chronicle of Black Washington, D.C., for six decades, becoming Howard University's official photographer and the portraitist whose work signified having “arrived socially” in the city's Black community
Roberts, Richard Samuel
1880-1936
Operated a Columbia, South Carolina, portrait studio from 1922 to 1936 that produced what became, after a chance 1977 rediscovery of his glass-plate negatives, the most comprehensive surviving photographic record of a Southern Black middle class community in the early 20th century