Scurlock, Addison Norton

Impact on the world

Opening his first studio in his parents' home in 1904 after a three-year apprenticeship under white photographer Moses P. Rice, Scurlock built a storefront studio on U Street — the heart of what was known as “Black Broadway” — in 1911, developing a signature lighting and posing style so associated with dignity and success that a 1976 Washington Post article noted “one of the marks of arriving socially in Black Washington was to have your portrait hanging in Scurlock's window.” He photographed the era's most prominent Black Americans, including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Duke Ellington, served as Howard University's official photographer for six decades, and in 1939 captured his most historically significant image: Marian Anderson's open-air concert at the Lincoln Memorial after she was barred from performing at Constitution Hall because of her race. Historian Carter G. Woodson distributed Scurlock's portraits of prominent Black leaders in the educational packets he mailed nationwide for the founding of Negro History Week, and Scurlock's sons Robert and George continued the studio's work into the 1990s, extending its documentation of Black Washington across nine decades.

Life & background

Born June 19, 1883, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to attorney and Republican politician George Clay Scurlock and his wife Nannie, Addison Scurlock moved with his family to Washington, D.C., in 1900 after finishing high school. He apprenticed under photographer Moses P. Rice from 1901 to 1904 before establishing his own business, winning a gold medal for photography at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition and opening his landmark U Street studio in 1911. He married Mamie Estelle Fearing, who managed the studio's business operations, and the couple raised four sons, two of whom, Robert and George, joined the family business as photographers in the 1930s and later founded the Capitol School of Photography in 1948, whose students included a young Jacqueline Bouvier, the future First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Scurlock's photography also captured white Washington figures including Presidents Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Mamie Eisenhower; he died December 16, 1964, and his studio's 250,000-image archive is now held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Smithsonian Magazine; National Gallery of Art