UC Faculty Member to Present on 19th Century African American Daguerreotypist at Upcoming Conference

Theresa Leininger-Miller, associate professor of art history in the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP), has become the nation's most noted researcher on 19th-century African American daguerreotypist/photographer James Presley Ball (1825-1904).

She will next present on Ball’s impressive legacy as a creative artist and an astute businessman during an upcoming Sept. 30-Oct. 2

Stowe Bicentennial Commemorative Conference

focusing on the life and era of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the pre-Civil War novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Leininger-Miller will present her research at 9:15 a.m., Friday, Sept. 30, at the main branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, downtown Cincinnati.

While both Stowe and Ball had Cincinnati ties, it’s unknown whether they ever met; however, Leininger-Miller opines, “If not, it’s very likely Stowe would have known about Ball. She was from an abolitionist family, and Ball photographed abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and the family of Ulysses S. Grant, as well as many other Cincinnati leaders along with marginalized groups, not only African Americans and Chinese but Jews and Quakers. Ball was also quite well known in Cincinnati, in part because he had several studios around town and advertised heavily in the Enquirer and Gazette.”

In fact, Ball was internationally recognized even in his day. For instance, in 1856 when in London, he photographed Queen Victoria. The “London Times” reported that Queen Victoria was so charmed by the portrait that Ball took of her "that she removed one taken by the most eminent artist in London from her boudoir and hung the American artist's in its place."  

Furthermore, such was the renown of Ball, "from that fertile province of pork, Cincinnati," that his sitters included singer Jenny Lind and author Charles Dickens.  

Leininger-Miller’s presentation will place Ball in the context of other photographers and African American artists, such as landscapist Robert Duncanson, who worked in Cincinnati from the late 1840s to the early 1870s, a period coinciding with Ball’s time in Cincinnati.

Her presentation will feature scores of Ball’s daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, advertisements, and reproductions of his images as prints, his abolitionist and civic passions, and his connections to political and social leaders locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. She will also discuss his 2,400 square-yard panorama of the slave trade that traveled the nation in the 1850s and was one of the few attempts of his era to produce a series of photographers and/or panoramic paintings to pictorially tell a story.