More information about the keynote speech at the All Are Welcome event:

“Picturing Freedom: Emily Howland and Portrait Photography”

Emily Howland was born in 1827 the same year that the camera obscura was invented in France and part of the first generation to grow up in front of a lens. Starting at an early age she began to sit for her portrait, and over time photography documented her growing sense of self-confidence. Taking pride in oneself—and showing it—was a lesson she passed on to her pupils at the Myrtilla Miner Normal School for Colored Girls in Washington D.C., whose remarkable portraits are now in the collection of the Howland Stone Store Museum.

As photographs became cheaper to produce and share, Emily collected pictures of people she admired and placed them in an album. This album was acquired in 2017 by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and includes a never-before-seen portrait of her friend Harriet Tubman, a rare likeness of John Willis Menard, the first African American elected to Congress, and students she taught in the 1860s. In many respects the Howland album modelled the kind of inclusive and educated community she desired for America after the Civil War.

Kim Sajet, the director of the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, will discuss Emily Howland’s friendship with other social reformers, and especially African Americans, whom she supported as an ally in the fight for equality and equal representation.Featured exhibits include a portrait gallery style exhibit of daguerreotypes, photographs taken by an early process employing an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapor.