Daguerreotypes of Anonymous African Americans

Simply because we don’t see enough of this– material record of black history, that is. I came across the Randolph Linsly Simpson Collection in Yale’s online archives at the Beinecke Library, which includes letters, prints, film clips and formal studio portraits of African Americans. For more than 25 years, Randolph Linsly Simpson, a white man whose family had a strong antislavery tradition, collected over 6,000 objects relating to the “African-American experience”. From a young age, he became deeply disturbed by the realisation that objects and pictures related to black history were rapidly disappearing. Many of these faces are unidentified, leaving us to merely guess who they were, what they achieved and what they endured.

View the collection on Flickr.