James Presley Ball

James Presley Ball was born about 1825 in Frederick County, Virginia, to free Black parents, William and Susan Ball. In the fall of 1845 he learned the daguerreotype art from John B. Bailey, a Black daguerreotypist out of Boston — one free man of color handing the new craft to another. His first Cincinnati studio that year lasted months; itinerant seasons through Pittsburgh and Richmond followed, until he settled in Cincinnati in 1849.

By 1851 he stood master of Ball's Great Daguerrian Gallery of the West on Fourth Street, a salon so celebrated that Gleason's Pictorial engraved it for the nation in 1854. He employed Black artisans — his brother Thomas, his brother-in-law Alexander Thomas — and for some years the painter Robert S. Duncanson colored prints under his roof. Frederick Douglass sat for his camera. In 1855 he raised his great witness: Ball's Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States, a vast painted panorama of the slave trade in fifty-three scenes with a pamphlet from Quaker presses — the canvas is lost; its testimony is not. When a tornado wrecked the gallery in 1860, he rebuilt it grander.

He went west with the century — Mississippi, Louisiana, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and from 1887 Helena, Montana, as J.P. Ball and Son, where his photographs of William Biggerstaff, taken before and after the man's 1896 hanging, remain among the era's most haunting documents. The new century found him in Seattle at the Globe Photo Studio.

Seeking a kinder climate for his rheumatism, he reached Honolulu in 1902 and died there on the fourth of May 1904 — some sources say 1905 — at about seventy-nine, among the earliest and most celebrated of African American photographers. Honored be James Presley Ball, who made the lens tell the truth.