Cornelius Marion Battey

Cornelius Marion Battey was born on the second of August 1873 at Augusta, Georgia, the son of Robert Battey — a Black Augusta drayman — and Annie Battey. He was raised in the segregated Black community of post-Reconstruction Augusta.

He was apprenticed at fifteen in 1888 to the Augusta studio of the white portrait photographer Bradley & Rulofson — and completed the principal apprenticeship in 1893. He relocated to Cleveland, Ohio in 1893 and operated the principal Battey Studio at Cleveland from 1893 to 1900.

He relocated to New York in 1900 and was hired at the Bradley Studio on Fifth Avenue — and was promoted in 1906 to the principal studio manager position at the Underwood and Underwood Studio at New York. He was the first Black studio manager at a principal white-owned New York portrait studio of the period.

He opened the principal Battey Studio at 116 West 132nd Street at Harlem in 1908 — the principal Black-owned portrait studio in early-Harlem.

He was recruited by Robert Russa Moton in 1916 to found the principal Tuskegee Institute photography department at Tuskegee, Alabama — the first formal Black collegiate photography programme in the United States. He held the principal department founder and head photographer position at Tuskegee from 1916 until his death in 1927.

He produced across the eleven years at Tuskegee the principal photographic record of the principal Black American intellectual leadership of the early twentieth century — including the principal portraits of W.E.B. Du Bois of 1916, the principal portrait of Booker T. Washington of 1915, the principal portraits of Frederick Douglass of 1895 (posthumously printed), and the principal portraits of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

His principal Du Bois portrait of 1916 — known as the 'Crisis Profile' — was published on the principal cover of The Crisis magazine of the NAACP in September 1916 and is at this day the principal extant photographic record of the middle-period Du Bois.

He trained the principal next generation of Black studio photographers at Tuskegee — including his principal successor at Tuskegee P. H. Polk (placed in this archive).

He died at Tuskegee, Alabama on the seventeenth of March 1927 of complications of pneumonia, at fifty-three.

He is honored here as the founder of the Tuskegee Institute photography department.