James Presley Ball

James Presley Ball was born about 1825 at Virginia, the son of free Black parents of the principal Virginia free-people-of-colour community of the early-nineteenth-century period. He was raised in the free Black community of antebellum Virginia and at the family relocation to Cincinnati, Ohio in the late 1830s.

He was instructed in the daguerreotype process in 1845 by the principal white Boston daguerreotypist John B. Bailey — and operated the principal itinerant daguerreotype practice across the principal Ohio River Valley from 1845 to 1849.

He opened the principal Ball Daguerreotype Studio at Fourth Street at Cincinnati, Ohio in 1849 — the principal Black-owned daguerreotype studio in the principal antebellum Ohio River Valley. The principal Ball Studio operated at the Cincinnati Fourth Street address from 1849 to 1871.

He employed at the principal Ball Studio from 1851 onward the principal Black-American daguerreotype workforce of the antebellum period — including his brother Thomas C. Ball, his brother-in-law Alexander Thomas, and the principal apprentices of the Cincinnati Black community.

He produced across the principal Ball Studio twenty-two years at Cincinnati the principal photographic record of the principal Cincinnati Black middle-class community of the antebellum and Civil War periods — including the principal portraits of the principal Black Cincinnati clergy, the principal Black Cincinnati professional class, and the principal Underground Railroad operatives of the Ohio River.

He produced the principal abolitionist commission of his career in 1855 — the principal Ball's Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade — the principal six-hundred-foot daguerreotype-painted antebellum panorama of the principal antebellum trans-Atlantic slave trade and the principal cotton-and-tobacco plantation economy of the antebellum American South.

He relocated the principal Ball Studio to Helena, Montana in 1887 — at the principal post-Reconstruction Black-American western migration — and operated the principal Ball Studio at Helena from 1887 to 1900.

He relocated to Honolulu, Hawaii in 1900 in the closing years of his life.

He died at Honolulu on the fourth of May 1904 of natural causes, at approximately seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the principal Black-American daguerreotypist of the Cincinnati Black middle-class community of the 1850s.