P. H. Polk

Prentice Herman Polk was born on the twenty-fifth of November 1898 at Bessemer, Alabama, the son of John Polk — a Black laborer in the Bessemer steel mills — and Eliza Polk. He was raised in the segregated Black industrial community of Bessemer.

He enrolled at Tuskegee Institute at Tuskegee, Alabama in 1916 in the photography programme under Cornelius Marion Battey (placed in this archive) — the first formal Black collegiate photography programme in the United States. He completed the photography certificate in 1918 and went on to apprentice under the Chicago studio photographer Fred Jensen from 1922 to 1927.

He returned to Tuskegee Institute in 1927 as instructor in photography under Battey — and was named principal staff photographer of Tuskegee Institute in 1933 on the death of Battey. He held the principal photographer position at Tuskegee from 1933 until his death.

He produced across his fifty-two years at Tuskegee the principal photographic record of the Institute and its principal personalities — including George Washington Carver, Robert Russa Moton, Frederick Douglass Patterson, and the principal Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group of the United States Army Air Forces.

His principal Carver portraits of 1929, 1932, and 1947 are at this day the principal extant photographic record of the Tuskegee agricultural chemist — and his principal Tuskegee Airmen portraits of 1942 to 1945 are the principal extant photographic record of the only segregated Black American fighter group of the Second World War.

He was the principal portraitist of the Black rural southern aristocracy of the Tuskegee community — including the principal studio portraits of the Tuskegee Black yeoman farmers, the Tuskegee Black professional middle class, and the Tuskegee Black Baptist clergy.

His principal portrait studies of the Black rural South — including the principal 1932 portrait of the elderly farmer 'The Boss', a study of the Tuskegee farm-worker community — established the principal Tuskegee photographic-portrait register that informed the principal subsequent Black studio-portrait tradition of the post-1930s American South.

He was the subject of the principal Tuskegee P. H. Polk retrospective exhibition of 1980 at the Tuskegee University Department of Architecture and Construction Science.

He died at Tuskegee, Alabama on the twenty-ninth of December 1985 of natural causes, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the principal photographer of Tuskegee Institute.