Picnooga will presents a live webinar, Lost Chattanooga: Horace Brazelton, on Thursday, April 7 at b7 p.m. about African American photographer Horace Brazelton.
Horace Maynard Brazelton (1877-1956) was the first African American portrait photographer to operate a professional studio in Chattanooga. His career spanned the course of almost 50 years, amidst Jim Crow segregation and racism.
Despite the related challenges, Mr. Brazelton and his wife Hettie (Hodge) Brazelton acted as pillars of the African American community in Chattanooga during the first half of the twentieth century.
Unfortunately, photos that were created by Mr. Brazelton are now difficult to locate or have not yet surfaced from private collections. As such, his remarkable story is largely unknown in Chattanooga. His forgotten contributions to the black business district on East Ninth Street (now known as MLK Boulevard) are also not the only examples of lost stories or silenced voices, further hinting at an erasure of African American history.
Stefanie Haire’s research aims to fill that void by uncovering more examples of Brazelton’s photographic work and placing them within the context of self-representation among African American communities in a post-Civil War south.
Pre-register online here.