Day’s photographs of Skeete in African garb can be interpreted as simultaneously avoiding and participating in discussions of the place of the New Negro, the class of cultured and educated Afro-Americans emerging in American society at the time. They do so by circumventing this new entity and retreating to an essentialist view intermingling racial origins and ethnic destiny. But, they can also be seen as participating in other discussions centered around ancient African history and spirtuality, and the pride of place of black Africans in that continent’s varied and rich heritage.
W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of “a distinctive African consciousness” rooted in spirituality, linked to folklore and faith, and separate from American society and values.[i] His use of the term “consciousness” was linked to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s discussion of the Transcendental Eye and the need to step back from daily life to gain perspective and a larger understanding of self separate from the workings of the world and daily life.[ii] In this study, I seek an understanding of Day’s photographs of Skeete bearing in mind the intellectual climate and societal restraints they both lived within. I do so employing the rhetoric of double-consciousness and the New Negro, interwoven into the fabric of social consciousness and public discourse at the time, against the backdrop of Skeete’s work as a photographer’s model and the photographs themselves.