Curating the Philadelphia Photographic Experience of a Black Family: The Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning Collection

In 1830 Sarah Martha Sanders (d. 1850), an enslaved fifteen-year old girl was sold to married Charleston, South Carolinian banker Richard. W. Cogdell (1787-1866). Within twenty years she would bear ten of his children and die giving birth to their last. By 1858 Cogdell relocated their five surviving offspring to Philadelphia where the family became a bastion of the middle-class African American community of a city central to the history of early photography. The multi-racial Stevens-Cogdell/Sanders-Venning family thrived in the North despite systemic racial hierarchies. Active in the city’s middle-class African American educational, political, and cultural communities, the family took advantage of the city’s network of photographers, the commodification of photography, and the rise of personal cameras in the early twentieth century. In 1991 family descendants gave the Library Company of Philadelphia hundreds of these photographs taken between the 1860s and 1950s as part of a family archive, which has been continually added to and digitized since.

This paper examines the provenance and stewardship of, and access to, this pictorial record of multiple generations and branches of a black family from the perspective of a curator of visual culture. A collection of photographs of posed and candid portraits born between two key eras of African American civil rights movements, the archive serves as a complex case study to analyze the sociopolitical role of photography in the history of the Philadelphia black community. Issues of gender, race, and urbanism will inform this exploration of a private visual narrative made public of the historical Philadelphia black photographic experience.