During his forty-five years at Tuskegee Institute, P.H. Polk photographed dozens of notable figures.  George Washington Carver was a subject of inexhaustible interest to Polk.  As director of Tuskegee’s Agricultural Institute, Carver devoted his life to improving agriculture in the South.  Products he derived from crops such as peanuts and soybeans helped free the South’s economy from its dependence on cotton.  Polk deeply admired Carver as a scientist, teacher, and artist, and he captured the many aspects of Carver’s personality by photographing him in different settings and poses.

Polk’s portraits of Carver, such as this one taken in his laboratory in 1930, are informal, improvised, and personal.  Here, the viewer looks through the scientific apparatus that clutters Carver’s laboratory table to catch him, flask in hand, conducting an experiment.  The light focuses attention on the figure and on objects in the foreground, and illuminates Carver’s hands and forehead.  Although it seems to be a casual shot, the photograph is actually carefully composed to show Carver as a hard worker and as a wise man.

Prentice Hall Polk, an African-American photographer, created a record of the daily life around him.  Polk was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1898, and studied at the Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington as a training ground in the basic trades such as carpentry, plumbing, and agriculture.  Although Polk had wanted to become a painter, the school did not offer such training, so instead he became one of the first students in the institute’s new photography department, where he studied the basic theory and techniques of the medium.  After marrying and moving to Chicago in the early 1920s, Polk apprenticed with a commercial photographer and acquired a deepened commitment to his trade.  In 1927, he returned to the Tuskegee Institute to teach photography.  Except for a brief period when he ran his own portrait studio, Polk spent the remainder of his career at the institute and was named its official photographer in 1939.

P.H. Polk was not recognized as an important American artist until the early 1970s when the body of work he had produced between 1920 and 1950 became widely known.  In addition to his documentation of George Washington Carver inside and outside of the laboratory, Polk skillfully created studio portraits of family members, the social, political, and intellectual elite around the Institute, and candid portrayals of people from nearby rural communities.