Biography
Hugh Leonard Mangum was born June 3, 1877, on Main Street in Durham, son of Presley J. Mangum, a Durham postmaster, and Sally Mangum nee Farhting. In 1891, wishing to escape the bustle of a growing Durham, Mangum's father bought a house six miles North of the city, on a property of mills and tobacco barns, known as the McCown House at West Point on the Eno. The family used the house as a summer home for two years and moved to this more rural spot permanently in 1893. As told by his brother Leo, who outlived Hugh by more than four decades, Hugh was invited at the age of sixteen to attend Trinity College (later Duke University) but chose instead to study fine arts in Winston-Salem at Salem College, the oldest women’s educational institution in the United States. There is, however, no record confirming Mangum's studies at Salem College.[ citation needed ]
A box of Hugh Mangum's photographs with the date 1897 was found in 2016. Margaret Sartor and Alex Harris used this information to guess that Mangum began making professional portraits in 1897, though many of his images were made earlier. His traveling studio had a straight-forward approach: affordable pictures, quickly produced, and as far as is known –– no records kept of the persons portrayed by his camera. Using mostly simple backgrounds and natural light, the pictures sharply delineate hair, clothing and body language. Though he may have begun traveling earlier, Mangum was riding the rails by 1899, the year he began a handwritten log of the towns he visited. That log, begun on the inside of a suitcase, eventually migrated to the inside lid of a large traveling trunk, and provides us with some of the best clues we have about where he worked. The beginning of Mangum’s itinerant career also coincides with legalized segregation in North Carolina, beginning with the mandated separation of Black Americans and whites in railroad cars and passenger waiting rooms. As the oppression of Jim Crow worsened, Hugh Mangum continued to travel, photographing people of all colors and from all walks of life at prices that allowed even the most humble to afford his services. [3]
Hugh Mangum visited eight to ten different towns a year, some more than once. He usually remained in a town for one to seven days and would visit several in a row before returning to Durham for a stay of several weeks to months. By matching the towns in his travel log to clues in his photographs, it’s clear that Mangum frequented towns with schools, especially women’s colleges and military academies. Some of his advertising flyers indicate specials to school children, and others. He set up his studio tent near railroad depots and circuses. He followed vaudeville shows, making portraits of performers as well as spectators. He stopped at roadsides, set up his tripod to photograph workers in fields and caravans of gypsies. He made photographs inside and outside of schools and churches, of congregations, and of classroom pupils, veteran groups, and family reunions. He visited people at their homes to make family portraits.
In 1906, after years of itinerant work, attempted partnerships and working under a few different studio names, at age twenty-nine, Mangum married Annie Carden of East Radford, Virginia. The couple soon set up residence in her hometown, near her family. After marrying, Hugh continued traveling but also operated seasonal studios in Durham, Radford, and its sister town of Pulaski. Then, after more than two decades of a nomadic professional life, Hugh Mangum’s Radford studio was destroyed by fire in 1919. Within a year, he took over the proprietorship of the well-established, and permanent, Kidd Studio in the nearby city of Roanoke.
