Fine Work Guaranteed: The Studio Photography of F.S. McKnight, 1892- 1930, Aberdeen, Mississippi

>> click to see McKnight's exhibition photographs

The Evans Memorial Library is pleased to present the online version of the exhibition, Fine Work Guaranteed: The Studio Photography of F.S. McKnight, 1894-1930, Aberdeen, Mississippi. The original exhibition featured over 150 photographs selected from the existing 13,838 images on glass plate negatives given to the Evans Memorial Library in the early 1960s. Present here are the wall mounted images.

In an 1894 Aberdeen Examiner, newspaper advertisement, F. S. McKnight newly arrived in Aberdeen, Mississippi promised potential customers a guarantee "to give you as fine a work as any sample I show you!" His fine work evidently pleased the town's residents because during the next 36 years over 15,000 people chose to have their likeness preserved by this photographer. Each glass negative has a number etched in the upper right corner. These numbers correspond to numbers found in the customer registers making identification of each image possible.

Though made in a small Tombigbee river port town, these photographs are, to quote Naomi Rosenblum, mirrors of personality, artistic and historical artifacts and items of cultural communication. The images selected for the exhibition inspire questions such as: Who were these people? How did they spend their time? What were their passions? and What if anything do we have in common?

Over 30 per cent of the photographs portray African Americans. Also included are photographs of Chinese Americans, Mediterranean immigrants, Irish Americans, and immigrants from Germany and central Europe. Because McKnight served such a vast clientele, his images are a unique window into the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More than a documentation of the individual, they portray social and psychological attitudes of the past. They allow us to go beyond the limitations of class, race and gender, to experience ways of life with which we are unfamiliar.

Kathy Bailey - Exhibition Curator

Frank Summerfield McKnight

Born 1848 in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, F.S. McKnight grew up in Iuka, Mississippi. In 1872, John Rapier, a traveling tin typist, pitched his tent in Iuka where he befriended the young, unemployed McKnight and taught him the business of tintype photography.

In October of that same year, McKnight borrowed $200 from his father and brought his own equipment and tent. He learned the "new" dry glass negative process from the Simmons Brothers, photographers in Aberdeen. After stays throughout Northeast Mississippi, he married Sally Spight in 1878. For the next sixteen years, they traveled to Texas and Tennessee, lived briefly in Ripley, Mississippi and finally settled in Aberdeen. McKnight opened his first Aberdeen studio in 1894 and remained there until he died in 1934 at the age of eighty-six.

F. S. McKnight was a careful, competent town photographer. His photographs are artful only in so far as he obeyed the most commonplace conventions of portraiture. Primarily a businessman, McKnight realized that his job was to validate his customers and their place in society through the creation of a photograph that presented them to the world as they wished to be seen.

The Mcknight Photographic Project was made possible through the support of: