Race, Photography, Labor, and Entrepreneurship in the Life of Maurice Hunter, Harlem’s “Man of 1,000 Faces”

Abstract

In 1925, African American newspapers began reporting on Maurice Hunter’s work as a model for prominent visual and commercial artists, illustrators, and art students. By the 1950s, Hunter’s image had appeared on millions of advertising billboards, in all the major magazines, and in murals and statues in banks, parks, and department stores from Wall Street to Rochester to Cincinnati. Because no agency would represent a black model, Hunter was forced to raise his own public profile and create work opportunities. He did so by emphasizing his authenticity as a performer of nonwhite roles and at the same time his versatility as someone who could model for any role, including female and/or white. As well as permitting Hunter some degree of creative control over his work, his approach garnered him considerable esteem among elite African Americans. They also admired Hunter’s effort to control use of his image whenever photographed. This article examines Hunter’s labor, including his own effort to record it through scrapbooks he donated to the New York Public Library.

Augustus Granville Dill: A Case Study in the Conceptualization of a Black Public Sociology

“…For example, Dill was “instrumental in having Maurice Hunter pantomime Negro spirituals at one of the Lincoln Day services” ( Pittsburgh Courier 1933:2). Hunter later become the most recognized Black male model of the 1940s and 1950s (Corbould 2018). Dill’s sacrifices were recognized by Paul Harrison, who wrote, “You’d think a Harvard graduate and former college professor ought to be able to live in some degree of affluence.…”

Photography and Work

“…As Corbould demonstrates, "by paying attention to the breadth of Hunter's work as a model and performer, we can see he trod a line between caricature and respectability that enabled him to win significant admiration among African Americans, and that any claim to virtuosity was itself a product of the racialized capitalist and market forces in which he lived and worked." 41 The visual record of empires is scattered far and wide, held in museums, university libraries, and private collections throughout both colonies and metropoles. Fueled not only by the desires of knowledge production, imperial governance, and Orientalizing spectacle but also by the search for new frontiers of untapped energy, labor, and markets, these archives are material traces of capital's imperial drive.…”