[Emmett J. Scott]

Your Mirror: Portraits from the ICP Collection
Section: Self-presentation
When Cornelius Marion Battey took this portrait, Emmett J. Scott (1873–1957) was Booker T. Washington’s secretary at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1912, just after this photograph was taken, Scott was elected secretary of the school. He was considered a leader of the “Tuskegee Machine,” a group of people close to Washington who promoted his views through the black press, schools, and churches. Battey, an African American
photographer who worked in the painterly pictorialist style, was born in Georgia but spent most of his life in Cleveland and New York. A number of years after taking this portrait, he moved from New York to Tuskegee, where he became head of the Photograph Division.
Washington understood the power and importance of photography in constructing both individual and institutional identities. Positive images of African Americans and of his schools could be used to raise funds and create counternarratives in the media and popular culture, which were essential to his vision of uplifting African Americans.