Born in 1877, the year the Civil War’s Reconstruction period ended, Mangum died in 1922, only three years after the First World War and two years after women gained the right to vote. During his lifetime the final battles of the Indian Wars were waged and the first law limiting the number of immigrants allowed in the U.S. was passed. The personalities in Mangum’s images collectively, and often majestically, symbolize the triumphs and struggles of this pivotal era.

An itinerant photographer primarily working in his home state of North Carolina and the Virginias, Mangum cultivated clientele from across racial and economic divides. Though the American South of his era was marked by disenfranchisement, segregation, and inequality, Mangum portrayed all his sitters with candor and heart. Above all, he showed them as individuals.

A century after their making, Mangum’s photographs allow us a penetrating gaze into faces of the past, and in a larger sense, they offer an unusually insightful glimpse of the South at the turn of the twentieth century. His “portraiture hints at a counter-history…few white Southerners besides Mangum dared to reflect,” writes Prof. Maurice Wallace of the University of Virginia in the book.

Notably, the camera Mangum used was designed to create multiple and distinct exposures on a single glass plate negative. The sequence of the images on a single negative represents the order Mangum’s diverse clientele rotated through the studio, thus representing a day’s work for this gregarious photographer.

In the years Stacke has spent with the Mangum Collection—imagining the distinct personalities and lives, their relationships to each other and to Mangum—the collection has evolved to represent a family album to her. Not only as its own entity, unfurled by the welcoming and harmonious spirit of Hugh Mangum, but also in the way she’s formed relationships with the images and individuals in them.