Wedding Couple,

1849–1850s

<p>This rare daguerreotype of a wedding portrait came from the successful photographic studio owned by James Presley Ball. This wedding portrait is relatively large for its time, signaling that it served as a special marker of an important personal moment. It would have been entrusted only to one of the best and most reputable photography studios, attesting to the status of the photographer. As a second-generation free person living in the relatively integrated, anti-slavery city of Cincinnati, Ball enjoyed considerable popularity among white sitters; in 1855 he used his commercial success to publish an abolitionist pamphlet accompanied by a six-hundred-yard panoramic painting outlining the roots of the African American slave trade in the United States. The object serves as a record of the complex relationship between Black and white communities in the free state of Ohio, where slavery and the slave trade were illegal, in the years before the Civil War.</p>