Cotton Press,

1860s

This photograph is a stereograph, a format that places two images taken at slightly different angles side by side on a single card. When viewed through a binocular device called a stereoscope, the two images coalesce into one, producing an illusion of three-dimensionality. Taken at the end of the Civil war, stereographs like this one would have been widely distributed as vivid documents of the war and its aftermath. The Irish American commercial photographer J. A. Palmer specialized in photographs of Black American communities, including family portraits, scenes showing Black workers, and plantation buildings. In this image, three Black workers rest under a cotton press warehouse, with the worker on the left reclining on a bundle of pressed cotton.