J.P. Ball was a pioneering African American photographer whose Cincinnati, Ohio, studio became one of the most successful in the United States.

Ball was born free in Virginia and learned the daguerreotype technique from John B. Bailey, an African American photographer from Boston. Ball first worked itinerantly then established a studio in Cincinnati in 1849. Business thrived, and his “Great Daguerrean Gallery of the West“ soon occupied two floors with opulent interiors. Ball’s fame spread nationally and globally when he took his practice abroad in 1856. Photographing royalty and celebrities, Ball operated studios in Liverpool, London, and Paris.

Ball was a passionate abolitionist and in 1855 produced a vast, 600-yard-long panorama, painted by Robert Scott Duncanson among others, entitled “Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States Comprising Views of the African Slave Trade.“ Ball left Cincinnati, continuing his work as a photographer he went south to Mississippi and Louisiana during Reconstruction, and then on to Minnesota and westward to Helena, Montana by 1887. He later traveled to Washington, before finally settling in Honolulu, Hawaii, around 1900.

In Lessons of the Hour, Sir Isaac Julien recreates Frederick Douglass sitting for his portrait at Ball’s “Great Daguerrean Gallery,“ a place of interracial civility. Julien pays homage both to Douglass’s revolutionary understanding of photography and Ball’s genius for creating images.