Social Settlements: United States. Alabama. Calhoun. "Calhoun Colored School": Agencies Promoting Assimilation of the Negro. Training Negro Girls in Domestic Science. Calhoun Colored School, Calhoun, Ala.: Carpentry. 1901

Editor: This photograph, attributed to Frances Benjamin Johnston, captures a carpentry class at the Calhoun Colored School in Alabama. There's a feeling of both industry and… constraint, wouldn't you say? What strikes you most about this image? Curator: Ah, the weight of good intentions, perhaps? I see a staged tableau, a performance of progress. Johnston, like many, was caught in the complicated dance of uplift and assimilation. Notice how the light falls, almost theatrical? It spotlights labor but obscures individuality. Do you sense that tension too? Editor: Absolutely. It's like the subjects are props in a story not entirely their own. Still, there’s undeniable skill on display. Curator: Precisely. It's a photograph wrestling with its own purpose, revealing as much as it conceals. It leaves us pondering progress and the stories we choose to tell.