Social Settlements: United States. Alabama. Calhoun. "Calhoun Colored School": Agencies Promoting Assimilation of the Negro. Calhoun Colored School, Calhoun, Ala. 1901

Curator: This photogravure print attributed to Frances Benjamin Johnston is titled "Social Settlements: United States. Alabama. Calhoun. 'Calhoun Colored School': Agencies Promoting Assimilation of the Negro. Calhoun Colored School, Calhoun, Ala." Editor: It's bleak, isn't it? The high-contrast light gives the impression of something both abandoned and intensely scrutinized. Curator: The composition is divided, showing two interior spaces, labeled, respectively, as community church and public school house. Note the stark geometry, the parallel lines of the pews. Editor: The bareness of the structures strikes me. The intention, visible in the title, to assimilate, feels like an erasure. Is that too strong? Curator: Not at all. We see a record, visually stark, of a fraught history—the imposition of cultural norms on a community, rendered in tones of gray and white, lacking perhaps the warmth, even the messiness, of true integration. Editor: It's a photograph that holds a profound silence. Powerful, sad.