A lecture by Clare Corbould (Monash University - Melbourne, Australia)
In this paper, I unearth the forgotten life of Maurice Hunter, a migrant to New York from Suriname who made a career of modeling from the 1920s to 1950s. His face appeared in illustrations on millions of advertising billboards and in all of the major magazines. He also modeled for African American photographers, sculptors, and painters, and in art schools for white students in cities all over the Northeast and Midwest. Hunter also performed a range of “exotic” roles on stage, including on Broadway, in countless Harlem salons, and further afield.
Discrimination meant Hunter had no agency representation and thus had to create his own opportunities for work. He did so by making himself into a minor Harlem celebrity, famed for his extraordinary skill in an arena not usually open to non-whites. In doing so, he left behind an enormous archive of photographs and other visual imagery, including film. Many of these he collated himself, very purposefully, in scrapbooks he donated to the New York Public Library. One scrapbook also became part of the Gumby Collection at the Butler Library.
In this paper, I consider Hunter’s use of varied media, especially photography, in his quest to extend ideas about what it meant to be black in the United States. Like many others at the time, he worked hard to alter visual imagery away from stereotyped black characters. Hunter also worked extremely hard to convince people that his modeling was a vocation and that, to use the language of neoliberal economy, he “loved what he did.” In this paper, I consider the meaning of Hunter’s extraordinary labor to make himself into an entrepreneurial representative of the black diaspora.
