Leininger-Miller Researches Local Historical Photographer
Since she began teaching at UC in 1992, Leininger-Miller has been intermittently researching a fascinating daguerreotypist /photographer who worked in Cincinnati from the late 1840s through the early 1870s. James Presley Ball (1825-1904), who hired Duncanson (also a free African American) as a retouch artist and backdrop painter in the 1850s, ran the largest daguerrean gallery in the Midwest, and had nine employees, including a white man, during the time of slavery. Ball photographed celebrities like Frederick Douglass, P.T. Barnum, Jenny Lind, and Ulysses Grant's family, as well as many city leaders, in addition to Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens when he was in England in 1856. Leininger-Miller shows students over 300 original daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cartes-de-visite, and cabinet cards by Ball at the Cincinnati Historical Society when she teaches the 500-level "History of Photography to 1945" course. She has supervised many independent studies in which both graduate and undergraduate students have uncovered a wealth of information about Ball by carefully reading local 19th-century newspapers on microfilm.
When Ball left Cincinnati he moved south and then west, living in Greenville, Mississippi; Vidalia, Louisiana; St. Louis, Missouri; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Helena, Montana, Seattle, Washington; and Honolulu, Hawaii. This year while on sabbatical Leininger-Miller won a University Research Council Grant which will allow her to conduct research in Hawaii, Minnesota, and Washington. In 1996 she received a Faculty Summer Research Grant from UC to work on Ball, and in 2003 and 2005, she was part of a team that won NEH Consultation and Planning Grants, respectively, for the Cincinnati Museum Center. This support allowed her to do research in London, New Haven, Boston, New Bedford, New York, Washington, D.C., Helena, and elsewhere. Leininger-Miller has given over twenty lectures on Ball at professional conferences, museums, universities, and civic institutions throughout the nation. In the fall she spoke on Ball at the American Studies Association meeting in Philadelphia, and this February she delivered a presentation at the College Art Association conference in Dallas. She has also talked about the photographer on local TV (WCPO and WKRC) and radio (WVXU) programs. Leininger-Miller published an entry on Ball in St. James Guide to Black Artists (1997) and, most recently, in African American National Biography (Oxford, 2008). Although an exhibition sponsored jointly by the Cincinnati Museum Center and Cincinnati Art Museum fell through in late 2006 due to lack of federal funding, Leininger-Miller plans on further publishing her research in scholarly essays and perhaps a book.