African-American families have been descending on the San Diego History Center for the last few months, leafing through mid-20th-century photographs of their ancestors and relatives. The History Center owns about 30,000 negatives and prints by Norman Baynard, a self-trained African-American photographer, and is now trying to identify his clients.

Mr. Baynard ran a photo studio in the Logan Heights neighborhood of central San Diego. (After his death in 1986, his son Arnold gave the archive to the History Center.) Mr. Baynard was colorblind, so his wife, Frances, occasionally hand-tinted his black-and-white shots. He kept somewhat haphazard records, jotting down customers’ names on index cards.

Black History in Photos

By EVE M. KAHN

Published: May 26, 2011

For Full Story go to NewYorkTimes.com.

(San Diego History Center, Baynard Collection) A photograph by Norman Baynard, from about 1950, in an exhibition at the San Diego History Center highlighting his work

Generations of families hired him to document baptisms, weddings, baseball games, choir performances, grocery store ribbon-cuttings, political fundraisers, airport arrivals and funerals. His upwardly mobile patrons posed alongside their new cars, swimming pools, backyard citrus trees and diplomas.

Visitors to the History Center have been supplying captions for an exhibition of 500 images that opens next Friday: “Portrait of a Proud Community: Norman Baynard’s Logan Heights 1939-1985.” Many of the families portrayed, the staff has learned, moved to San Diego from the segregated South.

Harrowing tales have surfaced, including that of a 12-year-old girl’s arriving alone on a bus with her money sewn into her clothes, and of a grandfather who had been run out of Arkansas for trying to unionize sharecroppers.

“Themes kept emerging about escaping racism,” said Chris Travers, the director of the center’s photograph collection.

A monograph about another African-American photographer’s studio, “Jasper, Texas: The Community Photographs of Alonzo Jordan,” was published by Steidl this year. From the 1940s to the ’80s, Mr. Jordan worked out of a home darkroom, laboring to perfect every strand of hair in portraits of homecoming queens, beauticians and Freemasons.

He died in 1984, and a decade later his wife, Helen, donated about 6,500 of his prints and negatives to the Texas African American Photography Archive. Jasper became infamous in 1998 when white supremacists chained a black resident, James Byrd, to a pickup truck and dragged him to death.

Alan Govenar, a founder of the photography archive, said that Mr. Jordan’s evidence of calm prosperity in Jasper surprises viewers now.

“The emphasis is on dignity and self-esteem, a silent protest against people saying you’re inferior,” he said.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 27, 2011, on page C24 of the New York edition with the headline: FOLLOWING THE FAIENCE OF A BROOKLYN DESIGNER.

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Edward Lycett, Designer for Faience Company, Brooklyn, For Full Story go to NewYorkTimes.com.