Florestine Perrault Collins Passed for White to Learn the Trade, Then Ran a Black Portrait Studio in New Orleans for Twenty-Nine Years
Florestine Perrault was fourteen when she started earning money in photography, hired as a clerk, photo finisher, stationery embosser, and developer by white-owned studios in New Orleans and by the Eastman Kodak Company. She got that work by letting her employers assume she was white. She was Creole of color, and in Jim Crow New Orleans, that fact would have kept her away from the picture-making end of the business.
