Photograph copyrighted in 1895 by the Russell Brothers of Anniston, Alabama, titled “A Stitch in Time Saves Nine.” The image depicts an intimate outdoor domestic scene on the porch of a log cabin, capturing three African American subjects engaged in daily life. A woman sits in the foreground with a pipe in her mouth, focused on mending fabric spread across her lap. A young boy reclines against her knees, his bare feet extended toward the viewer. In the background, an elderly man sits in a chair with a cane across his lap, beside a basket placed on the porch floor. A dog rests nearby, adding to the homestead atmosphere.

The photograph is part of the Russell Brothers’ “Special Southern Views” series, a body of work documenting and often staging scenes of rural African American life in the post-Reconstruction South. The reverse of the mount lists this as number 240 in their catalog and provides a brief description matching the scene depicted. The Russell Brothers’ imagery was widely distributed at the time, marketed as both picturesque and ethnographic, reflecting contemporary Southern attitudes toward African American subjects at the close of the 19th century.

Boudoir card format, with the image printed on a large card mount, represents the commercial photographic style favored by traveling photographers and regional publishers of the era. The photograph stands as both a historical artifact of Southern photographic commerce and a revealing visual document of the ways African Americans were portrayed in turn-of-the-century popular imagery.