It is not surprising that P.H. Polk succeeded in a career making pictures when one considers the photographic lineage he inherited on the campus of Tuskegee Institute. From the turn of the century, founder Booker T. Washington understood the power of the photographic image in communicating his vision of the school to outside supporters and potential donors. He found numerous photographers in the South to handle the task, among them Frances Benjamin Johnston, and Arthur P. Bedou.

Realizing photography's potential in advancing the vocational training of Tuskegee students,Washington wrote to film magnate George Eastman, one of the school's benefactors, in 1905:

I very much wish we could have a department at this school for teaching photography. We could not only use the department in much of our work here to advantage, but we could train students who would go out and establish galleries in different parts of the South. While there is prejudice in many directions in the matter of photography, strange to say, a colored man would have almost as good [an] opportunity to succeed as a white man; in fact there are a number of colored men in the South who are succeeding in photography.

Other funding priorities took precedence and it was not until almost a year after Washington's death in 1915 that Eastman agreed to found a chairmanship of photography at Tuskegee. Cornelius Marion Battey, an accomplished photographer whose reputation was established in New York City, was appointed as head of the new Photography Division in 1916. He arrived on campus in 1917 and throughout his tenure at Tuskegee, he enjoyed a cordial and mutually respectful relationship with Eastman.

P.H. Polk was the first student to enroll in the Photography Division. He studied with Battey for three years (1917-19) before leaving Tuskegee for Chickasaw, Mobile, and Chicago. Battey died in 1927, a decade after his arrival at the Institute. That same year, Polk returned to Alabama from Chicago and set up his own photography studio in Tuskegee.

Leonard G. Hyman, a Washington, D.C. studio photographer, had been hired to replace Battey. Polk joined the faculty in 1928 as his assistant and after Hyman left the college in 1932, Polk took over as head of the Division. He kept this position and his private studio in Tuskegee until late 1938. He then moved to Atlanta to set up his business there. Though he tried several locations and hoped to find work with the group of Atlanta's black colleges, Polk's venture failed and he returned to Tuskegee in 1939. At the recommendation of President Frederick D. Patterson, he was named the Official Photographer for the Institute and he remained in that position until the time of his death in 1984.

The volume of Polk's existing negatives reveals he balanced two busy photographic careers. While he is best known for the portraits he produced during the first decades after his return to Tuskegee, the archive of photographs he took as official photographer evidences a man who juggled numerous responsibilities for the school. Polk was charged with creating and upholding the image of Tuskegee Institute with his camera. Recording track meets, choral concerts, veterinary school clinical procedures, or alumni award banquets, and even the student protests of the 1960s, he was a constant and energetic presence on campus. Polk endured the gradual and sometimes abrupt changes that transformed the institute from a turn-of-the-century normal and industrial school to a major Southern university.

As P.H. Polk mastered his craft at Tuskegee under the guidance of Battey and Hyman, so he passed on his knowledge to younger photographers there such as Charles Lang, Chris McNair, Frank Godden, Albert Carter, and Chester Higgins, Jr. Higgins, in admitting he "didn't go to school for photography; I learned from old men," acknowledges the influence Polk, among others, has had on his work: "He nurtured my sense of confidence in taking pictures and validated my existence even though I was just a boy from the country. In observing Polk, who was always in a hurry, always heavily obligated by photographic assignments, I developed a quicker 'eye' for seeing the shot and capturing it on film."

For over fifty years P.H. Polk focussed his lens on life at Tuskegee Institute. Both practitioner and pedagogue, he solidified the school's photographic legacy through the body of his own work and in the achievments of his successors.