Very few of the original black-and-white prints made by Hugh Mangum still exist today. Hundreds of his glass plate negatives, however, did survive and in 1986 were donated to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University for restoration and preservation. In the early 2000s, the library began the process of recording the information on the glass plates by digital capture and then making these positive images available to the public. Though the negatives were originally exposed by Mangum as black-and-white images, the library used color technology to record all the information in the often badly damaged negatives.

Historical photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century have traditionally been reproduced in their original black-and-white. When Sartor and Harris began collaborating on the book that became Where We Find Ourselves, they were drawn to the poetic possibilities of reproducing Mangum’s work in color. In particular, they chose to emphasize the disquieting fragility and paradoxical beauty of the damage to Mangum’s portraits by reproducing the images in color and later, for exhibition, by significantly enlarging their scale. In so doing, they hoped to communicate to others the ways in which these portraits, made over a century ago, resonate with how it feels to live in the world today.