Jules Allen Photography--The Contemporary Scene

In tribute to the ongoing spirit of the historic vitality of the best tradition of street photography, I would like to dedicate this blog to the work of photographer Jules Allen (born 1947 in San Francisco, California). 

As much as I love to rummage through archival photography done by photographers who have come and gone, it is particularly inspirational to remember that there is still important work being done today by photographers who prefer to celebrate the lives of others rather than themselves.

In celebration of Jules Allen's fabulous new website, making widely available to fans of his photography for the very first time a sufficiently broad range of his work at http://www.julesallenphotography.com, I am including here as well the text of a piece I wrote about Allen's photographs taken in Bamako and Conakry.

Jules Allen’s Photographs

By Michele Wallace
(Friday, September 26, 2003)


“Society never makes a man. It destroys him. What we see never fits what we say. The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”

Jean-Luc Godard


Why do we continue to need photographs anyway? More to the point, why do we continue to long to see photographs we haven’t yet seen? What is it we’re trying to find? In our current environment of globalization, digitalization, cell phones and satellites, what possible use could we have for another photograph? The answers lie in two words: aesthetics and information.
I suspect a lot of us have realized for some time now that Jules Allen makes very special photographs. For years he has kept his audience on a starvation diet, desperate to see more than we ever get to see. Yet despite this deprivation, his afficionados know his photographs the instant we see them by his unprecedented combination of sleek Modernist compositional wizardry with this ruthless insistence on plainly presenting the real material conditions of people’s lives wherever he finds them—on the streets of Harlem, in a boxing gym, among nudes in the studio, or, as in this case, in the streets and back alleys of Bamako and Conakry.
You see Allen has the listening eye that Godard speaks of. The capacity for the listening eye marks almost every great black and white photograph of street life in the 20th century with an inexorable rhythm, as though the shadows, despite their apparent stillness, were dancing with the pulse of the city. Many of Allen’s favorite street photographers—Manuel Alvaro Bravo, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans, Henri-Cartier Bresson, Roy De Carava—all had it. Everything, every texture, every accident of weather or materials or light becomes crucial to the vision. The situation requires that the photographer make his decision of where the shot is in an instant. In order to do this, an infallible eye is necessary. I will say it again: an eye that listens.
Allen has that eye, or has trained himself to have that eye or to perfect that eye during his many years of patiently taking pictures wherever it seemed likely that he might stumble upon the truth of the juxtaposition of light and human existence. He is now at a point where his pictures speak volumes, tell stories, reassuring us that life isn’t anywhere near as bad as you may have been tempted to think it is.
I worry that Jules Allen and I and others our age are part of the last generation to learn to think completely in black and white film, that the younger ones can not fathom what the play of light and dark, and shadows, the translation of black skin into the rich tapestry of shadows of black and white film meant to us, and continues to mean to us. And that this discipline, which was forced upon us by black and white film (photography, advertising, film and tv) made us strong, and smart and resilient in ways they can scarcely imagine. It may be because in the context of such a ruthless hierarchy of light dark, blackness and darkness were so transparently the best possible thing to be from the standpoint of aesthetics. The blues on the one hand, the sublime on the other.
Perhaps even more essential to we blacks in the U.S. than the aesthetic visions such photography supports is the raw, unmediated information about the world we don’t yet sufficiently understand. Allen prides himself on surprising the life that lies just around every corner. These photographs are telling us at least one hundred very concrete things about that which we may think we already know but don’t know nearly well enough, the urban streets of a contemporary African Muslim city such as Bamako or Conakry.
I have never been to either place and yet through Allen’s images, I feel as though I have been prepared in ways that I could never gather from any other source. Of the 25 photos, I would divide them into three groups. They are all about people who are not being portrayed as foreign or exotic or distant in any way. Several of the pictures focus on small groups, several more focus on large groups and another set focuses on single figures, albeit there is frequently at least one other blurry figure in the background.
Among the small groups, there is the shot of the Ballet Africains dancers having an unguarded moment of relaxation at the stage’s edge, reminding me of Degas’ reposing ballet dancers of a century ago. One of the African dancers lies on her back, her feet dangling luxuriously over the edge.
There is another image of a few women in dresses trying to get past two men who are kneeling in a back courtyard with clothes hanging from the lines and a large industrial—looking well, from which they get their water. This is another kind of historical moment altogether from the Reuters, Times and BBC images from which we are usually asked to cull our information of the African continent.
There is another courtyard with hanging clothes, women cooking in the background at outdoor grills, a faucet dispensing water into a metal teapot being held by the hands of a man, his face blocked by the dangling clothes. He wears a watch on one wrist, and a wedding finger on his other hand.
A sexualized little girl stands among a small group in a courtyard, reminding us once again that the status of boys and girls is different in this society, and that the sex industry could be part of this little girl’s future.

My favorite image is of 2 slender fishing boats, fragile canoe-like structures, anchored side by side in the still water of the Niger River. Although there are no people in it, this picture too is about the people.
In another group photo, there are 4 males, 2 bodies, their beautiful chests, hairless and perfect like the finest ebony wood. They are laughing, playing perhaps, in a moment grabbed from the teeth of their workday to love each other.
A woman smiles in the background of a market scene through a group of men in the foreground too busy to notice that they are being observed in profile.
Everywhere we see little girls with wise, sad musical faces.
These pictures tell stories even as their abstraction compels us to see the organization of the shadows and of things that are not there. Allen always draws our attention to the actual conditions under which people are living, not by focusing on poverty but, nonetheless, with no chance to romanticize the surroundings or to misunderstand the critical lack of modern resources.

What is really fabulous in these photos is the edges, how the outer frame supports the center of the frame in terms of composition. Until you could almost say what the photo says, as though it was on the tip of your tongue. That is, of course, if it were say-able, which it is not.
There are the shots that focus on single figures, for instance, a head of a beautiful woman juxtaposed with the reflection of leaves in the glass of a car windshield. Then there are the large groups, among them two scenes on the beach. The first of boys playing in silhouette against the dusk, a mirror image of Thomas Eakin’s “The Watering Hole” for sensuality and masculine pleasure. Then there is the more distant shot of a group of men working, struggling perhaps with a fishing net on the beach as the sun comes up.
There is the congestion of the women in the market, their bodies swaddled in layers of clothe in the heat, their backs bent over in industry. There is also the stunning image of workers in a sculpture workshop where the fragments of sculptures look exactly like a pile of bones. Everything looks like at least like two or three different things, one of them always from some other world and not strictly capable of being put into words. These photographs leave you wanting more. Much more.

ENDIT

Picturing US History: Online Teaching Resource

I am thrilled to announce a new online resource being offered by the CUNY Graduate Center at the following link: http://www.picturinghistory.gc.cuny.edu/ and a wonderfully length list of web resources to be further explored.  More later.

Lynching

Caption: The burning of Will Brown's body, Omaha, Nebraska, Sept. 18, 1919

Source: NSHS, RG2281-69

Nebraska born actor Henry Fonda was 14 years old when this incident occured.  He watched the riot from the second floor window of his father's printing plant across the street from the courthouse.  "It was the most horrendous sight I'd ever seen . . We locked the lan, went downstairs, and drove home in silence.  My hands were wet and there were tears in my eyes.  All I could thimk of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope."

This material is taken from a series of pages on the history of racial tensions in Omaha at the following address-

http:/www.nebraskastudies.org/0700/frameset.html.

I got interested in lynching because of my interest in African American visual culture. It seemed to me that it was necessary to add certain previously ignored elements to the aesthetic ensemble in order to more plainly see the traditions of an African American visual culture.

When I decided to do a Ph.D., my first impulse was to do it in Art History but after very little research I realized that it would be entirely an uphill battle to do extensive coursework in Art History, most or all of it having nothing to do with African American visual culture, and then compose a committee from the current personnel of the best departments of Art History. Your committee is just as important or even more so than the available coursework when it comes to completing the dissertation.

As I imagined it, the better field to pursue would be film because it meant that I would be studying the 20th century, a period during which I thought the impact and visibility of African Americans was undeniable. My tropes were passing, lynching and Jim Crow, which I borrowed from the concerns so prominent in the African American literature of the 20th century.

A collection of lynching photographs was published in 2000, WITHOUT SANCTUARY: LYNCHING PHOTOGRAPHS IN AMERICA edited by James Allen (I finished my Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at NYU in 1999), which increased the general knowledge of lynching episodes in American history. Meanwhile, I had begun to include lynching in the courses I offered at the Graduate Center in the English Program. One of the students in my class, Anne Rice, put together an anthology of writings protesting lynching, dating from 1889 through 1935. She asked me to write the foreword, which I gladly did. WITNESSING LYNCHING: AMERICAN WRITERS RESPOND was published by Rutgers University Press in 2003.*

It is a truly wonderful and indispensable book with selections of writings on lynching by Frederick Douglas, Frances Harper, Ida B. Wells, Pauline Hopkins, WEB Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Walter White, Sterling Brown, Nancy Cunard, Claude McKay, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Esther Popel, Angelina Weld Grimke.

Anne has written for this book a wonderful, lucid, crystal clear and succinct introduction to the issues of lynching in American culture, as well as shorter introductions to each writer, and to each essay, short story, play or poem included in the book, weaving all the material in the book together into a perfect correspondence with the actual events of the period.

Since 2000, I have had several copies of this book in my possession but I always end up giving them away to people I think may really need to read it and who won't go to the store and buy it for themselves. During my recent visit to the Schomburg, I found a copy of it in the gift shop for a price of $7. The proprietor of the store told me that the book was out-of -print and had been remaindered, which explains why the book was so inexpensive.

Anne's purpose in doing this book was to make available in one place a range of relatively obscure writings on lynching, most of which I had never seen before. These were the historical witnesses to lynching, able to articulate for their audiences then exactly what they thought they saw along with its deeper meaning. And yet so few people have ever had a chance to read this proud American literature. Fewer still will have the chance with the passing of this book, an obscure title during the best of times, from availability.

Just this past Wednesday, Judith Killens, a former M.A. student at the Graduate Center, a teacher and an intellectual, was saying during a visit to my office at CCNY (NAC 6/223) that it was getting more and more difficult to explain to students why they needed to go to libraries and do research in an archive since more and more everything can be found online.  She was pointing out in particular a booklet that Ida B. Wells, her husband and Frederick Douglas had produced at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 with the title WHY ARE THERE NO BLACKS AT THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION which is now online in its entirety. 

But I still worry about what will happen to WITNESSING LYNCHING.  I still worry that first, having something online doesn't make it necessarily more available to the people who need it and 2) that some projects are inherently against the grain and are therefore invisible to the majority of the reading and thinking public.  

Another project which is also probably indispensable in its importance is REMEMBERING JIM CROW: AFRICAN AMERICANS TELL ABOUT LIFE IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH edited by William H. Chafe et al, The New Press and Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Press, 2001, which contains two hours of interviews as well as a book of analysis and a transcript of the recordings, bibliography, etcetera and so forth. This project was in part inspired by the previous REMEMBERING SLAVERY project edited by Ira Berlin and others, and coordinated by Joe Wood, an editor and writer greatly loved and admired by myself and many others.  

I became Anne's mentor and the head of her dissertation committee. She subsequently wrote her dissertation on lynching and literature, completing her graduate work at the Graduate Center in 2004. She currently teaches African American Studies at Lehman College, CUNY, and is working on a book on lynching, photography and historical memory.

***There are inexpensive copies of WITNESSING SLAVERY at the Schomburg Gift Shop.  Also, they have piles of A SMALL NATION OF PEOPLE: WEB DU BOIS AND AFRICAN AMERICAN PORTRAITS OF PROGRESS, The Library of Congress with Essays by David Levering Lewis & Deborah Willis, 2003--African American Photographs Assembled by Du Bois for the 1900 Paris Exposition--at half price!!!! 

To Conserve a Legacy and Black Education

Concerning To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities edited by Richard J. Powell and Jock Reynolds, Addison Gallery of American Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, MIT 1999.

Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Jo Moore Stewart, Spelman: A Centennial Celebration. Spelman College 1981.

Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in The Segregated South. Belknap Harvard 2007.

The Black Washingtonians: The Anacostia Museum Illustrated Chronology. Wiley 2005.

George Sullivan, Black Artists in Photography, 1840-1940. Cobble Hill Books 1996.

To Conserve a Legacy is where and when the sense of this project of race and photography really begun to take shape for me. The book on Spelman’s photographs was something I remembered, and it gave me early on with some inkling of what archives of photographs at historically black colleges could provide. But it is only with this new technological piece (internet, blogging, scanning and so forth) that I could begin to imagine the possibilities for somebody like me who can’t begin to get physically to all these archives at black schools for envisioning, thinking, teaching and being inspired.

The story of Spelman might provide the corner stone of the chapter or chapters on black education. It is one of the two only black female colleges and it has such a great photographic archive so little seen by the outside world. The way the book is presented, I can’t tell who actually took these photographs. Was there the combination at Spelman as at Hampton and Tuskegee of photographs by teachers, alumni and hired photographers such as Frances Benjamin Johnston?

I always like to know who took the pictures because it helps a great deal with understanding and interpreting the point-of-view, which is usually being represented somewhere. I notice the early shots of graduates mirror again the aesthetic qualities visible in the Paris Exposition photos and in the Johnston photos. Of course, the early faculty of Spelman was white and I am reading Fairclough to gain a better sense of the lay of the land in terms of the different racial dispositions which lead to the various black colleges, normal schools, Baptist academies etcetera. I still haven’t a sense yet of exactly how many different kinds of black schools there were at any given time. But I think that it is something important to know in telling this story of black photography since the photographs obviously were composed in order to serve those interests. It is good to know that there is an archive which resulted in a regular publication because then one learns by observing the process of selection.

Rereading it I don’t think I had realized the extent to which the role of black women and the education of black women and Spelman has been minimized in the telling of the story of the struggle between DuBois and Washington. Of course, the story of black education is central to the unfolding drama of Jim Crow segregation and the struggle for Civil Rights. And it has always seemed to me that the story of black education and the history of black educational institutions function as an essential mystery within the larger mystery of how it is we are ever going to go about getting our people on the right track educationally.

But the piece of it that has made me so curious as somebody who was raised and educated in the North and in integrated private schools about what happened in the South and most particularly in its classrooms is this: if the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement (or cultural nationalism) was about achieving equality, wiping out the caste of slavery, and getting rid of discrimination, the greatest failure has been this eternal problem of mis-education or the lack of an adequate education which continues to plague our children, and to some degree all of us.

In my experience at Cornell’s Black Studies Program, one of the oldest in the country, I got the sense that this yearning for an education that can liberate us is as much of a problem at the Ivy League Colleges and the State Colleges as it has been in the historically black colleges, because the kids at the Ivy Leagues may be able to achieve in a superficial sense but at the price of knowing next to nothing about the struggles and accomplishments of their forebears, particularly their female forebears who were so crucial to their own survival and success.

Anyhow, it goes around and around in circles but what I am trying to say is that education continues to be a hard nut to crack for us black folks. In the discussions of the fight against segregation, the focus is on the physical conditions but what about consciousness and philosophy? And I don’t mean just vocational versus academic. When we are dealing with rural students from very poor communities in a section of the country in which a high school education is still a luxury for a majority of young Americans, why is the most important thing whether or not there is someone qualified to teach Greek?

I knew black women leaders and intellectuals were trivialized but that the story we tell ourselves about the history of black education marginalizes the role of black women even as we are told again and again that the women were the only ones who were able to advance, is ironic. I wonder where Zora Neale Hurston was when all of this was going on. Why didn’t she have the opportunity to be in those earlier classes at Spelman when she might have attended without having to feel as though she needed to lie about her age.

Also that the story of black women’s education would be marginalized by discussions of women’s education is also something I had thought about because wandering through the libraries at Cornell I got interested in this vocational, industrial focus in early women’s education in the form of Home Economics. There was as well a history of a vocational emphasis at Cornell, which had been co-educational from the outset and geared toward farming and rural occupations apparently from the outset.

(My Aunt Barbara was the apple of everybody’s eye when she graduated from Hunter College at 16 in I guess 1943 and went to college at New York University majoring in Home Economics with a focus on Dietetics. It seems unimaginable to me that this was seen as an advance over becoming a maid. It was just the first chapter in a short and tragic life but that’s the other book).

When I saw the Conserving a Legacy exhibition at the Studio Museum the summer of 1999, what really stood out for me were the photographs—15 by Frances Benjamin Johnston’s from the Hampton Album, 13 of the Hampton Camera Club and other anonymous works sent back by Hampton graduates, 3 by Leonard C. Hyman from Tuskegee, 5 by Cornelius Marion Battey of Tuskegee, 7 by Arthur Bedou of Tuskegee, 2 by William Christenberry of Hampton, 1 portrait of George Washington Carver when he was a young man by Charles S. Livingston, 11 by Leigh Richmond Miner at Hampton, 3 by Prentice P. Polk of Tuskegee, 5 by C.D. Robinson of Tuskegee, 1 by Richard Riley, 1 by Herbert Pinney Tresslar, 1 by Doris Ullman and 8 portraits of famous people by Carl Van Vechten in the 30s. Which totals about 69 or 70 photographs.

Primarily what interested me in this group were the photos from Hampton and Tuskegee and the different generic conventions they represented. On one level, they seemed somehow highly familiar and yet I also knew even if I had ever seen such pictures before, I knew little about them and the people in them.

At the same time, my preoccupation with African American visual culture in recent years made me immediately aware that here might be some aspect of the archive documenting our steps as a people from slavery to our present marginal status in modernity. It was clear enough that these pictures presented in a fairly straightforward and humble way students and teachers at or around the turn-of-the-century engrossed in the endeavor of educating the former slaves and their children.

I also knew from the central role played by images produced at Hampton and Tuskegee at the turn-of-the-century, as well as images of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, that the debate over manual training versus elite liberal arts training had been an issue and that these images portrayed institutions which were ostensibly devoted to so-called “vocational” training. Although I was also aware, given my interest in the Jim Crow violence which characterized this period in the South, that these schools functioned in the middle of an often terroristically violent environment. To look at these often tiny pristine images of African Americans whom I had wondered about so intensely for so long dressed so neatly in their period costumes, so serious in their preoccupation of getting an education and passing it on to the less fortunate children of the rural south was as healing as anything I had ever experienced during my years as a Northern African American. Of course, on some level I had always known there had to be such images since my great grandfathers and great grandmothers were such people, teachers in fact who started small schools in the South. But to actually see them finally on the wall of a museum I admire (not my ancestors particularly but some people like them) was to know immediately that I was going to spend a lot of time finding out exactly where they came from, how many there were and what they signified.

These images gave the lie finally to all the stereotypes that had ever worried me or any other African American. The debate was not even over whether or not they were positive or negative images or role models. It wasn’t a questions of whether the subjects were playing into some preconceived notions of African American abilities or not, as one would be led to believe in a novel such as Invisible Man. The point was that these people were every bit as real as Buck and Bubbles, as Williams and Walker, as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. And although the talented tenth must have been closer to a one thousandth at the time, nonetheless, they provide the balance of a picture of a people living under apartheid and making the very best of it under the circumstances.

There are the following articles in To Conserve a Legacy concerned with the photographs, short but providing crucial clues to my work:

1. Lux, Lies, and Compromise: The Politics of Light Exposure by Leslie Paisley.
2. Preserving the Cyanotype: Unlimited Access and Exhibition through Digital Image
3. Surrogates by MK Lalor, James Martin, Nicholas J. Zammuto
4. The Hampton Camera Club by Mary Lou Hultgren
5. Chronicling Tuskegee in Photographs: A Simple Version by Cynthia Beavers Wilson

Black Media Archive

Black Media Archive--Inventory of Relevant Film Footage and Recordings

132 Beware with Louis Jordan, musical short 1946

http://www.louisjordan.com

131 Hard Times 

Gospel Elder Curry and Congregation 1930

130 Leadbelly, Pick a Bale of Cotton
Grey Goose, Take This Hammer

129 Last Kind Words, Gesshie Wiley

128 Bessie Smith, He Treats Me Like a Dog

127 Mind Reader Blues,Bertha Lee and Charlie Patton 1934

126 Where is My Good Man, Memphis Minnie

118 The Beulah Show, 1952

117 The Bronze Buckaroo, 1939

116 Zora Neale Hurston,  Tampa, Ever Been Down,
Mama Don't Want No Peas, No Rice

115 Former Slave Interviews: Harriet Smith

106 Cocaine Habit Blues, Memphis Jug Band 1930

105 Clean Pastures, Cartoon 1937

103 The Quiet One 1948

102 Gil Scott Heron

98 We Work Again, 1937

97 Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Leadbelly

96 March of Life Life of Leadbelly, 1935

91 Hallelujah! dir: King Vidor, 1929

90 Zora Neale Hurston, audiotapes: Georgia Skin, Let The Deal Go Down, 

Let's Shake It, Dat Old Black Gal, Uncle Bud

88 Kwame Nkrumah 1957

87 It Happend to Crusoe

86 Satchmo, Swings in the Congo

85 Africa Speaks 1930

83 Song of Freedom 1936

79 I ain't bliged to stan no foolin

78 All the Way Home 1957

72 Interviews with Alice Gaston and Mr. Isom Moseley

Gee's Bend and former slaves

Library of Congress

68 Educational inequalities in the South 1939

Negro Colleges in War Time

60 Fountain Hughes interview

49 Booze and Blues, Ma Rainey

43 Interview with Former Slaves: 

Mrs. Laura Smalley, Library of Congress

36 Harlem Review 1937

Added Notes--Music and Black Colleges

Concerning Jazz, Music and Performance:

1. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, Jazz: A History of America’s Music. Knopf 2000.

2. Charles Graham, The Great Jazz Day. Woodford Publishing 1999.

The second book tells the story of the great jazz photograph featured in Esquire in 1959. There is also a documentary about it. The advantage of this particular book and packaging of Jazz photography is that it composes an anthology of jazz remembrances and jazz photography: Milt Hinton, Ralph Ellison, Art Kane, Sonny Rollins etcetera.

I am not an avid fan of the Ken Burns series but the book has extraordinary performance photographs, some of which I haven’t seen before. If memory serves, much of this material would be accessible at reasonable prices. If it isn’t, whatever is expensive, we can avoid because there really is so much wonderful performance photography which hasn’t been much seen except by those of us who are completely obsessed with the subject.

Of the things I particularly would want to include (aside from anything involving either Louis Armstrong or Billie Holiday both of whom have been seen more than anybody else although I think not by the average black audience for books), I like all those wonderful orchestras and bands my parents grew up listening to and dancing to. The ones who are all dressed to death in matching suits and so forth. This image is really so much in conflict with what our children are currently learning about black history and culture, unimaginable really.

I liked that whole style of being dressed up and doing things in unison, which I saw so much of at the Apollo still in the sixties, and don’t feel as though it is adequately documented in terms of discussions of photography. It would be good, as well, to emphasize the more unusual photos of black female performers, in particular instrumentalists.

Many of our singers have been given short shrift especially in the looks department on the idea that they weren’t good looking (which probably means too dark) but these women are often exquisite looking: different and stunning if nothing else. Neither Bessie Smith nor Ma Rainey ever took an uninteresting picture. Not to mention the beauty of Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Sarah Vaughn—all of whom I saw perform many times and who provided much of the musical background of my life growing up. This is perhaps true for most black women my age.

Of course, I feel as though Josephine Baker, who has been so under appreciated and misunderstood by Afro-Americans, should have her own chapter in which we can finally reclaim her as part of the African American performance tradition (along with Florence Mills and Ethel Waters) which traveled all over the world trying to escape from racism at home.

I would love us to emphasize the rare but extraordinary female instrumentalists, in particular Mary Lou Williams (about which there are two recent books that are highly informative: Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams by Mary Dahl, University of California Press 2001 and Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams by Tammy Kernodie, Northeastern University Press 2004). As it turns out, Mary Lou was a major midwive for the whole bebop scene, a nurturer as well as a genius as a performer and a composer so she is a real role model that young black women know little about. I knew her in her later years. 

There was this priest who was very connected to the jazz scene who was after me to write about her for The Village Voice so I got to see her, meet her, so forth but it was way over my head to comprehend her contribution, particularly given that there was so little written about her then. She performed frequently at the Cookery, as did Alberta Hunter whom I also met. She was a central figure too. The other woman I want to point out is somebody I’ve noticed in a lot of the pictures but know little about: Melba Liston.  Maybe she plays trombone.  

She is very very cool looking, obviously an important instrumentalist on a lot of recording sessions. 

Speaking of which there is a film of Big Momma Thornton singing Hound Dog at a Blues Festival in London which is just incredible. There's also some great footage of Sister Rosetta Tharpe performing in England.  There are entire films such as St. Louis Blues, Stormy Weather, Cabin in the Sky and New Orleans which have been hidden away and forgotten collectively by black and white coalitions of high brow opinion (on the grounds that they are somehow unflattering) in which there are contained wonderful performances and real clues as to what became of African American contributions to American popular culture. 

There is a book about film, which I am planning to pursue under "Movie Talk" as a separate blog, that I am planning to do eventually, maybe next year or the year after (if somebody else doesn’t write it first) and I think we should probably use only so much of this movie material as serves to offset the more sociological and less entertaining or pleasurable materials. In another words, to achieve the sense of a multi-disciplinary and representative mixture of the depths which lie in the archives.

Talking in Pictures: Race and Gender in Photography in the 20th Century

In Talking in Pictures: Race and Gender in Photography in the 20th Century, I will reflect upon the larger meaning of some of the key occasions upon which the 20th Century has fostered the accumulation of photographic images related to the accomplishments, the culture as well as the misfortunes of African Americans, and their relationship to the language such images have engendered. I am proposing in the process that the existence of a largely neglected photographic archive can contribute to the historical re-evaluation of events and personalities, as well as providing a handy and creative new way to present black history and culture in the classrooms of the nation. Simultaneously, new readings of such materials invariably offer, as well, unprecedented opportunities for readings of gender in representation and photography.
Women photographers participated substantially in the creation of photography as a popular form of expression but in the case of black women photographers, it has proven difficult thus far to document their work. Nonetheless, notions of importance in photography, given its technological basis and commercial affinity from the turn-of-the-century, remain flexible and available to myriad interpretive approaches to a degree unimaginable in other visual culture fields. Regardless of the race or gender of the photographers, themselves, white or black, male or female, gender and race were often crucial to photographic composition and perception. Or in other words, there is a sense in which the subject of the photograph participates equally in the creation of the photograph, or the shadows the past cast upon the present. t things may be, they often seem to pivot early in the century around issues of gender and racial differentiation.

The current technological revolution of the internet and computers has completely altered the availability of photographs from the first half of the 20th century. Archives and libraries, in significant numbers, have taken it upon themselves to provide massive databases of their collections on line, and also in enough occasions to make it significant, to provide computer files of the actual pictures. In some cases, these archives make available to the public photographs and negatives, which had been completely overlooked and unnoticed by scholars and historians before.  

As archival resources are being digitized and rendered available to the college student or the scholar, it remains to be seen what impact these methods will have upon aesthetic standards and modes of evaluation. The democratization of the technology is still concentrated in the hands of those with the funds to purchase such equipment, as well as the software and the internet services and the leisure which facilitate teaching and study.

Those who are in most dire need of history and culture will not necessarily find the archive and its scholars the most welcoming or encouraging. Indeed, photographic scholarship would seem to suffer from the same elitism and snobbery of all the other fields of visual culture commentary, most notably art and film criticism and history. But the major difference with photography is its numerical plenitude. With the digital revolution, the 21st century is sure to produce photographs in numbers that will entirely dwarf the resources of the 20th century. Yet, these photographs stand to be entirely different in their importance and accessibility. All the more reason, to submit the resources of the 20th century to rigorous examination, most particularly in regard to the wealth of information concentrated therein on the history of developments of race and gender concepts.

Digitalization is bound to democratize the mode of production of photography in the 21st century but what of access to the resources of the 20th? There are two ways to further disseminate the democratization process of access to the resources of the 20th. One is through the funding of computer access and services in poorer communities and schools, and their hope that readers and students will put together for themselves some modes of interpretation and criticism, perhaps out of thin air. The other way is to disseminate the techniques of access and spread the word concerning the riches of present sources in the form of books and texts as well.

This dissemination of knowledge I propose to provide to the readers of this book. Given the range of photographic occasions of race and gender, it would be impossible to do a comprehensive job of summarizing what is available worldwide. But rather I have chosen to highlight twenty or so particularly rich sources of photographic representation keyed to major events, personalites and occasions in African American history and culture. In other words, this is an introduction to race and gender in photography: its uses and interpretations.

General Surveys of Racial Images in Photography:

In terms of getting access to what lies out there, there are a number of books in the field which give some indication of the photographic resources for the study of race and gender, although not nearly enough of them in my opinion. How do you find them? The most reliable way I have found is to visit the Africana Studies section of the bookstore in which will be found, as well, whatever picture books and photographic collections there are on the subject. This collection is usually surprisingly meagre in my experience with few additions from season to season.

The present titles in this set are:

Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin, ed. The Face of our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present. Indiana UP, 1999;

Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture edited by Howard Dodson, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL 2002;

A Pictorial History of Black Americans by Langston Hughes and C. Eric Lincoln. Crown Fifth Edition 1973;

Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings 2000;

One More River to Cross: An African American Photograph Album by Walter Dean Myers, Harcourt 1995;

Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968, The New Press, ISBN: 1-56584-266-9.

The Black Book Random House 1974.

These books rarely engage in any real discussion of how one can find more of such photographs or how the compilers of the books obtained their photographs. Such information is usually left to the exclusive domain of a photographic researcher. What they are looking for is copyright permissions for the photos used in the book. But there are two major dominions of historic photography: those still under copyright restriction, and photographs which are available to everyone either because they were never under copyright restriction (such as in the case of library and state collections) or because restriction has elapsed.

In this book, we will endeavor in particular to focus upon such photographs in the interest of providing researchers, authors, writers and those who are curious about the past with material which calls out for discussion but which is rarely discussed.

Photo Criticism & History

Photo Criticism & Theoretical

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill & Wang, New York. Translation 1981.
---. La chamber Claire: Notes sur la photographie. Cahiers du cinema & Gallimard Seuil 1980.
---. Mythologies. Hill and Wang 1972.

*Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador 2003.
---. On Photography. FS&G 1977.
* ---. On Photography. Anchor Books 1990.

Carrie Mae Weems, The Hampton Project, Aperture 2000.

Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Cornell University Press, 1988.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MIT Press, 1992.

Beaumont Newhall, Photography: Essays & Images, Illustrated Readings in the History of Photography. The Museum of Modern Art, 1980.

Henry Louis Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self. Oxford UP, 1987.

Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, Second Edition University of Chicago Press (1965) republished 1979.


African American Cultural Theory & History (Background to Photographic History)
*W.E.B. Du Bois, The Illustrated Souls of Black Folk, (1903), edited by Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. Paradigm Publishers 2005.
W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line. Edited by Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson, University Press of Mississippi 2005.
Pierre Hauser, Great Ambitions: From the “Separate But equal” Doctrine to the Birth of the NAACP (1896-1909). Chelsea House Publishers, 1995

----. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899.
---. The Souls of Black Folk, 1903.
---. Quest of the Silver Fleece, 1911.
---. Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil, 1920.
---. Dark Princess: A Romance. Harcourt Brace reprint 1928.
---. Black Reconstruction in America, 1935.
---. The Black Flame Trilogy: Part I: The Ordeal of Mansart 1957.
• Part II: Mansart Builds a School, 1959.
• The Black Flame Trilogy: Part III: Worlds of Color 1961.
The Best of the Brownies’ Book edited by Dianne Johnson Feelings. The Opie Library/Oxford UP 1996.
David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. Henry Holt 2003.

World’s Fairs:
*Christopher Robert Reed, All the World is Here! The Black Presence at White City. Indiana UP 2000.
Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. University of Chicago Press 1984.

Jim Crow:
Richard Wormser, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. St. Martin’s Press 2003.
Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography. Geoffrey Ward et al. Knopf 2001.
Dora Apel, Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, Black Women, and the Mob. Rutgers UP 2004.
Christopher Metress, The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, 2002.

FSA/Depression:
Paul Dickson and Thomas Allen, The Bonus Army: An American Epic. Walker 2004.

Chicago:
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis
Timuel D. Black Jr., Bridges of Memory: Chicago’s First Wave of Black Migration. Northwestern University Press and Dusable Museum of African American History, 2003.

Visual Culture:
Jacob Lawrence, Migration Series, MOMA Collection 1935.

Miscellaneous Projects:
*Donald Alexander Downs, Cornell 69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. Cornell UP 1999.
The Routledge Atlas of African American History. Jonathan Earle, Routledge 2000.

PHOTO ESSAYS

Preface by Wlliam Clift, The Darkness and The Light: Photographs by Doris Ullmann. Aperture 1974.

Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) Foreword by Alan Trachtenberg, University of Georgia Press, 1995.

James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939 & 1940.

Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam, 12 Million Black Voices. 1941. Thunder Mouth Press Reissue, 1988. Preface by David Bradley.

Godfrey Frankel, In The Alleys: Kids in the Shadow of the Capitol. Smithsonian Institution Press 1995.

Edward Steichen, The Family of Man. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1955.

Langston Hughes and Roy de Carava, The Sweet Flypaper of Life. 1955.

Dorothea Lange & Paul Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion JeanMichelPlace, 1999.

Helen Levitt and James Agee, A Way of Seeing (1965) Duke UP 1992.

Allan Schoener, Harlem on My Mind. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1968.

Wayne F. Miller: Chicago’s South Side, 1946-1948. University of California Press, 2000.

Relevant Commentary:

Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: James Agee, Walker Evans and The Rise and Fall of the Cotton in The South. Pantheon 1989.

Erick J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America. Alburquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Maren Stange, Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures 1941-1943. The New Press, 2003.

Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. Duke UP 2004.

James Agee Rediscovered: The Journals of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Other New Manuscripts edited by Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis, University of Tennessee Press 2005.

Photographic Collections

In Focus: National Geographic Greatest Portraits. National Geographic Society, 2004.
J. L. Mashburn, Black Americana: Postcard Price Guide: A Century of History Preserved on Postcards. Colonial House 1996.
Lucy Lippard et al, Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century. The Saint Louis Art Museum 1997.
1968 Magnum Throughout the world. Hazan 1970.
Love and Desire Photoworks 1990. Chronicle Books.
Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self 2003 edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis. ICP/Abrams
Willis, Deborah and Brian Wallis 2005. African American: Vernacular Photography. 

ICP Steidl.

Africa
Revue Noire: Anthology of African & Indian Ocean Photography. Smithsonian 1999.
Flash Afrique! Photography from West Africa. Kunsthalle 2001.
In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885-1960. Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, 2002.
Jeanne Cannizzo, Into the Heart of Africa. Royal Ontario Museum 1989.

United States
The Way Life Was: A Photographic Treasury from the Amerian Past. Praeger 1974.
Stuart Kidd, Farm Security Administration: Photography, The Rural South and the Dynamics of Image-Making, 1935-1943. The Edwin Mellon Press 2004.
Els Rijper, Kodachrome: The American Invention of Our World, 1939-1959. Delano Greenidge Editions 2002.
David Stravitz, ed. New York, Empire City 1920-1945. Abrams 2004.

Latin American
Margaret Randall, Women Brave in the Face of Danger: Photographs of and Writings by Latin and North American Women. The Crossing Press 1985.

African Americans
Carlebach, Michael and Provenzo, Eugene F 1993. Farm Security Administration: Photographs of Florida. University Press of Florida.
Kathleen Thompson and Hilary Mac Austin, ed. The Face of our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present. Indiana UP, 1999.
The Library of Congress, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. Du Bois & Afrian American Portraits of Progress. Amistad 2003.
Wilson, Jackie Napolean 1999. Hidden Witness: African-American Images from the Dawn of Photography to the Civil War. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Europe & Britain
Billy Kluver and Julie Martin, Kiki’s Paris: Artists and Lovers, 1900-1930. Abrams 1989.
William J. Fishman & Nicholas Breach, The Streets of East London. Duckworth 1979.
Nick Yapp, ed. 150 Years of Photo Journalism, Volume I. Konemann 1995.
Bonnie L. Grad and Timothy A. Riggs, Visions of City & Country: Prints and Photographs of Nineteenth Century France. Worcester Art Museum 1982.

Tibet & Burma
Tibet: The Sacred Realm—Photographs 1880-1950. Aperture 1983.
Burma’s Revolution of the Spirit: The Struggle for Democratic Freedom and Dignity. Aperture 1989.
Tibet Since 1950: Silence, Prison, or Exile. Aperture/Human Rights Watch 1988.

India
The Last Empire: Photography in British India, 1855-1911. Aperture 1976.

China
L. Carrington Goodrich & Nigel Cameron, The Face of China As Seen by Photographers & Travelers: 1860-1912. Aperture 1978.

Photographic Monographs, Auto and Bios

Berenice Abbott: Changing New York. The Complete WPA Project & The Museum of the City of New York 1997.
New York in the Thirties as photographed by Berenice Abbott. Dover 1973.

Diane Arbus Magazine Work. Aperture 1984.
Diane Arbus: Revelations. 2003.

Andreas Krase et al, Paris: Eugene Atget, 1857-1927Taschen 2000.

Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato’s Photographs of China. Santa Barbara Museum of Art 2004.

Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of the Revolution: Photographs by Jack Birns, edited by Carolyn Wakeman and Ken Light. University of California Press, 2003.

Warehime, Marja 1996. Brassai: Images of Culture and the Surrealist Observer. Louisiana State University Press.

Alain Sayag and Annick Lionel-Marie, Brassai: The Monograph. Bullfinch Press Book, 2000.
Brassai: The Secret Paris of the 30s. Pantheon 1976.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photographs and Memories. Aperture Foundation, 1997.
Susan Kismari, Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Museum of Modern Art and Abrams 1997.

Esther Bubley: On Assignment. Aperture 2005.

Margaret Bourke-White: The Early Work, 1922-1930. Paragon 2005.

Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection. Phaidon 2001.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, The Image & The World. Thames and Hudson 2003.

Agustin Victor Casasola, Mexico: The Revolution and Beyond, Aperture, 2003.

Anne Makepeace, Edward Curtis; Coming to Light. National Geographic Society 2001.

Thomas L. Johnson and Nina J. Root, Camera Man’s Journey: Julian Dimock’s South. University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938. Library of Congress/Da Capo Press, 1973.
Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology. Scalo & Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2000.

Chester Higgins, Jr. Feeling the Spirit, Searching the World for the People of Africa,

Vicki Goldberg, Lewis W. Hine: Children at Work. Prestel 1999.

Freddy Langer, Lewis W. Hine: The Empire State Building. Prestel, 1998.

Lewis W. Hine 1992. Photo Poche, Centre National de La Photographie.

Judith Mara Guttman, Lewis Hine and the American Social Conscious. Walker and Company, 1967.

Women at Work: 153 Potographs by Lewis Hine. Dover 1981.

Lincoln Kirsten, ed. The Hampton Album (selections from photos taken in 1900 by Frances Johnston Benjamin). The Museum of Modern Art, 1970. Out-of-Print.
Bettina Berch, The Woman behind the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1864-1952, University Press of Virginia 2000.

Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer. Brooklyn Museum 1992.

Andre Magnin, ed. Seydou Keita. Scalo 1997.

Andre Kertesz. National Gallery of Art and Princeton University Press, 2005.

Pierre Borhan, Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer, Bullfinch

McDarrah, Fred W. and Timothy McDarrah 2002. Kerouac and Friends: A Beat Generation Album. New York: Thundermouth Press.

Boris Mikhailov: Case History. Scalo 1999.
Boris Mikhailov: Unfinished Dissertation. Scalo 1998.

Ann Thomas, Lisette Model, International Center of Photography 1991.

Margaret Hooks, Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary. Da Capo Press 1993.

Gordon Baldwin and Judith Keller, NadarWarhol: Paris New York. Getty Museum 1999.

Gordon Parks: Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective. Bullfinch Press 1998.
Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera 1968. New York: The Viking Press.


Irving Penn, Worlds in a Small Room. Viking 1974.
Passages: A Work Record. Knopf 1991.

P.H. Polk, Through These Eyes: The Photographs of P.H. Polk. Exhibition Catalogue, University of Delaware, 1998.

Wallace Stegner & Page Stegner, Eliot Porter: American Places. Greenwich House 1983.

Man Ray: Photographs, Thames and Hudson 1987.

Thomas L. Johnson and Phillip C. Dunn, ed. A True Likeness: The Black South of Richard Samuels Roberts, 1920-1936, Writers and Readers Publshing, 1994.

The Depression Years, As Photographed by Arthur Rothstein, Dover 1978.

August Sander, 1876-1964. Taschen

Andre Magnin, ed. Malick Sidibe. Scalo 1997.
Malick Sidibe: Photographs. Hasselblad Center/Steidl 2003.

Glen G. Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay, Cambridge UP 1992.

Harlem, the Thirties: Photographs by Aaron Siskind, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian I.

Sue Davison Lowe, Alfred Stieglitz: A Memoir, Biography. MFA Publications 2002.
Weston Naef, The Collection of Alfred Stiegliz: Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978.

Steichen: A Life in Photography. Harmony Books and MOMA 1985.

Paul Strand: The World on My Doorstep, 1950-1976. Aperture 1994.

Philip Walker Jacobs, The Life and Photography of Doris Ullman. University Press of Kentucky 2001.

John Vachon’s America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II. Edited by Miles Orvell, University of California Press, 2003.

Deborah Willis-Braithwaite, VanDerZee: Photographer 1886-1983. Smithsonian and Abrams, 1993.

Eudora Welty Photographs. University Press of Mississippi 1989.

Autobiographies & Biographies

Paul Delany, Bill Brandt: A Life. Stanford UP 2004.

Gordon Parks, A Choice of Weapons. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1965.

Self Portrait: Man Ray. New York Graphic Society Book, 1963.

Jim Haskins, James Van DerZee: The Picture Takin’ Man. African World Press 1991.

TALKING IN PICTURES BIBLIOGRAPHY--NEW POSTING

Web & Journalism Resources:
I. Articles:
Ben Ratliff, “A Fly on the Wall of Jazz: W.Eugene Smith’s Tapes Eavesdropped on an Era,” 

The New York Times, Thursday Arts March 10, 2005: 1, 6.

Barnett Wright, “From Negatives to Positives: Discovery in News archives leads to publication of unseen photographs tracing progress of civil rights movement through Birmingham,”Sunday, February 26, 2006. http://www.al.com/unseen.

Links:
Prints and Photographs Online Catalog Home Page http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html

Including—

2. African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition, more than 360 Photographs assembled by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1899.

17. Curtis (Edward S.) Collection (1890-1920), about 1000 photographic prints selected from the collection of images of Native Americans across North America.

21. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black and White Negatives—about 171,000 negatives: includes all FSA, OWI, and OEM negatives, 1935-1945.

22. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs, 

about 1600 images, 1939-1944. U.S. Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands.

For both of these two last collections, there are substantial numbers of images of interest to those who are looking for black images previously unseen, or images relevant to others of color including Asians, Native Americans, Latin Americans, and hyphenated Americans of all walks of life. There were many fascinating things into which the WPA poked their cameras, all of it relevant to the lives of ordinary Americans.

The color images, which are Kodachrome, are particularly less well known and often extraordinary. One may search these collections by topic or by photographer. My recommended list would include Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Esther Bubley, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks.

In addition there are online at the Library of Congress a series of essays entitled Documenting America with chapters devoted to the black images of Ben Shahn in Pulaski County, Arkansas, Arthur Rothstein in Gee’s Bend, Alabama and Gordon Parks in Washington, D.C. at tbe following URL: http://memory.loc/ammem/fsahtml/fadocamer.html.

33. Frances (Johnston Benjamin) Collection, Selections from collection of 1500.

35. Lomax Collection. 1934-1950. Snapshots documenting recording trips by John Avery Lomax, Alan and Ruby Terrell Lomax to document African American and Latino Folk Culture primary in the Southern U.S. and the Bahamas.

39. The National Child Labor Committee Collection, 5000 prints mostly taken by Lewis Hine, some of which document the working practices of children of color.

43. Photochrome Prints in North Africa and the Middle East.

Other resources of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs are:
Defining Moments: A Chronology
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/guide/chron


The Library of Congress's Prints & Photographs Division is pleased to announce that all the negatives in the George Grantham Bain news photograph collection (nearly 40,000 glass negatives in all) have now been digitized and are available for searching in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. The collection, which represents the archive of one of America's earliest news picture agencies, features an array of personalities, news events, sports coverage, and sites, particularly in New York City, for the period 1900-1931.

< http://memory.loc.gov/pp/ggbainhtml/ggbainabt.html >


The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) < 

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html > provides access through group or item records to about 65% of the Division's holdings, a portion of which are accompanied by digital images. The records represent the variety of materials held in the nearly 14 million items in the Division's collections. In addition to photographs, these include fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. The collections are international in scope and are particularly rich in materials produced in, or documenting the history of, the United States and the lives, interests and achievements of the American people.

Other collections that have recently become available in PPOC include:

-World War I Posters: All of the posters are now cataloged online with accompanying digital images. The nearly 1,900 posters feature strong representation of U.S., Canadian, British, German, and French posters.

To search and view the posters, go to the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog , select the blue button labeled: "Search the Catalog," and then scroll down the alphabetical list of collections and select "Posters: World War I Posters."

-Photographs from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive: 

The Archive features photographs of landmark buildings and architectural renovation projects in Washington, D.C., and throughout the United States. Other photo assignments show President Ronald Reagan meeting with Republican Senatorial candidates, as well as historic sites in Lexington, Virginia. The first 23 groups of photographs contain more than 2,500 images and date from 1980 to 2005, with many views in color as well as black-and-white. The archive is expected to grow to more than 50,000 photographs covering all of the United States. More information about the collection is available at: < http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/highsmhtml/highsmabt.html 

Vaudeville and Motion Picture Theater Drawings by Anthony Dumas.

A collection of more than 250 pen and ink drawings of theater facades from across the United States can now be retrieved in PPOC. Dumas created these theater "portraits" at a time of transition (1916-1934), when vaudeville was yielding to the movie palaces of the 1920's and '30's. In addition to documenting the theater architecture in some detail, marquee text often names vaudeville performers and film titles and stars. To search and view the drawings, go to the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog , select the blue button labeled: "Search the Catalog," and in the search box, type "Anthony Dumas"

-LOT (Group) Catalog Cards Converted: Old card catalog descriptions for almost 12,000 groups of pictures containing more than 1.5 million photographs and prints are now available as brief online records in a set called "Groups of Images in High Demand." To search these records, go to the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog , select the blue button labeled: "Search the Catalog," and then scroll down the alphabetical list and select "Groups of Images in High Demand." Rely on keyword searching for best results and use the "Check for online items from this group" link to see if any images from the group display online.

For information on new collections and recent and upcoming activities in the Prints and Photographs Division, see the division's "What's New" page .

For questions about the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog or the holdings and services of the Prints and Photographs Division, consult our Ask a Librarian service.

African Burial Grounds in New York

This is a cross reference to a post on Blues People: African Burial Grounds 

Legacy of Lynching--Bill Moyer's Journal

Bill Moyers does absolutely wonderful shows, accessible by website and by podcast, as well as on television-- although, probably like many of you, I follow very few things on actual television broadcasts anymore.  No time.

In any case, since we are on the subject of lynching photographs, Moyers has an excellent site posted November 23, 2007, which recaps some of the research and commentatory on lynching, as well as providing an excellent visual display of some lynching images with annotation at www.pbs.org/moyers/journal11232007/profile2.html.

This summation includes a series of photographs compiled by Ken Gonzales-Day, including lynchings of Native Americans, Chinese and Latinos, Emmett Till and his mother, as well as an overview including the keeping of lynching statistics at the Tuskeegee Institute from 1882-1968 and the anti-lynching crusade of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Apparently, in 2005, Congress formally apologized for failing to act on some 200 anti-lynching bills.  The resolution states that the Senate "expresses the deepest sympathies and solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of the victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the Constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States."  

Without Sanctuary--Lynching Photographs

The Without Sanctuary Website which offers on display the lynching photographs which serve as one entire starting point for this work on photography I am herein engaged.

The point about these photographs is their horror, and the degree to which the crimes they represent are both unspeakable and unforgettable.  It is impossible to blot out their image in the mind and yet they are in some manner completely forgotten even as the pictures were taken, even as the acts they document were being committed.  

Like battle scenes and executions, some things are too awful to occupy permanent residence in consciousness.  To hold any one of these scenes firmly in the mind's eye, is to go slowly mad unless one possesses the temperament of the sociopath or of a forensic investigator.  

And so instead of deeply considering the photographs, themselves, those of us who sincerely wish to prevent such acts in the future, reassure ourselves and others with an endless catalogue of the facts, of the circumstances surrounding such acts, of the precise and statistical probabilities of such things happening again--where they are happening even now (I am speaking of genocide, torture and unjust murder), and how we would stop it.  

I don't know.  You had better take a look at these photos on this website one more time.  Just to be on the safe side.  Or perhaps not.  

Copyright of James Allen and John Littlefield 2000-2005, Twin Palms Publisher

Utes Chief Sevara (i.e. Severo) and family

1 photomechanical print: photochrom, color. c. 1899. Detroit Photographic Company

LC-USZC4-4168 (color film copy transparency)

Bone Necklace. Oglala Sioux Chief c. 1899

Photographic Print, hand colored 15.5 x 12.5

Heyn Photo, Photographer. Omaha.  Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Control #2008675510.  There are many many striking photographs of Native Americans, this one of a chief and a portrait, taken at the turn-of-the-century.  The treatment of Native Americans as photographic subjects, particularly as in a case with a tribe still not fully assimilated, is strikingly different from most African American portraits.  This one is also beautifully colored. 

Black Media Archive

The Black Media Archive has more than one front door via a variety of sites and internet services, most of which I am still entirely new to BUT at this link http:/www.theBMA.org, you will find yourself somewhere making it possible to download the podcast, watch or listen to the programs archived herein via an itunes link. Then there is a related site http://www.theBMA.blogspot.com, which seems to provide information and commentary from the director and composer of the Archive, Bill Lee, about where he got the material from and so forth. It is possible to make comments and to conversate but it is moderated because some of the material would be a little dicey for some on the stereotypical tip.

In the process of going through the itunes selection of podcasts, there it was and I found it to be what I hope will be an endless list of black archival sources, cartoons, old films, radio shows, speeches, newsreels on a variety of topics of particular interest to me at the moment. No reason to be overly exuberant about this though. There aren't likely to be very many surprises, at least for me. I went to the Ph.D. program in Cinema Studies at NYU in order to unearth something no one had noticed. Mainly I wanted to see for myself. I worried less about whether I would be able to say anything new about it. It would be new to me. That was the point, to have the experience of seeing it for myself but to find that so much of it was what I already knew on some level, well that was a disappointment.

Much of it is the old disappointment of realizing I am black, and therefore a member of a club for which there are certain limitations. Nothing I signed up for, nothing that I or anyone I know ever was consulted about but limitations nonetheless so far as how the club is represented via audio-visuals especially in the distant past when the technology was really young. But for some who may read this who are younger and have had less time to browse the electronic archival record, I hope that some of the BMA will be helpful, entertaining, surprising, mind expanding, revelatory, whatever.

Unfortunately, however, the older you get, the more ridiculous and claustrophobic the rules of this ancestral club appear. I think the thing that always gets me is the infernal shallowness of it. Anyhow this isn't the place to try to explain what I mean. See for yourself. Keep an open mind if you can. The trouble is most people can't.

Among the materials I have thus far seen are a March of Time newsreel about John Lomax and Lead Belly right next to a wonderful recording of Lead Belly singing "Irene." Newsreels were the way the old folks use to get their news before there was CNN and NPR, WBAI and Democracy Now.

There is a documentary about the work of the WPA in the Harlem area around Edgecombe Avenue and Colonial Park in the early 40s (including the description of changes in the park to provide diversion for small children such as a wading pool). This, too, was obviously a newsreel. I just love this one. It includes so much stuff compressed in a tight space--a lengthy video selection from a performance of Orson Welle's black cast production of Macbeth set in Haiti. Also the BMA includes speeches galore from MLK, Paul Robeson, Fanny Lou Hamer, Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X and lots of much rarer names. It is all just beautifully done, a great educational resources for serious scholars as well as kids of all ages.

Alternately obtuse and ridiculous, yet essential and blood curdlingly moving, the documents are presented one after the other in a dazzling array. Through this source, I am beginning to get a feel for the old radio days my parents always talked about.

So these podcasts are free, downloadable to your hard drive and playable on an ipod or perhaps other mp3 players as well (do I know what I am talking about I do not) , and it is also posssible to just watch it and move on, which is always good I think. This material helps provides the milieu for all the pictures of the time--the photos from my family archive and from photography of race generally through the first half of the 20th Century, the overall subject of this blog.

Right now some of these documents are of particular interest to me because as a family we are moving toward the exciting project of the Faith Ringgold's Children's Museum of Art and Storytelling in Harlem, which is being sponsored by Broadway Housing (the authors of the impressive Dorothy Day Residence for the formerly homeless) and spearheaded by its fabulous director Ellen Baxter. The site, which has already been purchased, is at one of the major intersections in the new Harlem-- Sugar Hill and the Valley, the Macombs Dam Bridge and Washington Heights at the old garage on St. Nicholas and 155th Street. Right where the museum will be is not a highly or even over-populated area, which is nice, because of all the park land surrounding it and the way the bridge and the dam are designed to augment the panaromic view of the Bronx and Yankee Stadium and the Hudson River. Just spectacular. The biggest population of the children in the area will perhaps be provided by those who live in the Jackie Robinson Housing Projects just beneath the site of the planned museum in the valley. These children and the children who live on the hill should be well served by the museum, as well as children from all over the world. A somewhat grown up museum focused upon the art of children (and the capacity of children for the appreciation of art) in a predominantly black community is utopian and unprecedented so far as I have been able to tell. It is nonetheless easy for my sister and I to imagine because of our experience of having been introduced to visual art as children by my Mom. We both love museums because we were raised in them.

It distresses me that some people hate museums. It also distresses me that everything remotely like a museum is having its entry-level re-designed as a miniature crystal palace. This is going to get very dated very fast. To me it already seems old.

As we speak, the plans are going forward to build the museum, as well as ten floors of demographically much needed affordable apartments. I can't begin to describe how excited I am about this prospect, about which I can say more in a later post.