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.

Reading List: The Theory of Photography

As my Mom often likes to point out, all I ever know is something I got from reading something or other. This is more often true these days than not. I cannot have much to say or write on any topic before my mind begins to be flooded with the true sources of my various pronouncements and dictums. Moreover, the idea for initiating such a blog came from an assortment of readings over the course of a lifetime.

Soul Pictures and the Talking in Pictures projects were always about a lot of other books I've read before, a lot of music and most importantly a lot of pictures. Most especially, I just love picture books, or illustrated narratives of any kind, no matter how slim the narrative, and sometimes no matter how perfunctory the illustrations.

I hope to include here some of my bibliographical lists of photographs and photography books in some kind of a link off to the side, where you can refer to it or ignore it as inclination dictates. Some of the more iconoclastic writings on photography have been extremely influential in my thinking.

In some cases, it may be necessary to explain how I got from the readings to issues of race because works such as Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, Susan Sontag's On Photography or even James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men seem opaque to some readers on these issues. Although I do not agree, I've run into the confusion enough to know that it is real.

I try to teach these texts when I do the course on Talking in Picture. In fact, in most cases it is simply impossible because the photographs they took the course in order to think about, or write about, or look at again or whatever leads some place else first, and by that time the course is over. It would be a pity to divert them to Barthes or Agee where they might simply be turned off on the whole project. I think of the process of taking the steps he or she needs to connect with photography as entirely unique for each student each time I teach the course. It is even private in a sense.

As I move further into the conceptualization of Soul Pictures, which is my series of photo-essays about the women in my family (in particular Mme. Willi Posey, Faith Ringgold and myself), the impulse toward turning photography into a critical expertise becomes less and less compelling, and my attachment to the model of Walker Evans and William Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men becomes less tenacious. But what I really liked about what Agee did with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was all the exhaustive lists and inventories, not that I want to do the same with my topics, the women in my family, but lists and inventories are, in fact, one of the ways you can begin to conquer your unfamiliarity with the unknown or the unfathomable. That Agee chose this approach is all the more strange because he was, himself, a Southern male although of a different class background. Did he do it this way in order to bring them closer or in order to create more distance?

Whatever may be the case, his process, which still fascinates me to this day, helped de-mystify for me the relation between photographs and words, a relation that is often taken for granted as automatic and invariable.

Agee isn't highly respected in the literary world these days, or he hasn't been thus far, but there seems no doubt to me that he is an immensely important figure in understanding developments in American Literature and Culture, and its intersections of race and gender. For understanding race in American Culture in the 20th Century, he and his book provide invaluable clues about the meaning of the word race both when it is mentioned and when it is not mentioned.

On Photography by Susan Sontag is perhaps even more important as a concise guidebook on the transformation of photography into some version of an art historical canon. Her judgments are conventional yet visionary because at the time she is making them (1977), she is ahead of the curve. What's astonishing to me, in retrospect, is how durable her judgements have turned out to be (in the canonical sense). She writes for a general audience who might or might not be interested in the intellectual roots of the discourse on photography. 

Whatever her initial political motivations might have been worries me a great deal less than they do some. In academia, why we read and pay attention to some things and not others always boils down to some half-baked notion of the political intent of the author.  She was kind of like a Margaret Mead (to mention another difficult figure for some) for her time. She bravely and triumphantly straddled that fence between the general audience and intellectual scholarship until the very end.

She seems to have known a good deal about what to pay attention to and why, at the same time serving to create some of the most enduring stereotypes about the emotional and historical limitations of photography, a topic on which she followed up on in Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others and AIDS as Metaphor. I don't agree with everything by any means but I don't think that's my purpose in recommending the reading of this work.  Rather the purpose is to provide me or you with a starting point for our own investigations.

As for Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, Barthes is from time to time one of the best writers who ever put pen to paper. He has his turgid impulses, like most academic writing, but when he is on it, such as he was, for instance, in S/Z, he is on it. Camera Lucida is a stunning book, a brilliant work in which I find something new every time I read any portion of it. The first thing I love is that the whole little book comes out of an engagement with a photograph of his mother whom he adored and who had recently died. And then he goes from there in order to weave a singular encounter with what we can and cannot know about a photograph we are looking at. The photographs he picks to talk about and how he situates them has enormous power, but I will admit it took me at least ten years of the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," to grow into this relationship to the book.

Not quite sure at this moment what was initially off putting. He does deal with race on a number of occasions in this text, albeit in order to suggest that race is always "myth," and not in a useable form. Of course I don't agree with that. First and foremost, I would need to insist that "myth," however you may define it, it must be regarded as useable. Second, he was just wrong, even naive, about myth versus history. Maybe there is a tendency if you disagree with him (and I think a lot of people would) to put the book down and not pick it up again. But there was so much other writing of his that bowled me over. He bowled me over when he got specific about The Family of Man exhibition composed by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art, which toured the world, about the significance of the black soldier as defender of French patriotism on the cover of Paris Match, about the photography of August Sanders whom I might never have connected with if not for his fascinating introduction to his series of photographic studies of the French population of the 20s, 30s and 40s.

Through the doorway made by his beautiful writing, his beautiful mind, he provided a major link for me intellectually between the Modern and the so-called Postmodern if you care (which I felt as though I had no other choice but to care) because so many people whose ideas I cared about and care about were into it.  

But I recommend all three of these authors on photography and lots of others to those who are starting out on their investigation into the philosophical elements operating in photography in the 20th century. Just that if you want to do race and photography, you should be sensitive to the fact that three of the key authors on the topic of photography aren't likely to give you much help in this area. It is almost another course, depending upon whether you want the long version or the short version. In the short version (which is the typical semester), you want to read these books on your own during the summer or after your graduation or whenever and wherever it suits you but when your mind is relaxed and fertile.

You've got to get up on the horse somehow and thus far I've found academic and scholarly accounts of the history of photography singularly suffocating and sometime positively unendurable for my purposes. This is precisely how I find myself at this point, ten years after having begun my first investigations into the topic, having run out of external inspiration but not yet able to leave it as I found it. I've got some things to say about one or two things I think. Beyond what I've seen anybody else say, at least certainly in the context of race in America. At any rate, we will soon find out if that's so or not.

Nobody seems to know nearly enough for me about the potential power of photographs: the power of that window into the past, into the soul, into interiors, landscapes, objects whether made by man or god. And this is regardless of whether or not the window or the mirror is true. It simply doesn't matter given the alternative, which is nothing and pure nothingness. By power, I mean psychological power (about which I have only the most minimal knowledge), or what goes on between the eye and memory when it encounters the images made possible by the photographic instrument. So that's my thing.

Haven't got any time anymore to load my head up with a lot of information not relevant to where I am heading. Most of these commentators, historians of photography, whatever you want to call them, are never going to get anywhere near any racial material or any African American photographers, except perhaps to name one or two photographers such as perhaps VanDerZee and Gordon Parks, and to point to one or two photographs only in order to substantiate ever more deeply how marginal that whole body of work (together with whatever it's formal or institutional roots may be) is to where the action really is in photography as history, as art, as political document. Why this is the case I don't know. I think it may be force of habit.

Oddly, in American photography, this negative estimation of race in photography spans over the reputations not only of African American photographers, in general, but it can also include African American life as the subject of the photograph even if the photographer is not black. If the photographer is also female, so much the worse for her historical importance. Something different may be happening with African photography but if so, it probably stems from the fact that European photography is so much more inspirational and true in its relation with the African body and its landscape. To over emphasize the role of the history of photography in Europe in the subsequent formation of American photography is to make it all the more difficult to see and understand the crucial role and singular role race has played in the unfolding of American photography before the onset of the digital revolution. Of course, the digital revolution is what makes this discussion even possible.

Slave Ship Photographs & Images

At the following link, http://www.sonofthesouth.net you will find a copy of the edition of Harper's Weekly, June 2, 1860, 344-345 reporting the capture of the renegade slaveship Wildfire stocked with 510 Africans from the Congo being transported illegally to the northern coast of Cuba, by whom I am not exactly sure. 

It was reportedly captured by Lieutenant Craven of the U.S. Steamer Mohawk, the passengers were photographed and the photographs copied in etching reproductions. 

 As usual, the photographs are much more striking then the drawings which seem never able to capture the emotions of the actual photographs, especially in harrowing situations as portrayed herein. The idea of an actual slaveship being apprehended and captured in photographs seems so stunning to me. Thier appearance, the fact that so many of the "slaves" are male and obviously adolescent, that they are so emaciated like concentration camp victims shocked me at first. I knew a slave ship was no pleasure cruise but why had I not imagined that emaciation and starvation would be the inevitable result of the ordeal of the middle passage? The image of starving Africans or anybody is associated in my mind with situations in the 20th century, not in the 19th century. Anyhow, to say more isn't to further clarify. The details of the case and its portrayal in Harper's Weekly are interesting.

1900s-- Race in Photography

Clafin University, Orangeburg, South Carolina. Photographer Unknown. Library of Congress.

Kindergarten class at Haines Normal and Industrial Institute. Photographer Unknown. Library of Congress

Kindergarten Class. Library of Congress. Negro Exhibition 1900.

Women's League, Newport, Rhode Island 1900. Negro Exhibition.

Collage of Tuskegee Photographs. Negro Exhibition. 1900. Library of Congress.

I have done this course several times in which I consider the mobilization of racial images in photography in the 20th century. I include both black and white photographers from the turn-of-the-century through the 1950s. The class is chartered via significant landmarks in this photographic history. There is a book I have been wanting to write on the same topic but the obstacles involved with making this project a reality have been overwhelming.

Since the entire purpose of doing this is as a public service for other artists and humanists who need to know more about the availability and suitability of photographs for their work in teaching and writing, it doesn't really make any sense for me to engage in the level of self-sacrifice it would clearly take to pull it off. In other words, I can't really afford to invest any more hard cash into making this happen. And it has become clear to me that books of photography are not ordinarily profitable, and that there isn't anybody out there dying to publish such a book in which high quality reproduction would be a necessity and the audience who would be willing to pay even a token fee is extremely limited. Images are for rich people I guess. I guess I've known this since I was a kid but I have never really been willing to accept it.

Anyhow this blog thing is free and the good people who have access to all these images in the world's archival collections have gone out of their way to make a large quantity of them available to anyone who has a computer and a reasonable amount of patience. What exactly it is you are looking at and what it has to do with you is where my work comes in. Because the relevance of these images to your own experience as a black person is not at all self-evident, even when the focus of the photographs is on black people.

The course I've been teaching and the book I've been planning but will probably never write begins with a chapter or two on the turn-of-the-century in which WEB DuBois's Negro Exhibition at the Paris Exposition is featured. There is a site at the Library of Congress where all the photographs included in the exhibition can be accessed, as well as a lovely little book with a portion of the images beautifully reproduced along with essays by Deborah Willis and David Levering Lewis.

Also, I recommend in this period a heavily illustrated and annotated version of Souls of Black Folk and the photographs by Frances Benjamin Johnston reprinted in The Hampton Album exhibition, which took place at the Museum of Modern Art in the 60s. Johnston was commissioned to do this elaborate series by the president of Hampton University. I also take into account other photos taken by the Hampton Camera Club, which was apparently formed at Hampton in the wake of Johnston's visit there.

The Hampton Camera Club often illustrated The Southern Workman (Hampton's newspaper), Paul Lawrence Dunbar stories and poetry, and perhaps other racially inflected publications in the period, which would be considerable. It was the time during which dialect literature was extremely popular, much of it focusing on portraying the lives of the former slaves and their offspring, latter to be known as the New Negro. The writers associated with this school of literature, referred to as the Plantation School by Sterling Brown, includes among the most famous Dunbar, Joel Chandler Harris, Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt.

The use of dialect in literature seems to have emerged as a shorthand for signaling the distinction between the utterances of the unlettered versus the utterances of everybody else. Black writers, in particular, such as Frances Harper and Pauline Hopkins, were always very careful to make clear distinctions between their speakers of dialect and the other blacks who didn't speak dialect. Their dialect speakers were often endowed with special forms of wisdom having to do with their greater knowledge of history and slavery. Rarely were they ridiculed as they sometimes were in the lesser works of white writers.

The Hampton Club, as evidenced by its illustrations of several of Dunbar's poetry including When Malindy Sings, seems to have emphasized images of blacks from the rural areas located around Hampton, or in other words images of peasants and their homes. I can't look at this stuff without recalling Ralph Ellison's portrayal of Trueblood and his home in the vicinity of Tuskegee.

The houses, which are extraordinary looking--with rickety mud packed chimneys, no windows and no straightlines, are works of art, themselves, probably dating from slavery. The scenarios are clearly posed but to what end is unclear. In any case, this archive remains in the papers of Hampton University. Carrie Mae Weems did some work with this collection in her Hampton Album in which she juxtaposed Johnston's images with other archival images of blacks. Ultimately, Hampton did not allow her to bring her exhibition to their campus because of her criticisms of their history. This is one archival source I would love to examine first hand.

Johnston also did a series of photographs at Tuskeegee commissioned by Booker T. Washington. Washington used the photographer Arthur Bedou (who was black) as well. A year after his death in 1916, Cornelius Marion Battey (also black) was made director of its first photography division. Other major photographers associated with Tuskegee were Leonard G. Hyman, P.H. Polk, and finally Chester Higgins. Tuskegee's archive in Alabama is another place I can see myself doing more research. Tuskegee isn't too far from Gee's Bend, Alabama, the area of the famous quilting community, so such a trip is potentially rich in visual research.

The 1900s

Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans, Hill and Wang 1989.

Frances Johnston Benjamin, Hampton Album, The Museum of Modern Art 1966.

Deborah Willis, Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present, Norton 2002.

David Levering Lewis et al, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and African American Portraits of Progress, Library of Congress 2003.

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Viewfindings: Black Women Photographers (1985), reprinted Writers and Publishers 1993. This book appears to be out-of-print but is available via the secondhand book market via the Amazon website or the American Book Exchange.com.  This is, no doubt, the most important book about the history of black women photographers ever written.

Negro Exhibition: http://memory.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC)

Talking in Pictures: Selected Bibliography
August Sander edited by Manfred Heiting, Taschen 1999
Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks, Skira and Stanford University 2006
Dancing at the Louvre, University of California Press 1999
Gordon Parks, Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective, A Bullfinch Press Book 1997
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag Vintage Books 1979
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
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, Houghton Mifflin 1960
On Photography by Susan Sontag, Vintage Books 1977
Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present by Deborah Willis, WW Norton 2000
The Family of Man by Edward Steichen, The Museum of Modern Art 1955
The Harlem Book of the Dead by James VanDerZee et al, Morgan and Morgan 1978
The James VanDerZee Studio, The Art Institute of Chicago 2004
The PAS Newsletter: Pioneer American Society, Association for the Preservation of Artifacts and Landscapes
Walker Evans: Cuba, The J Paul Getty Museum 2001
We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold, Duke UP 2002