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CLARENCE PAGE: It is not really surprising that black Americans embraced
the camera enthusiastically from its birth. The camera offered power
to a people who found too little of it elsewhere. After all, if the
camera is an extension of the eye, it is also an extension of storytelling.
The camera lets you preserve with the eye, what ancient African griots
had preserved with the spoken word. That story is retold through many
eyes and images in a new book, "Reflections in Black: The Work of
African American Photographers from 1840 to the Present." It is also
retold in a mammoth new exhibit that opened at the Smithsonian, and
will be touring the country over the next two years. Gathered here,
the work of black photographers, from the pre- civil war era to the
hip-hop era, finally finds a grand stage on which to tell an epic tale.
The camera enables us to look and see how early photographers tried
to imitate painters. They were trying, at least at first, to show the
world that this new gadget, the camera, could produce true art. Quickly
their cameras became an extension not only of the eye, but also of the
word. Painters would envy and try to imitate photography. The camera
snatched moments in a frozen instant. It brought time to a halt long
enough to bear witness to tragedy and struggle, and juxtapose it ironically
next to triumph and celebration.
Behind the walls of segregation, many black Americans seized opportunities
and made the best of them in every corner of American life. Black photographers
found images in black America that were reflected, ironically, in a
richly textured parallel society. The themes of black photography shifted
between its first hundred years and its second. Pre-1950s, we see a
self- conscious formality in these efforts to portray black life as
an imitation of white middle-class life. After 1950, we see a new wave
of photography grapple with the emerging civil rights period. Photographers
became more journalistic and self-aware. Over time, photographers engage
in new emerging black consciousness. Photo art becomes more impressionistic,
like the works of Dennis Alonzo Callwood. He photographs young inmates
who have applied text to their bodies. Then he surrounds the pictures
with more text. Mixed media formats offer today's photo artists an avenue
to the inner mind of black America. The camera also is an extension
of the ear. It helps you to hear the importance of writer Amiri Baraka's
thoughts tapping their way across the page, or the soft slap of Muhammad
Ali's jump rope as it punctuates his lonely preparation for a fight
not limited to a boxing ring.
The curator of this exhibit, Deborah Willis, uses the word "war"
to describe what black photographers were up to. If so, it was a war
of memory against indifference, a struggle against those who would try
to oversimplify black life in America. In resisting stereotypes, the
man or the woman with the camera, leads a fight for the right to be
complicated. Photography mainly teaches us a new way to see. It becomes
art in the way that every photographer sees something different. Studio
photographer James Vanderzee wanted you to see the stately elegance
of Harlem during its renaissance. Gordon Parks, the award-winning photojournalist,
wanted you to see the everyday poetry in the lives of urban housing
projects and rural poverty. Chester Higgins, Jr., saw something profound
in the eyes of this young Muslim woman in Brooklyn, and so do we. Shrouded
in faith, she looks confidently at us as we look curiously at her across
the walls of parallel time. Take a good look. I'm Clarence Page.
RAY SUAREZ: The exhibition is currently on view at the American Jazz
Museum in Kansas City.
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