The Brooklyn Rail

To some, photojournalism, and documentary photography riding shotgun, has been the most noble of photographic genres, with the presumption of fact and evidence and the medium as reliable, objective witness. In its heyday throughout the last century, photography in newspapers and magazines advanced a shared visual literacy and galvanized social change and a promise of democratic commonality from the ubiquitous corner newsstand.

Black Photojournalism honors this considerable photographic legacy and the archives of the vigorous Black American communities from the end of World War II to the 1984 Presidential race of Jesse Jackson. Although American cities could often boast a half dozen broadsheets and tabloids in both morning and afternoon editions, people of color were excluded from the news except in routine characterization as criminal, immoral, or, at best, of little interest. Black-founded newspapers and periodicals in this celebratory post-war culture were a corrective, providing equitable coverage to the Black community. Along with the products of Johnson Publishing, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Afro American News (“You Know Because You Read the Afro”), and the Atlanta Daily World were among dozens of Black-owned newspapers whose robust circulations affirm their significance. Adding to these mainstream publications, the Black Panther, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Muhammad Speaks (with the highest circulation of 600,000) were of formidable bandwidth in the news of the day.

Through exhaustive and admirable research by Carnegie Museum curator Dan Leers and community archivist Charlene Foggie-Barnett, Black Photojournalism is a garrulous exhibition encompassing three soaring galleries and of exuberant staging. The show acclaims the making of the photograph as a form of activism, of an empowerment and self-representation that photography advances. And the photographic archive—of which much activity and consideration is currently made—proves to be an inexhaustible repository of pictorial and cultural information. The exhibition grandly affirms philosopher Jacques Derrida’s assertion that “There is no political power without control of the archive.”

The exhibition is not a discourse on photography and its instability as a witness, the photo narrative as a subjective construction, nor an interpretive text in an axis between fact and fiction. It does encourage thinking about the medium and its profound effect on how the past (and present) is defined.

However broad the terms of photojournalism, the curatorial emphasis here dwells not upon its numerous approaches. Photojournalism is commonly considered as a description of urgent and relevant political news, often unforeseen. Beyond the front page, however, much of newspaper photography was pre-meditated if not staged; the daily churn of wholesome performative events—ceremonial transactions, celebrity appearances (often with a circumference of adoring fans), civic leadership and individual accomplishment— supporting a common cultural rhetoric of progress through the citizenry’s well-being. Photography was public facing, and even the family album itself was of calculated protocols reserved for occasions and formality. And as always, the photographic technology determined the representation. Until the 1970s, a mid-century newspaper photojournalist wielded a clanky 4x5 Graflex, a couple sheets of film, and a handful of flashbulbs, a process that yielded little spontaneity.

There is much to enjoy and participate in, and the simple pleasure of looking at pictures is much evident in this monumental endeavor. Here is Duke Ellington in his dressing room surrounded by fans reflected in his mirror, Greystone Ballroom, Detroit (1947) by Bob Douglas, a portrait of magisterial charisma. Moneta Sleet Jr.’s aching portrayal Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. enroute to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (1964) of a sleeping King in a hushed train compartment; an astonishing cover of the August 1965 EBONY magazine with the emphatic text: “The WHITE Problem in America.” And not to be overlooked by an unidentified photographer “Jackson 5 wearing bell-bottoms playing basketball in a driveway, 1972.” Gordon Parks, the first Black staff photographer hired by Life magazine, is represented by the now iconic Department Store, Mobile, Alabama (1956) photograph of a graceful and elegant mother and daughter in twilight at the “Colored Entrance,” made on assignment for the magazine. And of particular interest is the inclusion of advertising photography, both national and local. A suite of 1976 images by A.B. Bell poses the pictorial inquiry at the Bonanza Sirloin Pit “After a good steak dinner, what’s your next move? The Answer: I think it will be a CARLTON after tonight?” The mercantile use of photography knows no demographic nor racial barrier.

Several photographers of acknowledged accomplishment—Roy DeCarava, Ming Smith, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Chester Higgins Jr., Moneta Sleet Jr., Gordon Parks—received initial opportunity through the black-owned press, and their refined work is seen as having transcended its primary context. The inclusion, however, of pictures without known authorship adds to the exhibition’s impression of democratic pomp. Original press prints with grease pencil crop marking and, in a few cases, the back of the print with the quick notations of sizing, smudged page numbers, and a glued clipping of its use in the paper reinforces the practical and ephemeral nature of the enterprise. So too, the vitrines with the original newspapers recognizes photomechanical reproduction on newsprint as a sustained venture and one worthy of museological consideration. In this turn of the ephemeral into legacy, the recuperation of the archive parallels the act of photography itself.

This gathering of images does not re-interpret Black history but confirms its familiar arc. It is a reminder that the anecdotal and diurnal and miniaturist narrative can spiral into tectonic cultural change—that modest routine, like the proverbial penny dropped from the roof, gains force. Black Photojournalism is a reckoning and a celebration, and it is also a wistful requiem for community and civic agreement, a vanishing social contract, that appears to be becoming relic. The joy of the exhibition is muted by its valedictory.