A Site That Honors, Displays And Discusses Documentary Photography
Operating a hand drill at Vultee-Nashville, woman is working on a “Vengeance” dive bomber, Tennessee 1943 Feb., all photographs by Alfred T. Palmer/OWI (Office of War Information)
Poster using Alfred T. Palmer’s 4″ X 5″ color transparency
Shot for the OWI, used by the U.S. Employment Service
For more of Palmer’s work, click here.
Old Civil Rights leader lost in the crowd, (from ChiTown Journal) Chicago, by Bruce Berman. 1968
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUCE BERMAN
Eras are always changing. They’re changing now. Old liberals aren’t enough now, socialists may not be enough next year.
In 1968 the era was changing as well. In the photograph above, Martin Luther King had been assassinated only six months before. Bobbie Kennedy, only three months before.
The old Civil Rights movement was being paralleled by the anti-war movement. The old Baptist church arguments, high on morality and sincere ecumenicalism of previous years was being replaced by the Hell No I Won’t Go movement, sincere, but clearly lacking in thought-out ideology. “I won’t go,” isn’t a spiritually-driven theology.
In one of the many protests in the hot summer of 1968, in Chicago, during the Summer of Rage, Part II, the contrasts between these two eras was becoming evident and the clash was real. The old Civil Rights leaders’ voices were being drowned out by the new Black Nationalist voices of the Black Panthers and others. The middle class kids were more enraged by getting grabbed by the Draft Boards than they were by Segregationist southern sheriffs.
This photograph, shot in Lincoln Park, Chicago, in August 1968 was a glimpse into the divide to come. By September, 1969, fourteen months later, the divide was complete. MLK was gone. The Kennedys were gone, Black Panther Fred Hampton had been assassinated by the Red Squad of the Chicago PD, Bill Ayers and the SDS Weathermen started to learn the craft of bomb-building (and went underground one year later), and the old, moral voice of the Civil Rights movement was all but drowned out in the dark and strident days that tagged the next ten years in the coming 1970s.
Eras change.
Roy DeCarava was one of the most influential documentary photographers of the 1950s-1960s. He was known more for the simplicity and ordinariness of his work than for it being spectacular or showy. His particular importance was photographing the Black community of his native Harlem and for the jazz scene of the era.
For a more thorough descrtiption of DeCarava’s work check out the always insightful Claire O’Neil’s essay at: https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2009/10/decarava.html
The meteorologists call this a “High Pressure system being pushed out by a Low Pressure system.”
Photographers will admit “every once in a while things come together and you get a lucky.”
What do I call it? What does one get for being out there, every evening and every day, always with your “axe (camera)at the ready, often coming home with nothing but the pleasure of having been out there trying?”
The funny thing is, as usual, I was in a part for town I’d never been in before (there are few left). It is a very unusual ‘hood for El Paso. In another city one would call it the “ghetto.” Here, no one thinks there is a ghetto. Being a predominantly latino city (82%), if you have a neighborhood that is lower income, the natural thing is to call it a barrio. This neighborhood was definitely “low income,” and of the three people I conversed with, two had been drinking alcohol to the point of inebriation. It is a mostly Black neighborhood, unusual in El Paso that is only 4% African-American.