An audio/video preview of the book is the star attraction on the new site. It's probably the first thing that I've ever put together that truly rocks. (I'm a jazz fan, after all.) In any case, be sure to have your computer's speakers turned up high.
Ok. That's a little over the top. How about this... William P. Gottlieb is a god to anyone who's serious about jazz and photography. Ask jazz photographers and they'll tell you: He's the granddaddy of us all.
Just today the Library of Congress announced that a selection of images from its Gottlieb jazz photo collection are now available on Flickr Commons, a public photography archive. That's as good an excuse as any to show you some of my favorites.
William P. Gottlieb: Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Milt (Milton) Jackson, and Timmie Rosenkrantz, Downbeat, New York, N.Y., ca. Sept. 1947. (All photos are from the William P. Gottlieb Collection at the Library of Congress. Click directly on any of the photos to see much larger versions.)
Gottlieb wasn't the first person to photograph jazz musicians, but he was the man who made it an art form.
His career as a photographer -- roughly 1938 to 1948 -- coincided with what many people call "the Golden Age of Jazz," from the height of the swing era to the beginnings of bebop. Ask me, and I'll tell you that plenty of golden jazz is still being made in clubs and concert halls all over the world, by musicians young and old.
True enough, but it's hard to argue that jazz is popular music. In Gottlieb's day it was the popular music. In many ways, he was the right guy, in the right place, at the right time.
William P. Gottlieb: Portrait of Thelonious Monk, Minton's Playhouse, New York, N.Y., ca. Sept. 1947.
As a photographer, Gottlieb was essentially self-taught. He was already a jazz lover, when the Washington Post hired him, fresh out of college, to sell advertising. He convinced the paper's editors to allow him to write a weekly column on jazz. Although he initially worked with a staff photographer, he ended up having to illustrate the column himself. And that required learning, through much trial and error, how to use a camera -- a big, heavy, slow Speed Graphic and those new-fangled flash bulbs.
William P. Gottlieb: Portrait of Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis, and Max Roach, Three Deuces, New York, N.Y., ca. Aug. 1947. (I dig the way that Miles is so clearly enjoying himself in this photo. Remember, you can make it much bigger by clicking directly on the image.)
Much about photography remains a mystery, and the most elusive aspect of all is the photographer's eye. Some people just naturally have it. Sure, everyone can learn to see better, but not everyone can learn to see well.
I've worked with young people who were using a camera for the first time, many time over the years. In every group, there are always one or two kids who start making good photos before you even show them the first thing about using a camera. Pretty soon, they're making very good photos.
William P. Gottlieb: Portrait of Django Reinhardt, Aquarium, New York, N.Y., ca. Nov. 1946.
Gottlieb was one of those naturals.
Don't get me wrong -- he worked hard to move from good to great. But he knew instinctively how to see.
William P. Gottlieb: Portrait of Frank Sinatra and Axel Stordahl, Liederkrantz Hall, New York, N.Y., ca. 1947.
After World War Two, he moved from Washington, DC, to New York, where he found himself working as an assistant editor at Downbeat, then, as now, the leading jazz magazine. That put him at the center of the jazz universe, at the very moment that bebop exploded on the scene.
Pop music was also changing. Vocalists, like Frank Sinatra, were replacing band leaders as the stars of the show.
William P. Gottlieb: Portrait of Milt (Milton) Jackson and Ray Brown, New York, N.Y., between 1946 and 1948.
That photo of Sinatra is one of the best anyone ever made of him. Nevertheless, Gottlieb's reputation rests on the photos that he made of the titans of jazz. Milt Jackson is certainly one of them.
William P. Gottlieb: Portrait of Sandy Siegelstein, Willie Wechsler, Micky Folus, Joe Shulman, Billy Exiner, Mario Rullo, Danny Polo, Lee Konitz, and Bill Bushing, Columbia Pictures studio, the making of Beautiful Doll, New York, N.Y., ca. Sept. 1947.
Nobody would claim that this is one of Gottlieb's better photos. It's a strictly work-a-day publicity shot. But I love it. I'm a French horn player, and it's a rare day that you see a French horn in a jazz setting. (Actually, there have been, and are, more than a few jazz French hornists. Someday, I'll blog about them.)
This is a photo of members of Claude Thornhill's band, with Sandy Siegelstein and Willie Wechler on French horn. Thornhill had the good sense to hire Gil Evans as his arranger. Evans, perhaps the greatest of all jazz arrangers, loved the sound of the French horn and, crucially, knew how to write for it. The results -- in Thornhill's band, in the arrangements Evans made for Miles Davis, and later in Evans' own band -- were magic.
Back then, our interest had as much to do with the photographers' subject -- the struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s notorious system of white supremacy -- as with the photographs that they made. Given the stakes involved in the battle and its resonance with America’s own history of racism and segregation, it’s no surprise that many Americans couldn’t look away. For many of us, South African photos were dispatches from a strangely familiar land.
Darkroom cover. Photo of Miriam Makeba by Jurgen Schadeberg.
Sixteen years after the fall of apartheid and the birth of a new, democratic society, the American fascination with South Africa remains virtually undiminished, but the sense of political urgency is gone. While it’s a less exciting time, it’s also one that creates space to step back and take stock. Darkroom does just that.
According to Tosha Grantham, the exhibition’s curator and editor of the book, Darkroom aims to be "a brief survey of photography, photo-based installations, and video art made in South Africa since 1950." As far as I can tell, this is the first American attempt to take on such a daunting task. South African may be a relatively small country, but it’s nevertheless produced several distinct generations of fine photographers and visual artists, working in a variety of traditions. Deciding who to invite to the party and how to organize and interpret their photographic output presents challenges that Darkroom only partly overcomes.
There’s no complaining, however, about who’s included. The 18 artists and photographers are all well known internationally or ought to be. They represent a cross-section of practitioners -- young and old, black and white, male and female. Goldblatt and Mthethwa both make the cut, as do others who have long since established global reputations -- William Kentridge, Santu Mofokeng, Sue Williamson, Roger Ballen, and Ian Berry. (Williamson, Ballen, and Berry, while foreign-born, have lived and worked extensively in South Africa.)
David Goldblatt: Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto, Johannesburg. 1972. (Plate 20.) (Click directly on the image to see a larger version.)
Also included are photographers and artists whose work deserves wider recognition outside of South Africa. This group includes those who began their careers in the 1950s and ‘60s, such as Alf Kumalo, Jurgen Schadeberg, a German immigrant, and Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall, as well as others who are still in their thirties, for instance, Tracey Rose, Robin Rhode, and Nontsikelelo Veleko.
The book’s weaknesses have to do with exclusion, rather than inclusion -- the photographers and photographic movements that were left out. This isn’t fatal. There are still plenty of interesting things to look at. But it does prevent the book from being the representative survey that it aspires to be. The roots of this problem are both practical and theoretical.
First, over a third of the plates in the book (35 out of 110) are devoted to the work of just two men -- Goldblatt and Schadeberg. This is far too many, even for photographers of their undeniable stature. It gives their output undue weight and occupies space that would have been better used by opening the door to more photographers.
Second, the book misinterprets South African photography’s past and its present, constructing an implicit narrative of movement from documentary photography to fine art photography. The end of apartheid, writes Grantham, has allowed "documentary photography’s collective relevance" to be "overtaken by more individualistic and artistic aims." This storyline privileges art over documentary, a contestable perspective, to say the least. More importantly, it rests on a sharp, but unsustainable dichotomy between documentary practice, on the one hand, and art, on the other. I’ll return to these points later.
Jurgen Schadeberg: The Three Jazzolomos (Jacob "Mzala" Lepers, bass, Ben "Gwigwi" Mrwebi, alto, Sol "Beegeepee" Klaaste, piano), Johannesburg, 1953. (Plate 14.)
Whatever it’s weaknesses, Darkroom is full of photos that are wonderful to see. The deeply saturated full-length color portraits of urban Africans that Sukhdeo Bobson Mohanlall made in the 1960s and ‘70s will be a fascinating discovery, even for people who know something about South African photography. Jump forward 40 years, to Nontsikelelo Veleko’s street portraits of young Johannesburg hipsters (below), and see how both the subjects’ identities and the photographer’s style have become less local and more globalized.
Readers get a tantalizing, but far too brief glimpse of Mofokeng’s Black Photo Album series, in which he has rephotographed and reimagined nineteenth- and early twentieth-century studio portraits of the black middle class. They’ll also want to see more of Sue Williamson’s recent Better Lives project -- portraits of African immigrants to South Africa. It’s a sensitive and angry response to violent outbreaks of xenophobia within South Africa.
Goldblatt is the star of the show. The power and beauty of the images that he has created over a long career have made him the best known and most influential of all South African photographers. His images manage to be simultaneously subtle and direct, earnest and ironic. "Cup Final, Orlando Stadium, Soweto, Johannesburg. 1972." is an example (above). This wonderfully complex photograph was made at a time when apartheid seemed to be unshakable. The photo contains the expected -- a uniformed cop and a threatening German shepherd -- and the unexpected -- a beauty queen, an American luxury car, and, behind a chain link fence, a cheering crowd. It’s a photo about apartheid, all right, but its message isn’t obvious.
Nontsikelelo Veleko: Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder: Kepe I, 2003/2006. (Plate 103.)
Curiously, given the amount of space devoted to Goldblatt’s work, Darkroom doesn’t do him justice. It ignores two of his most important projects, Some Afrikaners Photographed and Boksburg, both of which were published as books. In them, his subjects are white South Africans, mostly Afrikaners, and their relationship to the country’s black majority. The photos are critical, compassionate, and often extraordinarily beautiful. Their absence is stunning.
The book also fails a much later series, in which Goldblatt photographed some of the many hand-lettered artisans’ signs that appear on urban roadsides. He then tracked down the artisans and made portraits of them in their working environments. It’s a brilliantly realized idea, connecting faces to the otherwise anonymous ads and exploring a vital niche in the post-apartheid economy. Darkroom includes a photo of one of signs, but not, inexplicably, the portrait of the man behind it. (His name is Corrie Jacobs. He and his sign appear in the book Rhizomes of Memory.)
This is an odd argument to make -- that there are too many Goldblatt photos, but too few of the right ones -- but so be it. Anyone interested in a tighter, yet more representative edit of his long and varied career should look at the chapter devoted to him in Paul Weinberg’s Then & Now: Eight South African Photographers (the link takes you to a slideshow of images from the book). In it, he was his own curator.
Schadeberg, Goldblatt’s contemporary (they began shooting professionally in the ‘50s and are still going strong), has 11 photos in the book, all but one from his early days as the photo editor at the now legendary Drum magazine. After a false start, Drum found its groove in the early ‘50s, catering to the tastes of urban and urbanizing Africans, covering politics, sports, and entertainment. Schadeberg and the photographers that he trained, including Kumalo, captured the energy and created the iconography of the era’s self-consciously cosmopolitan New Africans, from dapper political activists, such as the young Nelson Mandela, to jazz musicians in smoke-filled shebeens (above).
An interview with Zwelethu Mthethwa.
The photographs of Goldblatt, Schadeberg, and Kumalo call in to question the sharp dichotomy that the book draws between documentary and art. All have a documentary component, and some were first published and exhibited that way. After the fact, however, hanging on gallery walls or surrounded by thick white borders in elegant books, they’ve become art. The same photos, in different contexts, acquire new meanings.
Darkroom doesn’t see things this way. It relegates the older photographers (Goldblatt excepted) to a documentary past, in which even the best photos simply illustrated an unjust world. In contrast, the photos of younger generations of artists are seen to allow "complexity and contradictions to coexist," as Tumelo Mosaka writes in one of the accompanying essays. Yet complexity and contradiction were deeply embedded in many of the photographs that Schadeberg and Kumalo’s generation produced. The same can be said of most of the other photographs in the book. Mofokeng’s photographs of church ceremonies, Andrew Tshabangu’s street scenes, Mthethwa’s environmental portraits of workers and shanty dwellers, and Veleko’s urban hipsters -- all simultaneously describe and interpret. They don’t choose sides because they don’t have to; they are both documentary and art.
Darkroom’s condescending view of documentary work allows the book to exclude a number of significant photographers who worked in that mode and shaped the South African photographic tradition -- Bob Gosani, Ernest Cole, and Eli Weinberg. Well known documentary photographers who are still working, such as George Hallett and Jodi Bieber, are also missing. (Grantham hoped to include the work of Peter Magubane, a photojournalist who was probably South Africa’s best known photographer, in the 1970s, but his photos were not available.) Equally damaging is the absence of struggle photographers, who produced some of the most important work of the 1980s and ‘90s.
"Struggle photography" is something of a misnomer. Photographers associated with the movement produced a wide variety of work; it wasn’t the Bang Bang Club. For over a decade, struggle photography virtually defined documentary photography and photojournalism for many in South Africa and overseas. In the United States, their explicitly anti-apartheid and often elegantly crafted photographs were widely seen in newspapers and magazines, as well as in commercially successful books published by Norton and Aperture -- The Cordoned Heart (which included a documentary project by Goldblatt) and Beyond the Barricades. Many thousands of people also saw them in inexpensive, highly portable exhibitions that toured countless college campuses, church halls, and museums all over the country, generating support for the American anti-apartheid movement.
Who were the struggle photographers? Mofokeng was one, although the book is silent about that phase of his career. Graeme Williams, who is also in Darkroom, was another, a fact that you again won’t learn from the book. Those left out completely constitute a roster of important photographers who continue to influence photography in South Africa and beyond -- Omar Bashada, Paul Weinberg, Guy Tillim, Lesley Lawson, Gideon Mendel, and Chris Ledochowski to name a few of the most prominent.
In these conservative times, the struggle photographers’ highly politicized stance is embarrassing to some, and they find it easy to dismiss the entire movement. But there is no necessary contradiction between political commitment and good, even great photography. In fact, political engagement released an extraordinary creative energy. The evidence is in the photos that the struggle photographers produced -- alternately angry and lyrical, contemplative and direct. As Darren Newbury argues in his superb new book, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa, the struggle photographers were far from naive. Their photos constituted "a powerful indictment of apartheid. But it was not one that sacrificed complexity to broaden its appeal." Their impact on photography -- by no means just documentary photography -- was and is immense. No survey that aspires to be representative, let alone complete, can ignore this movement and the men and women who created it.
Should Darkroom have found space for all of the photographers that I’ve counted among the missing? Ideally, yes. In our less-than-perfect world, including everybody that I’ve mentioned was probably out of the question. But to include none of them and to ignore struggle photography altogether means that the book’s vision of South African photography is partial and distorted.
Although Darkroom fails as a survey of South African photography, it does present work that is almost always brilliant, challenging, and unknown to most Americans. In that sense, you can call it a success.
* * *
Note: Another version of this review will appear in the International Journal of African Historical Studies.
The Modern Day Slavery Museum, a mobile exhibition that's been organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers [CIW], rolled into Charlottesville, yesterday. Its mission is to educate the public about the brutal conditions that farmworkers in Florida endure and to encourage the people to do something about it.
"Slavery" probably sounds like an overstatement, but it's accurate. Farmworkers are too often held against their will by threats and violence. Since 1997, the federal government has prosecuted seven farm labor servitude cases in Florida, which led to the freeing of over 1,000 workers. Slavery is the extreme, but, as Senator Bernie Sanders has said, poverty and powerlessness mean that "the norm is disaster."
The museum has been traveling the country. Here's a video about, from the Naples (Florida) Daily News, about an earlier stop on the tour.
What can be done? The CIW has played an major role in investigating abuses in Florida, which one federal official has called "ground zero for modern slavery." Six of the seven federal prosecutions, since 1997, have relied partly on evidence that the CIW uncovered. In addition, the Coalition is asking people to insist that restaurants and grocery stores pay attention to the conditions on the farms that grow the food that they purchase. This "Fair Food" campaign has persuaded Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King, Whole Foods, and Subway to do business only agricultural suppliers that respect workers' rights.
This is terrific news, but it's only a start. What's needed is for all the players in the food industry to sign on. For instance, Kroger and Giant, the two largest supermarket chains in this area, have yet to accept any responsibility for the wages and working conditions of the people who grow the food that they sell. Anyone can help by sending letters to Kroger or Giant, asking them to take measures that would ensure fair wages and dignity for the farmworkers. You can find examples of the Kroger letter, here, and the Giant letter, here.
The museum, as you might expect, takes a historical look at the problem. The kind of abuses that exist today stretch far back into time -- to nineteenth-century slavery, of course, but also to Depression-era farm labor. At the exhibit, I was struck by the way that you can see evidence of the poverty and powerlessness that the CIW talks about in photos made by Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers, in the 1930s.
I admire the FSA photographers and have written quite a bit about them. They were important both for the power and beauty of the photos that they made and for the impact that they had on public opinion. It's sad to say, however, that the conditions under which farm workers labor haven't changed nearly enough.
Take a look, for instance, at this important set of photos by Shiho Fukada. The similarity to FSA photographs from over 70 years ago stops me in my tracks. And reminds me to send those letters to Kroger and Giant.
Marion Post Wolcott: Vegetable workers, migrants, waiting after work to be paid. Near Homestead, Florida. 1939.
In 1942 or '43, Constance Stuart Larrabee photographed a Muslim man with a sword. No, this has nothing to do with tired old cliches about militant Islam. Instead, the man was preparing to participate in what Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa, called the ratiep. Also known as the khalifah or the ratib, it's an expression of Sufi mysticism. As members of the group or jummah recite prayers and sing religious songs to the accompaniment of drums, others enter a mystical state that allows them strike themselves with swords and daggers without causing harm, thereby demonstrating the power of faith.
I stumbled across this photo, yesterday, in the Constance Stuart Larrabee collection, at the National Museum of African Art. (I was there to do some research on a series of photos that she made as part of a project on poor whites in South Africa. I'll be writing about it soon.) It's one of several dozen photos that she made during a day or two of wandering around the Bo-Kaap, a Cape Town neighborhood that used to be known, misleadingly, as the "Malay Quarter." And it's remarkably similar to a photo I made less than two months ago, nearly 70 years after Larrabee made hers.
John Edwin Mason: Ratiep ceremony, Athlone, Cape Town, South Africa, 2010.
I was at the ceremony because I've been fascinated by the ratiep for a very long time. A few years ago, I published an article about its history in the South African Historical Journal. In it, I showed how the ratiep has been an important part of Islam in Cape Town for over 300 years and was (and is) instrumental in attracting converts to the faith, especially during the days of slavery. (Here's an early version of the article -- "Some Religion He Must Have": Slaves, Sufism, and Conversion to Islam at the Cape".)
Despite my interest, I'd never actually seen the ceremony performed until this past June. Then members of three different Cape Town jummahs invited me to attend ceremonies and to photograph them. (I became friends with many members of the Cape Town Muslim community in the course of working on my book, One Love, Ghoema Beat: Inside the Cape Town Carnival.) I'm grateful for those opportunities. If I were to write about the ratiep, today, it would be with a much deeper appreciation for its meaning and beauty.
With love, Melanie Scholtz, Robbie Jansen (who lives on in all of our memories), Randolph Hartzenberg, Nick Carter, Aki Khan, Amanda Tiffin, Mark Fransman, Andrew Lilley, Shaun Johannes, Kevin Gibson, Tina Schouw, Monique Hellenberg, Jeremy Olivier, Valmont Layne, Donal Slemon, Mike Blake, Brendon Kierman, Mark Ginsberg, Speedy Kobak, Kevin Cook, Piet de Beer, Annemi van der Merwe, Cheryl de Havilland, Neo Muyanga, Matt Allison, Ricardo McCarthy, Keith Davies, Abdul Burton, Ian Chitundu, Jess Brown, Fabrice du Pont, Bob Ludwig, Ian Henderson, Eastern Acoustics, and me.
Note: Nelson, Born in the Land of the Sun, is a South African "struggle song" from the 1980s. It was re-recorded, two years ago, by the musicians, singers, composers, arrangers, and engineers listed above, to be offered as a tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 90th birthday. (He's 92, today.) It's a song that touches all South African hearts, especially in those of people from Cape Town and the Cape Flats. This new version of the song features the soulful voice of rising South African diva, Melanie Scholtz, and sax and flute solos by the late, great, Robbie Jansen. Lyrics are by Randolph Hartzenberg and Nick Carter; music is by Aki Khan, Nick Carter, and Neo Muyanga. The track was recorded in Cape Town, mixed at pureMIX Studios, in New York City, and mastered by Bob Ludwig, of Gateway Mastering. Video was edited by Ian Henderson.
You can read a story from the Cape Times about the song and see some of my photos from the recording session by clicking here.
