John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

"One Love, Ghoema Beat: Inside the Cape Town Carnival"

I've created a website for my book, One Love, Ghoema Beat:  Inside the Cape Town Carnival.  It's published, in South Africa, by Random House Struik and, elsewhere, by the University of Virginia Press.  An audio/video preview of the book is the star attraction on the site.  You can read a review in the South African magazine Amandla, here.

Wayne Miller, Photographer: 1918-2013

Wayne Miller passed away, yesterday, and with him went one of our last links to the that great company of mid-twentieth-century great American social documentary photographers.  He was less well known (and a generation or two younger) than the likes of Dorothea Lange, W. Eugene Smith, and Gordon Parks, but he shared their passion for photography and commitment to social justice.  (You can read a brief obituary in the Washington Post, here.)

Miller came of age as a photographer during World War II.  He photographed naval warfare in the Pacific and made some of the first photos of Hiroshima after it had been devastated by the atomic bomb.  In the late '40s, he produced a magnificent extended photo-essay on the black community in Chicago.  His depiction of the community was complex, nuanced, and profoundly human.  It stood in stark contrast to prevailing images of African Americans, which often reinforced stereotypes of a degraded or comical people.  You can see a slideshow of these photos, here, on Magnum's website.  The wonderful video below will give you a feel for Miller the man.

 

  

 

Miller was lucky enough to have been working at a time when social documentary photography had a central place within American popular culture.  From the 1930 until the early 1970s, Americans by and large accepted the idea that problems of poverty and inequality should be addressed and that individual lives and society as a whole could be bettered.  This belief wasn't universal, of course, and some people resisted change.  But many did not.  Change did come, thanks to the efforts of millions who helped in large ways and small.

You could say that social documentary photography went along for the ride, but that would suggest that the photographers were mere passengers.  In fact, the photos that social documentary photographers produced helped to change the way that Americans thought about and responded to issues such as racism and segregation, war, the environment, and women's rights.

The consensus that made progressive change possible and that supported social documentary photography had fallen apart by the early 1970s, by which time (coincidentally or not) Miller had stopped working as a professional photographer.  He turned his attention to environmental issues.

The widespread longing for a better world and the sense that it could be achieved (something that was by no means just an American phenomenon) helps to explain the success of The Family of Man, both the exhibition and the book.  To this day, this mid-'50s celebration of the essential unity of humankind remains the most widely seen photo exhibition ever produced and best selling photo book ever published.  Virtually every image in the show and the book was an example of social documentary photography.

Miller was an important part of making Family of Man happen, and that's what connects me -- very indirectly -- to him.

Throughout the planning and production of Family of Man, Miller was the most important assistant to Edward Steichen, its guiding light and motive force.  The exhibition was tremendously popular, traveling from New York's Museum of Modern Art to 37 countries on six continents, where it was seen by nine million people.  It's also come in for its share of criticism -- that its notion of a "family of man" was romantic nonsense, that it avoided difficult issues that divided humanity, that it was propaganda for the American way of life, that it showed Africans only as primitives...  There's some truth to all of those critiques.

But critics lose sight of why the exhibition struck such a responsive chord around the world, often with people who had no particular affection for the United States (and some of whom were themselves African).  Memories of the destruction and death of World War II and the horror of the Holocaust were still fresh.  The Cold War, with its threat of nuclear doom, was a new terror.  In circumstances like these, it's hard to fault people for wanting to believe that our similarities are more important than our differences and, if we recognize that fundamental truth, we'll make the world a better place.

When I first encountered Family of Man, however, I was too young for any of these weighty thoughts.  I simply fell in love with its photography -- and by extension with photography itself.

As in so many middle class American homes during the '50s and '60s, the book version of Family of Man had an honored place on the coffee table in the Mason family living room.  I can't remember when I first started thumbing through it.  It must have been when I was 11 or 12, but the photos became so much as part of me that it feels like they've always been with me.  I loved them for themselves -- photography as photography -- and as windows to distant worlds.  They shaped my ideas about what photos ought to look like and what they ought to say.  And they shaped my sense of the photos that I wanted to learn how to make.

I was lucky that Family of Man was my introduction to photography.  For all the criticism that has been heaped upon the project, no one has ever said that Steichen and Miller had bad taste in photography.  The photos are magnificent.  And why not?  They were produced by the some of the greatest photographers of the era -- Ansel Adams, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Margaret Bourke-White, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roy DeCarava, yes, Dorothea Lange and W. Eugene Smith.  I could run through the alphabet, but you get the point.  These guys and gals were good.  (It's worth noting that Asian, African, African-American, and Latin American photographers were poorly represented.)

When I was a little older, I saw something else in Family of Man.  I saw people like me -- African-Americans, or Negroes, as we were then -- represented respectfully.  We were depicted as equal members of a common American society, not simply as members of a family of man.

This mattered to me and, I'm sure, to my parents.  It was the high tide of the civil rights movement, a time when racial integration was more than a promise.  It seemed real, and it seemed to herald the end of racial distinctions in American society.

You could point to my family as an example of the possibilities of integration, even as I sensed its limits.  My father, having enlisted in a segregated U.S. Army, rose through the officers' ranks in an integrated one.  Later, after three years in an Episcopal seminary, he served as a beloved priest to two largely white congregations.  I spent my childhood living in mostly white neighborhoods, attending mostly white schools, and playing mostly with white kids.

I don't know how my father made of all of this, but I learned, especially in my teenage years, that integration had its limits.  It was a hard lesson, and I resented it.  I drifted away from Family of Man and found other kinds of images to inspire me -- Malcolm, Coltrane, Angela -- often produced, ironically enough, by white photographers.

Family of Man remains a part of me, however, and so does promise that it embodies.  I want to thank Wayne Miller for that gift.

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Funky Friday: Gordon Parks, "Symphony for Shafted Souls"

Here's a post I never expected to write -- Funky Friday and Gordon Parks.

Until a couple of days ago, I would have told you that it was more likely that Barry Manilow would show up on a Friday than Gordon Parks.  As much as I admire him as a photographer, writer, and filmmaker, his music has never done much for me.  If you'd asked me to describe it, I'd have used words like "sappy," "sentimental," and "ersatz classical."

Well, yes.  And no.  Sometimes -- such as when he was forced to produce the soundtrack for Shaft's Big Score, the second of his films about the black private dick who's a sex machine with all the chicks, in only two weeks -- he came up with a real gem.  Can you dig it?

 

 

Gordon Parks, Symphony for Shafted Souls.  Soundtrack, Shaft's Big Score (1972).

Whatever you make of it, this music sure isn't ersatz classical.

Parks, the director, hadn't expected to write the soundtrack for the movie, but Isaac Hayes, who had won an Oscar for his work on the original Shaft, couldn't come to terms with the studio.  So Parks stepped in a the last minute, knowing that he had to capture something of Hayes' magic.  He did a pretty good job.

Here's what the funk and soul blog never enough rhodes has to say about Parks' effort:

Parks is an interesting composer working with great orchestrators.  He takes Hayes' funk, strings and brass template, and adds in subtle, shifting woodwind textures, developing and extending the pastiche riffs -- it's a true musical "sequel" to the original Shaft.

 

 

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John Gutmann: The Photographer & the Automobile

It's no secret that I like cars.  More precisely, I'm endlessly fascinated by car culture, especially in America.  I've even got another blog that's all about cars and motorsports.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across this terrific video about an immigrant photographer and American automobiles.  It's a short clip from a film by Jane Levy Reed, My Eyes Were Fresh: The Life and Photographs of John Gutmann.

Gutmann came to the US from Germany, in the late 1930s, and was dumbfounded by the central place -- the sometimes fun, sometimes infuriating, and always absurd central place -- of the car in American culture.  He was my kind of guy.  I like the way he talks about cars.  And I like his photos a lot.

 

 

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You can learn more about Gutman and see many more of his photos, here.  You can watch the entire film, here.

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Funky Friday: DJ Li'l Miss Dolemite, Part 2

This is the second time I've had the honor and privilege of featuring the fun and fabulous Li'l Miss Dolemite on Funky Friday.  I love the mixes that she puts together -- great grooves with sprinkling of the absurd.

"Up in Flames (What-a-Gas)" is especially trippy.  Enjoy.

 

 

 

Li'l Miss.

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David Goldblatt: ICP Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement Award, 2013

There's no such thing as "the greatest photographer in the world," but, if there were, it would be David Goldblatt.

Goldblatt is also something of a paradox.  How is it that someone who has been honored so often by so many is still relatively unknown outside of his native South Africa?

Tomorrow night, Goldblatt will receive yet another well-earned accolade -- the International Center of Photography's prestigious Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement award.  Photo District News asked me to mark the occasion by examining his long career and, along the way, explaining the paradox.  You can read what I have to say, here.

 

PDN Pulse, 30 April 2013.

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