John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Convergences, 5: Weegee the Famous & the Daily News

New Yorkers are talking about murder.  Pictures of murder, that is.  For the last week, there's been a tremendous buzz around the opening of Weegee:  Murder is My Business, an exhibition dedicated to the crime photos of "one of the most relentlessly inventive figures in American photography (to quote New York's International Center for Photography [ICP], which is hosting the show).

There's no doubt that Weegee's gritty crime photos are part of what made him famous in the '30s and '40s.  Oddly enough, however, his best known photograph had nothing to do with crime -- or, at least, nothing directly.  It's "The Critic," a cartoonishly unsubtle commentary on the gulf between rich and poor.

 

Weegee:  The Fashionable People [title first used for "The Critic."]  Life magazine, 6 December 1943.

"The Critic" is classic Weegee.  And, as much as it hurts to admit it, the photo was staged.  Here's how the ICP tells the story:

In a recent interview, Louie Liotta, a photographer who acted as Weegee's assistant, recalled that Weegee had been planning this photograph for a while.  Liotta, at Weegee's request, picked up one of the regular women customers at Sammy's on the Bowery at about 6:30 p.m.  With a sufficient amount of cheap wine for the woman, they proceeded to the opera house.  When they arrived, the limousines owned by the members of high society were just beginning to discharge their passengers.  Weegee asked Liotta to hold the now intoxicated woman near the curb as he stood about twenty feet away from the front doors of the opera house.  With a signal worked out in advance, Weegee gave the sign to Liotta, who released the woman, hoping all the while that she could keep her balance long enough for Weegee to expose several plates.

Well, all the excitement over the exhibition prompted the folks at the New York Daily News to rummage through their photo archive, and what did they find?  "The Critic's" fraternal twin.

 

New York Daily News:  Among those present at the Met's Diamond Jubilee opening were Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh (left) and Lady Decies, both of whom had polished up their diamonds for the occasion. Among those missing was the Queen of American Society, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt....  22 November 1943.

Sure enough, the Daily News sent photographers to cover the Diamond Jubilee, and one of them came back with a picture that's almost a dead ringer for Weegee's -- although, as the Daily New tweeted, "sans hired help."

There's actually nothing surprising about this particular photo convergence.  In spot news coverage, it happens all the time.  Sometimes the resulting photos are eeirily similar.

For instance, take the iconic photo of "Tank Man," the white-shirted protester who confronted a column of tanks in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, in June 1989.  Four photographers made virtually identical pictures -- but only one was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  The New York Times' Lens Blog tells the story behind the photos, here.

The Lens Blog has also reviewed Weegee:  Murder is My Business.  You can read it and see many more of Weegee's photos, here.

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PS  I should add that, at the time Weegee made "The Critic," it was common practice for photojournalists and documentary photographers to stage or "direct" photos.  Most of his contemporaries -- Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, and many others -- did the same thing.  It wasn't considered unethical, as it would be today.

Convergences, 4: Constance Stuart Larrabee, the Ratiep, and Me

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.

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Muslim Man, Bo Kaap, Cape Town, South Africa, 1942-43.  (Courtesy of the Eliot Eliosofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.  Click directly on either of the photos to see larger versions.)

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.

Convergences, 3: South Africa's Poor Whites & the Color of Poverty

I've been thinking about two remarkably similar photos, one made by Contance Stuart Larrabee, in 1947 or '48, and the other by Finbarr O'Reilly, in 2010.  (Scroll down to see them.)  They've got me wondering:  What is the color of poverty?

Ask Americans, and they'll probably tell you that poverty is black.  For many Americans -- perhaps most -- blackness and poverty seem to go hand in hand.  It's an old story.  Nearly 15 years ago, Martin Gilens was already showing how "the black urban poor have come to dominate public images of poverty."  The association of blackness with poverty is even stronger, of course, when it comes to Africa.

Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters:  A man receives a monthly supply of food aid donated to residents of a squatter camp for poor white South Africans, at Coronation Park, in Krugersdorp, on March 6 2010.  (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)

Can poverty be white?  We associate whiteness with many things, but poverty generally isn't one of them -- wealth is.  When confronted with the existence of impoverished whites, Americans tend to see them as anomalies -- among whites, who aren't supposed to be poor, and among the poor, who are supposed to be black.  (For good measure, we label them "trailer trash" or "hillbillys" and blame them for the own misery.)  Once again, the association of whiteness with wealth is even more powerful when we think about Africa, especially South Africa.

The ways in which we connect color to poverty and wealth help to explain why a recent photo essay by Finbarr O'Reilly about poor whites in South Africa has gotten so much attention.  The subject clearly fascinates us.  In different forms, it's shown up on the Reuter's new agency's photographers' blog, the New York Time's Lens Blog, and the Boston Globe's popular Big Picture photo blog.  I've referred to it here and here.  The photo above from O'Reilly's essay.  Without reading the caption, it's hard to know what's going on.  Blacks helping whites?  That can't be right.

But, in fact, that's exactly what's happening.  It's happened before, and Constance Stuart Larrabee was there to capture the moment.

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Johannesburg (South Africa) social welfare, poor relief, 1947-48.  (Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.)

What accounts for our fascination with South Africa's poor whites?  Many people who commented on the Lens Blog and the Big Picture expressed surprise.  They hadn't known -- couldn't have imagined -- that there are poor whites in South Africa, given the country's history of colonialism and white supremacy.  The surprise in these two photos isn't simply about white poverty, however.  It's also about black empowerment -- in 2010, the power of blacks, in a democratic South Africa, to succor whites; in 1947-48, the vastly more limited power of a black worker.

More importantly, I think, O'Reilly's and Larrabee's photos upset our notions about the nature of the world, about hierarchies, and about the roles people of different races are destined to play.

In truth, there have always been poor whites, even in South Africa.  During the more than three centuries of colonialism and apartheid, South African governments and white public opinion viewed poor whites as anomalies, just as in the United States.  Their very existence threatened the ideological structure of white supremacy.  They were a political issue -- poor whites had the vote.  Within the world of white politics, that made them either a problem to be solved or a constituency to be courted.  When Larrabee made the photo above, she was documenting the efforts of governmental agencies to aid impoverished whites, during the run-up to an election in which the opposition party was furiously courting poor white voters.

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Johannesburg (South Africa) social welfare, food line, 1947-48.  (Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.)

Given the stark facts of life in South Africa, we might like to believe that this second Larrabee photo is truer than the first.  It certainly reinforces conventional notions of black-white hierarchies.  At the same time, it reflects the reality that the vast majority of poor South Africans have been black or brown.  Even today, 60% of Africans and 38% of Coloureds live below the poverty line.  But if we leave it like that, we're dealing with stereotypes.  We're ignoring not only the social significance of poor whites, but also the historical importance of an older black middle class, to which so many early African political activists belonged (including the founders of the African National Congress), as well as the rapid growth of a self-confident and assertive black middle class, in the new democratic South Africa.

Poverty and wealth have no true color -- as O'Reilly's and Larrabee's photos remind us -- not in South Africa and not in the United States.

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I've avoided the temptation to say that, in the United States, poverty is white.  It's true, however, that there are twice as many poor whites as there are poor blacks.  While a larger percentage of the African-American population lives in poverty, the sheer number of poor whites -- 24.1 million -- overwhelms the number of poor blacks -- 12.1 million.  (Interestingly, there are also more poor Hispanics than there are poor blacks -- 14.5 million.)

Nevertheless, Americans insist on associating poverty with blackness.  According to the influential study by Gilens that I mentioned above, the fact that blacks "dominate public images of poverty" is the result of "network TV news and weekly news magazines [that] portray the poor as substantially more black than is real the case."  This needs to change, and photography can play a role.  There are plenty of American Finbarr O'Reillys; maybe I'll write about them someday.  I've already written about our own Constance Stuart Larrabees.  They worked for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and '40s.  You can read about them, here.

Convergences, 2: Finbarr O'Reilly, Constance Stuart Larrabee, & South Africa's Poor Whites

Africa's exotic species -- giraffes, rhinoceros, mountain gorillas -- have always fascinated outsiders.  And none has been more exotic and unexpected, more scandalous and titillating than South Africa's poor whites.  After all, wasn't apartheid -- South Africa's particularly vicious system of white supremacy and black subjugation -- supposed to ensure that no white could possibly be poor?

On the other hand, the existence of poor whites has never surprised South Africans.  It has, however, often worried and annoyed them.

These two reactions to white poverty -- fascination and worry -- came together for me recently in a wonderfully unexpected way.  A few months ago, I wrote a about a fine photo essay by Reuters photographer Finbarr O'Reilly about Coronations Park, a poor white community near Johannesburg.  Here's one of O'Reilly's photos -- poor white boys playing with a old tire.

Finbarr O'Reilly/Reuters: Children play on a tire being used to block the entrance to a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010.  (Click directly on either of these photos to see larger versions.)

One of the points that I made in my comments about O'Reilly's work was that poor whites have been a favorite subject for photographers for a very long time.  O'Reilly responded to my comments, and that led to a friendly exchange of emails.  In one of them, he mentioned South African photographer Constance Stuart Larrabee, who had done a series on poor whites in the late 1940s.

I'd known about Larrabee, but had never studied her work.  What O'Reilly had to say about her intrigued me, and got me digging around in her online archive at the Smithsonian Institution.  And what did I find?  A photo of a poor white boy playing with an old tire.

Constance Stuart Larrabee.  Children in Johannesburg (South Africa) slum streets.  1947-48.

According to the Smithsonian, Larrabee photo's was part of a series about a social welfare system that "had been established for poor white South Africans in the Johannesburg area after the end of the Second World War."  It reflects official concern about poor whites -- the sense that they urgently needed to be lifted out of poverty, not so much for their own sake, but because their very existence poked holes in the edifice of white supremacy.  (Larrabee's photos have gotten under my skin.  I'm currently writing an article about the social welfare series.)

This set of convergences really isn't surprising.  Both O'Reilly and Larrabee were doing the same thing -- documenting the lives of poor whites.   (White supremacy is dead in South Africa -- politically, at least, but poor whites continue to fascinate.  They remain anomalous in a country where poverty is overwhelmingly black.)  And, in the age of Google, it wasn't hard for O'Reilly to discover that someone was writing about him.  We know, as well, that poor children will make toys out of whatever is at hand, and old tires are rarely in short supply.

So, the convergence is no surprise, but it's still wonderful to see.  The photos are beautifully evocative, and they remind us that what seems new is often very old.

PS, 20 November 2010:  Larrabee was one of the first photographers to examine the lives of South Africa's poor whites.  (She was almost certainly the first professional photographer to do so.)  I talk about her pioneering work, here.

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I should have mentioned this in my earlier posts...  Anyone interested in the history of poor whites in South Africa might want to look at White But Poor:  Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880-1940, edited by Robert Morrell and published in 1992 by the University of South Africa.

Convergences, 1: Ben Shahn and Constance Stuart Larrabee

Sometimes things come together in wonderful ways.  This post was born out of an email exchange that I had with Reuters photographer Finbarr O'Reilly and a comment that he made on this blog.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a photo-essay that he had done on poor whites in South Africa.  I returned to the subject, a few days ago, when the essay was featured on the the New York Times' Lens Blog.  Finbarr's emails and comment added to and corrected my post.  In his comment, he mentioned the South African photographer Constance Stuart Larrabee, who had photographed poor whites in the 1940s.

I'd known about Larrabee, but hadn't spent much time looking at her work.  Finbarr's comment prompted me to poke around in her online archive, at the Smithsonian Institution.  And there I found a photo that I knew I'd seen before.

Constance Stuart Larrabee:  Street photographer.  Johannesburg, South Africa.  1948.  (Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African Art, Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives.  Click directly on either of these images to see larger versions.) 

This image comes out of a series of photos about black life in South Africa's largest city that Larrabee later assembled into a collection that she called the "Johannesburg Black Man."  I was certain that I'd seen this photo, despite having never really studied Larrabee's work.  Sure enough, I had -- except that Larrabee wasn't the photographer.

Ben Shahn:  Itinerant photographer in Columbus, Ohio.  1938.  (Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection.)

This is the photo, and it captures a moment ten years earlier and 9,000 miles away.  The photographer was Ben Shahn, who's best known as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

At the time, Shahn was on an assignment for the by-now-legendary documentary project at the federal government's Farm Security Administration.  His mission was broader than Larrabee's -- he was concerned with both urban and rural life and with people of all colors -- but it shared with her's a desire to document as many facets of life as possible.  Having written about Shahn several times (for instance, his encounter with an old time medicine show, in Tennessee, and his use of a Leica camera, equipped with a disguised viewfinder), I knew this photo well.

It's more than mere coincidence that the photos look remarkably the same.  Photographers are often drawn to (and are assigned to) common subjects and themes.  Larrabee and Shahn were working on similar documentary projects, after all, at roughly the same time.  And, notoriously, photographers like to make pictures of other photographers.  As Geoff Dyer points out in his exhilarating and exasperating book, The Ongoing Moment, anyone studying the history of photography quickly discovers that photos and subjects that he or she has identified with one photographer turn out to be "shared and replicated by several others."

Still, the convergence here pulls me up short.  Two urban street photographers -- one African, the other African-American.  Two men struggling to make a living.  Two encounters with white documentarians.  The moments were captured, but the stories, inevitably, were lost.

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PS, 12 August 2010:  I'm in the middle of reading John Raeburn's new book, Ben Shahn's American Scene:  Photographs, 1938.  In it, he discusses Shahn's portrait of the itinerant photographer and sheds some light on the encounter between the two men:

The photographer specialized in tintypes, playing-card-sized portraits on a thin metal plate that could be rapidly developed on the spot and then delivered to the sitter.  ...the popularity of tintypes waned around the turn of twentieth century, but into the thirties, itinerant photographers continued to make them, mostly serving a clientele for whom portrait studios or personal cameras were too dear.

...The portrait not only emphasizes the tintypist's unimpeachable dignity, it also hails him as Shahn's artistic colleague, in spite of the differences in their equipment, working methods, and intentions. ...As itinerant workers discovering their subjects along unfamiliar sidewalks, both relied on the camera's inherent capacity to isolate the subject of a photograph from the inchoate flux of ordinary experience, and on their visual imagination to bring out that subject's essential qualities...."