John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Convergences, 8: Mathew Brady, Yannis Behrakis, & the Scarred Black Body

This photograph will shock you, but it's not likely to surprise you.  It's both disturbing and disturbingly familiar.  Images of black bodies in distress are depressingly common elements of our increasingly global visual culture.  Maimed, diseased, emaciated, incarcerated -- you and I see them every day.  Often we pass them by with a glace.  This one stopped me in my tracks.

Yannis Behrakis' powerful image accompanies "Tortured, Detained, and Ordered Out:  A Migrant's Tale in Greece", a Reuters story about the plight of Africans who have illegally entered the country in search of economic opportunities.  It's impact on me and, maybe on you, depends on more than the brutal reality of the scars on Hassan Mekki's back.  Some of its power stems precisely from its familiarity.  This image conjures up a history that, for many of us, is profoundly personal.

 

REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis:  Hassan Mekki, a 32-year-old Sudanese migrant, shows scars on his back in Athens December 5, 2012.  Mekki, who fled conflict in his country in hopes of a better life in Europe, said he was attacked by a group of men holding Greek flags and left with the deep wounds on his back, throat and neck in August 2012, about five months after he illegally entered Greece.  Mekki was walking in Athens with a friend from Mauritania when black-shirted men on motorcycles holding Greek flags and shouting "Go home black" and other racists insults came up and knocked him out with a blow to the head.  He was covered in blood when he regained consciousness and only later realized that his attackers, which he says were likely tied to the far-right Golden Dawn party, had left large gashes resembling an "X" across his back.  "I don't have the right papers, so I can't go anywhere to ask for help," Mekki said.  "I can't sleep. I'm scared, maybe they will follow me and my life is in danger now."

The scars on Mekki's back remind me of the wounds on the back of a man named Gordon, an escaped African-American slave, who joined the Union army in the midst of the Civil War and fought to make his people free.

 

Mathew Brady Studio:  Gordon, 1863.  [National Portrait Gallery.]

Gordon served his people (some of whom were my ancestors) in at least a couple of different ways -- with a gun and as the subject of the of a photo that also battled against the slave regime of the South.

Here's what the National Portrait Gallery has to say about this photograph:

In the spring of 1863, a slave known only as Gordon escaped from a Louisiana plantation and, after a harrowing ten-day journey, found security among Union troops stationed at Baton Rouge.  Before enlisting in a black regiment, he was examined by military doctors who discovered horrific scarring on his back, the result of a brutal whipping by his former overseer.  Two local photographers created this image to document the harsh treatment Gordon had received.  A searing indictment of slavery, Gordon's portrait became one of the most powerful images in the abolitionist cause.  As a New York journalist wrote, "This... photograph should be multiplied by 100,000 and scattered over the States. It tells the story in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe can not approach, because it tells the story to the eye."  Gordon fought in several battles, yet nothing is known about his subsequent life.  The copy carte de visite displayed here is the only existing version known to have been produced by the Mathew Brady Studio.

 

Unidentified Artist:  Gordon [wood engraving after Brady].  [National Portrait Gallery.]

Gordon's portrait circulated widely and was reprinted often in books, newspapers, and magazines (as engravings -- mass photo reproduction was not yet possible).  It played an important role in persuading many white Northerners that ending slavery was as important as preserving the Union.

The scars on Gordon's back have been etched in my mind ever since I first saw his portrait many years ago.  It's the first thing that I thought of when I saw the photograph that Behrakis made.

The images represent different things, of course.  An economic migrant is not a slave.  Street thugs and the institutionalized violence of a slave-owners' state are not the same thing.  But the resonance is undeniable.  It's in the racism and brutality directed at the weak and the marginalized as much as it's in the photos themselves.

Funky Friday & Convergences 7, Together Again for the First Time: Margaret Bourke-White, Marion Post Wolcott & Louis Jordan

Funky Fridays make me happy.  It's a chance to show off music (and other funky stuff) that puts a glide in my stride and a dip in my hip.  (By the way, if you're here for the tunes, skip all my talking and scroll down to the videos.)

Convergences make me happy, too.  This is a series of blog posts where I talk about two photographs -- by well known photographers -- that echo each other.

Today's post has two origins.  First, I'm just finishing two long articles about the photos that Margaret Bourke-White made in South Africa, in 1949-50, on assignment for Life magazine.  The second starting poing is Maurice Berger's wonderful post on the New York Times Lens Blog about the photos that Gordon Parks made for Life's 1956 series of articles on segregation in the South.  Berger made me ask -- did Bourke-White also work on the segregation series?  You bet she did.  Her photos are terrific.  One's from a juke joint -- and that's the point of this post.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  In "Harlem Cafe" Negroes dance to a jukebox.  The city operates a more sedate club for Negro teen-agers, but juke joints get more business.  Life, 17 September 1956.  [Click on either photo to see a larger version.]

Fifteen of Bourke-White's photos appear in the article, "The Background of Segregation, Part III:  The Voices of the White South."  (The work of other photographers is used as well.)  They're surprising on all sorts of levels.  First, they're in color.  Throughout her long career, Bourke-White preferred and is best remember for black and white photography.  Second, she used small cameras -- a Rollei TLR and a 35mm camera of unknown make.  Once again, throughout her career she was known for using bulky large-format cameras.  Third, the small cameras allowed her to create photos have a loose, unmannered feel that's very different from her usual meticulous style.

I'll write a blog post about these photos next week.  For now, it's enough to say that the photo above, made in a South Carolina juke joint, instantly brought to mind a much more famous photo from another juke joint in the South.

 

Marion Post Wolcott:  Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, Saturday evening, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi.  November 1939.  Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Marion Post Wolcott made this photo while she was working for Roy Stryker's epic Farm Security Administration [FSA] documentary project of the 1930s and '40s.  She was on her first assignment in the South, and she hated the place.  In his book about FSA photography, Nicholas Natanson says that she wrote to Stryker complaining about "small-minded local officials, about a stifling cultural environment, about racism and sexism, even about 'polite reform women... with their unrealistic and sentimental way of handling [problems]....  After a whole day of that crap and listening to them playing Jesus I could just plain puke!'"

Wolcott was young, white, and liberal.  I imagine that shooting in the juke joint was something of a relief.  Those small-minded local officials weren't particularly happy about the idea of a pretty white woman spending time with Negroes, of course, so they sent along a cop as her escort.  She made a glorious picture nevertheless.

Well, all this hanging out in juke joints made me want to hear some juke joint music.  Who better than the great Louis Jordan?  Nobody, actually.

 

 

Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, "Five Guys Named Moe."

That was so much fun, let's hear another.

 

 

Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, "Saturday Night Fish Fry."

If Louis and the boys sound like they're playing rock & roll...  Well, yes.  The roots of rock & roll lie in the rhythm & blues that was played in the juke joints of the South.

* * *

Some readers might argue Bourke-White's and Wolcott's photos (and the Jordan videos as well) reproduce and reinforce old stereotypes about the special affinity that African Americans have for music and dance.  In addition, the joyful expressions on the faces of the main subjects can be seen to undercut condemnations of segregation and racial discrimination.  After all, if the purported victims are so happy, how bad can things really be?

Seen in isolation, the photos do lend themselves to that reading.  But Bourke-White's picture needs to be seen in the context in which it was published -- the Life story on segregation.  Taken together, the 14 other photos that she contributed to the article give a much more rounded view of black life.  At least one of them pointedly underscores racial injustice and inequality.  (Follow the link above to see the story.)

Update, 13 August 2012:  I now think that I was wrong about the message that Bourke-White's photo sent, when it was published in 1956.  In the context of the article, it did tend to reinforce negative stereotypes about African-Americans.  You can read more about this, here.

In the same way, Wolcott's photo should be read in the context of the thousands of photos that she made for the FSA, many hundreds of which included African Americans.  All portray blacks with dignity (as does the one above, in fact).  One of her most iconic photos directly addresses the injustice of segregation.

As for Louis Jordan...  The man was a signifyin' fool.

Convergences, 6: Margaret Bourke-White & David Goldblatt Photograph Some Afrikaners

Margaret Bourke-White was already a Life magazine legend when she photographed some Afrikaner men on horseback.  Despite her fame and her accomplishments, she was out of her depth.  While technically accomplished, the photo is politically naive.  Twelve years later, when the great South African photographer David Goldblatt made a similar photo, he knew exactly what he was doing.  He made a point, and it was the right one -- for a time.

Yet the gods of photography had surprises in store.  Bourke-White soon discovered that what she had taken to be a colorful South African folk festival was, in fact, something much more complicated -- and troubling.  Goldblatt learned (probably to his delight) that you can't judge a man by his frown.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  Carrying Flag of Boer War Days, Modern Afrikaners Costumed as Pioneer Dispatch Riders Arrive on Prancing Arabians at Voortrekker Pageant.  From: "South Africa Enshrines Pioneer Heroes," Life magazine, 16 January 1950.

Life sent Bourke-White to South Africa, in late 1949, to produce a series of reports on racial injustice.  There was a good deal of American interest in the country at the time.  A year earlier, a newly elected National Party government had ousted the United Party of Prime Minister J.C. Smuts, who was widely admired by American and British political elites, and had introduced its policy of apartheid, which it pledged would entrench white supremacy forever.  The election had coincided with the publication of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country.  The novel -- an expose of the harsh conditions that black South African endured -- quickly rose to the top of American best-seller lists.

Oddly enough, the first photo-essay that Bourke-White produced in South Africa never mentions apartheid and has almost nothing to say about Africans.  "South Africa Enshrines Pioneer Heroes" is instead about the dedication of the Voortrekker Monument, a celebration of Afrikaner nationalism and, unavoidably, the National Party.

Both the photos and the text (which her memos to her editors influenced) go out of their way to liken the event to "American pioneer festivals."  (The photo and caption above are good examples.)  Far from capturing the occasion's ominous overtones, the text spoke of Afrikaners who "gathered with pride and with prayers for the white Christian civilization their forefathers brought to the dark continent."  Bourke-White's photos showed dignified men and women dressed in costumes that wouldn't have been terribly out of place in America's nineteenth-century West.  One shows teenagers, in similar clothes, enjoying Coke and "American Hamburgers."  The message to Life's readers was plain -- Afrikaners are a lot like us.

 

David Goldblatt:  Original caption:  A commando escorting the leader of the party, Hendrik Verwoerd, to the 50th anniversary of the National Party, De Wildt, Transvaal.  1964.  Added later:  The middle horseman in the front rank is Leon Wessels, who later became Deputy Minister of Law and Order in the National Party government.  He was also the first senior member of that party to apologise for apartheid.

David Goldblatt's photo of Afrikaner equestrian pageantry could hardly be more different.  Yes, the horses and the hats are similar, but the mood is completely different.  There's not a hint of celebration anywhere in the image.  Instead, it's dominated by the dyspeptic scowl of a young Leon Wessels, the man in the middle.  Photographing at a moment when apartheid seemed as if it really might last forever, Goldblatt got what he wanted.

The photo is not, however, supposed to summarize an entire people.  It's from Some Afrikaners Photographed, a very personal exploration of Afrikaner society, and it's about particular men and a particular kind of politics.  Goldblatt's use of the word "some" in the title reflects his awareness of the pitfalls of trying to generalize.  He knew (or hoped) that his photos (the best of them) would capture "moments of impossible contradiction."

Apartheid didn't last forever, of course.  And, in 1991, three years before South Africa's first democratic elections marked apartheid's official demise, the horseman in the middle apologized for the horrors it inflicted on his fellow South Africans.  The New York Times reported, that Wessels, by then deputy foreign minister, "startled his fellow Members of Parliament when he said that 'we now know that we hurt our fellow countrymen.'  Calling apartheid 'a terrible mistake that blighted our land,' he said, 'I am sorry for having been so hard of hearing for so long, so indifferent.'"  "Few others," the Times noted, "have expressed sorrow."

I imagine that Goldblatt was surprised, yet not surprised, by Wessel's change of heart.  Surprised, perhaps, that it was the young man with the scowl.  Not surprised that it was someone from deep within Afrikaner nationalism.  From the very beginning, Goldblatt was attuned to the many varieties of Afrikaner thought and emotion -- its "shapes and shades," "loves and fears," as he wrote in the introduction to Some Afrikaners Photographed.

For Bourke-White, her five months in South Africa were a constant learning experience.  She began from a point of utter naivete.  By the time it ended, she had produced scathing condemnation of apartheid -- one of the longest photo-essays that Life ever published and one that retains its power over 60 years later.  That essay will be the subject of a later blog post.  An lengthy article on the essay will appear in the South African journal Kronos.

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.

* * *

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.