An historian with a camera? That's a bit like a fish with a bicycle, isn't it? After all, a camera isn't a quill, a pencil, or a microfiche reader. It's not a computer or even an audio recorder. It isn't, that is, a tool of the historical trade.
Don't get me wrong. Many historians make use of photos that other people have made. For decades, we've studied, probed, read, scrutinized, and reflected upon photographs, often in highly sophisticated ways. Photos are documents, and historians have analyzed them in the same ways and with the same caution that we’ve used diaries, deeds, and death certificates.
But actually using a camera -- shooting -- comes as naturally to most historians as boxing does to gerbils.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2006.
I'm a boxing gerbil, an historian who shoots.
Over the last decade, I've worked on two long-term research projects in which a camera has been an essential part of my professional practice. My book, One Love, Ghoema Beat: Inside the Cape Town Carnival, which was published last year, combines words and photos to examine the role that the carnival has played in creating and sustaining a sense of "coloured" working-class identity, in South Africa. Democracy of Speed is on-going research into the dynamics of race and gender in grassroots motorsports in the American South. Here, too, the camera has been as important as the audio recorder and the archive.
Both projects grew out of little more than a desire to make beautiful pictures in interesting places, but they quickly evolved into serious historical research. In the case of Democracy of Speed, what I saw in the photos that I made at the race track was so unexpected that it drew me into an exploration of an unknown past. On the other hand, a past that I already knew informed the decisions that I made about how to photograph the Cape Town Carnival. As both projects evolved, the photos I was making continually suggested new questions and new lines of investigation.
Senior Drum Major, Pennsylvanians Crooning Minstrels, Cape Town, South Africa, 2008.
The idea of using the camera in scholarly research isn't anything new. Photography has been an important part of anthropology since birth of the discipline, in the nineteenth century. For a century and a half, modern science, from botany to astronomy, has also relied heavily on the collection and interpretation of photographic evidence. More recently, visual sociology has become a recognized subdiscipline.
On the face of it, it makes sense that some researchers use cameras and some don't. After all, both the social and physical sciences are concerned primarily with the here and now. Research involves people and things that can appear before a camera’s lens, even if that thing is light from a distant galaxy, many thousands of light years away. Historians, on the other hand, are concerned with the past, and you surely can’t shoot that.
John Bowles with car driven by his brother, Larry. Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2004.
Well, yes, you can. It might seem trivial, but it’s worth noting that every photograph is a record of the past. The moment of exposure might have been two minutes ago or 20 years. Whichever you choose, that moment is now history. Every time a photographer shoots, he or she has shot the past.
I like this point, and I'm constantly reminded of it when I look at photos that other people have made. But it's not particularly pertinent to what I'm going to say about my own photography. There are at least two additional and far more important grounds for objecting to the notion that photography has no place in the historical trade.
First, photography can raise questions and suggest topics for historical investigation that might otherwise have gone unspoken and unnoticed.
Second, photos of the present can shed light on the past, helping us understand it in deeper and more complex ways.
Senior Drum Major, Fabulous Woodstock Starlites, Cape Town, South Africa, 2010.
How do the photos that I make shape the history that I write?
Sometimes not at all. In writing Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa, I drew a small fraction of my evidence from sketches and prints, but none from the many photos I made in South Africa on research trips. A book that I’m writing now about popular music and popular politics in Cape Town, during the struggle against apartheid, will analyze and interpret the photos of others, not my own. Where images are concerned, both projects are utterly conventional.
As I've said, however, making photographs and thinking in pictures have been absolutely essential to One Love, Ghoema Beat and Democracy of Speed. I have an aversion to abstractions, so let's get down to brass tacks. We'll start with some photos from One Love, Ghoema Beat.
* * *
When I photographed the "board" and banner that the Atlantis Community Entertainers were parading through the streets of central Cape Town on die Tweede Nuwe Jaar (the second of January) of 2009, I sensed that I had captured something significant, even if I wasn't sure exactly what it meant. (By the way, you can click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)
Atlantis Community Entertainers, Cape Town, South Africa, January 2009.
The "board," a standard that all carnival troupes carry when on parade, represents theme that the troupe has chosen for the year. This year's theme was very obviously Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 American presidential election. The troupe's red, white, and blue color scheme emphasized the connection.
The photos that I made of the Atlantis Community Entertainers showed what was happening, but couldn't, by themselves, explain it. A troupe from a deeply impoverished suburb of Cape Town was celebrating the election of an American president. But why?
Atlantis Community Entertainers, Cape Town, South Africa, January 2009.
The answer lies in the history of South Africa's "coloured" community, the community which created and sustains the carnival. Like African-Americans, their ancestors were slaves. Again like African-Americans, they are a permanent minority. Of diverse ancestry and neither white nor black, in the South African scheme of things, they have been scorned as racially degenerate half-breeds, without a meaningful history or culture. During slavery and for a century and a half afterward, they were oppressed by the white-dominated state. By the late nineteenth century, they had begun to identify with African-Americans and, in particular, to adopt aspects of African-American popular culture. Black Americans, they believed, had successfully adapted to modernity and to a world of whites. Although democracy has now come to South Africa, many in the coloured community feel marginalized by the vastly larger and politically ascendant African population.
Is it any wonder, then, that they celebrated the son of a white American mother and a black African father who has been elected president of the most powerful country on earth?
Hollywood Superstars, Cape Town, South Africa, 2009.
But life is complicated, wonderfully so.
The Entertainers' board prompted me to look for others that might be just as revealing. I suppose that I expected to find more Obama. After all, we were only weeks away from his inauguration as what these Captonians surely saw as America's first coloured president. Instead, I found something else.
On the same day and in the same parade, another troupe, the Hollywood Superstars (note the name) carried a board that paid tribute to a more local hero, Nelson Mandela. As much as coloured identity in South Africa acknowledges a sentimental tie to the United States, local roots, connections, and interests matter much more. Paying tribute to Mandela was a way of asserting the fundamental South Africanness of the community. It simultaneously expressed the hope that Mandela's inclusive sense of what it means to be South African would prevail ultimately against more racially exclusive conceptions that would leave coloureds (along with whites and Indians) outside of the charmed circle.
Pennslyvanians Crooning Minstrels, Cape Town, South Africa, 2009.
This photo, made on the same day as the others, is one I'd been hoping to make for at least three years. I wanted a picture of a troupe marching past the slave lodge. It would be a way of connecting the carnival's present to its past: the Cape Town Carnival grew out of celebrations marking the end of slavery in the nineteenth century. But I didn't imagine that I'd be able to make an image quite as thickly layered as this one.
In it, we see the Pennsylvanians Crooning Minstrels (again, note the name) and the slave lodge. But we also see so much more. The new South African flag fills nearly half the frame, and, for this troupe, performs much the symbolic function as the board honoring Nelson Mandela. The slave lodge -- which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was indeed a place where slaves were housed -- has been transformed into a museum. A large sign on an exterior wall advertises an exhibition commemorating the 30th anniversary of the death of Steve Biko, one of the great heroes of the South African freedom struggle. It's merely a coincidence that the exhibition overlapped with the carnival, but the sign is nevertheless central to the meaning of the photograph. Biko advocated Black Consciousness, a ideology which redefined "black" to embrace all victims of apartheid -- Africans, coloureds, and Indians. His presence adds texture to a photo which captures an expression of identity that is both wholly coloured and wholly South African.
* * *
What I already knew about the history of the coloured community and the carnival informed the choices that I made while shooting One Love, Ghoema Beat. The photos, in turn, suggested new avenues of archival and oral research.
The situation was different, when I began work on Democracy of Speed.
* * *
I drove over to Eastiside dragway on a lark. I planned to spend a relaxing day making pictures of fast cars, smoky burnouts, and the cast of characters that loved them -- mostly dumb rednecks, I figured. (Like a lot of people, I had my prejudices about drag racing.) What I ended up seeing and shooting surprised, perplexed, and challenged me.
There were plenty of fast cars and lots of smoke at the track, but the people that I photographed weren't what I expected. Many of the racers and fans were black. A significant number were women and girls. The rednecks were pretty darn smart. And everybody got along just fine. The photos I made contradicted everything that I thought Iknew about southern working-class culture and about motorsports. I had to learn more. At first my tool was the camera. Later I added an audio recorder and archives.
Let's look at what the camera saw at Eastside, beginning with the dynamics of race, before moving on to gender. In both discussions, my words and photos are engaged in a conversation, commenting and reinforcing each other, but offering distinct perspectives.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
It turns out that African-Americans have been racing at Eastside Dragway -- head-to-head against whites -- from the day that it opened for business in 1965.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
The number of black racers was small, at first, but it's still remarkable that nobody tried to bar them from the drag strip. It was a time, after all, when "Whites Only" signs were only just coming off the walls of waiting rooms, restaurants, and restrooms in Virginia.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Blacks did sometimes sense hostility from other racers, but nobody told them to go home and, in general, as one black driver has put it, "everybody was right decent."
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Today, upward of a quarter of the racers and fans at Eastside, on any given Friday night or Sunday afternoon are African-American.
Longtime owner Al Gore (seated) and friends, Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside is far from unique. No motorsport (and few sports of any kind) has been more open to members of racial and ethnic minorities and to women than drag racing.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
In southern California, where organized drag racing began, black, Latino, and Asian men have been racing against white men ever since the 1930s, a time when baseball, for instance, was still rigidly segregated.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
The friendships formed at the track can be deep and lasting. A common passion, especially in something that the mainstream culture knows little about and tends to scorn, can bring people together in powerful ways. Seeing these race track friendships in action helps me to understand how they might have functioned nearly 50 years ago. The track was and is something of an oasis, where the laws and social norms of the outside world didn't always apply.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
For many years, African-Americans have served as race officials, at Eastside and all over the country.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Grassroots drag racing rarely attracts many fans, other than friends and relatives of the racers.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Symbols of what might be called "white consciousness" are often visible at the track.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
I've seen no signs that this consciousness, if that's what it is, is linked to racial hostility. Not at Eastside, and not at any of the dozens of other tracks that I've visited. There's certainly no hostility in the photo above. Gretchen Wilson's 2004 hit song, "Redneck Woman," celebrated a white working-class subculture, but it did so with warmth and humor, not aggression.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
This photo is about hipster irony, not racial animus.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Unlike stock car racing, which was born and bred in the South, organized drag racing emerged in the racially fluid culture of mid-twentieth-century southern California. While racism and segregation weren't absent, they didn't dominant social relations as they did in the South. As early as 1952, the National Hot Rod Association [NHRA] -- then and now the most important drag racing sanctioning body -- insisted that there were no racial or ethnic barriers to joined the organization or to participating its races.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
The NHRA's racial ethos wasn't universally followed. Some southern drag strips barred African-Americans. That was never the case at Eastside. By the end of the 1960s, the sport everywhere was open to all men.
* * *
Things were different where women were concerned. As late as the 1970s, women who wanted to drag race faced significant resistance from men. They were entering "a male domain," as Virginia Scharff has put it. And, to an extent, that's still the case. While women and girls are now an accepted part of the racing community -- at Eastside and throughout the country -- most participate as fans, crew members, minor officials, or "window dressing." Many male racers remain ambivalent about women drivers. Much of this past and all of this present is visible to the camera.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
The transformation of gender relations wasn’t easy, and it hasn’t been complete. But it happened. Drag racing, a macho sport that too many people insist on associating with delinquent, working-class white men, led the way among motorsports in accepting women as full participants. The irony is wonderful, and it’s part of what keeps me going back to the track.
Bunny Burkett (right), Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Bunny Burkett’s career embodies many of the contradictions that surround women in drag racing. On the one hand, few racers of either gender have been as successful as she. She's won hundreds of races and has long been one of the most sought-after match racers on the east coast. In 1986, she won the International Hot Rod Association’s Funny Car championship, marking her as one of drag racing’s elite.
Bunny Burkett, Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
On the other hand, she, like many successful female drag racers of her era, was "sexualised," as Jim Luikens once wrote, "in the sense that [her] looks, way of dressing and appearance became part of what [she was] 'offering' the sport as a sales proposition.” In the mid-1970s, for instance, she toured as part of Tom “Smoker” Smith’s all-female Miss Universe Pro-Stock Circuit of Drag Racing. Before the races, the drivers paraded before the crowd wearing mini-skirts and go-go boots.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Racers like Burkett paid the dues for the thousands of younger women who have followed them.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Today, women and girls participate in drag racing by the thousands, from the grassroots to the highest professional ranks.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
It remains true, however, that most women at the track aren't there to race.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
More likely, they're serving as crew members for husbands and boyfriends.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Others work as officials. One of hidden facets of motorsports is the vital role that women play in keeping everything moving. Without women officials and track workers, every motorsport would grind to a halt.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Helmets are an important form of self-expression. It should be obvious that the motorcycle racer in this photo is a woman.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Helmets can also capture the ambivalence some men feel about women and girls participating in a sport that they feel is theirs.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Sexualized images of women are common, if not pervasive.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Lose the race, lose face.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Most men embrace the macho character of the sport. In a subculture that celebrates its outlaw image, being bad is good.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
Despite whatever ambivalence male racers feel, women continue to be central to track operations.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
They offer moral and tangible support to men who race.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
They worry.
Eastside Dragway, Waynesboro, Virginia, 2002-2010.
And they win.
The girl and woman racers at Eastside are, like their counterparts at tracks all over the country, part of the post-Burkett generation. All admire her as a role-model and respect her as a pioneer. Because she and others had paved the way, none of the women and girls that I've interviewed had any hesitancy, when they first came to the track, about racing against males or any doubt that they would be accepted as drag racers.
Eastside Speedway and hundreds of other American drag strips are places where men and women and boys and girls compete against each other regularly, fiercely, and unselfconsciously. Lingering traces of male resistance can be found in humor and symbols, but it’s rarely overt and never effective. Men have their cartoons. Women have their trophies.
* * *
Neither One Love, Ghoema Beat nor Democracy of Speed would exist if I hadn't picked up a camera. Both project combine words and images to explore the past and present of fascinating social institutions. The camera and the photos that I made with it served a number of purposes -- drawing me into the past, suggesting new lines of investigation and new questions to ask, offering hints about how people thought and acted in the past, and, crucially, motivating me to keep looking and learning.
In these projects, photography and historical research are complementary, each enriching and deepening the other.
* * *
Note: I presented a paper based on this post to a history department seminar, at Lynchburg College, Lynchburg, Virginia, on 16 February 2011. I'm very grateful for the invitation and for the chance to articulate some of my thoughts about history and photography.
Photographs copyright John Edwin Mason, 2002-2010. Text copyright John Edwin Mason, 2011.
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