ART REVIEW : Portrait of Protest : Black Photographers Expose a Century of Struggle

‘Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists,” declared Frederick Douglass in 1849. “It seems to us next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.”

Douglass was right, of course. Representations of blacks are inevitably limited by the perceptions brought by the person making the image--which, in the case of 19th-Century white artists, most often meant perception was guided by the prevailing prejudices of a society whose growing prosperousness had been significantly predicated on the dehumanized practice of slavery.

One could, however, go further than Douglass and say that neither are representations of blacks by black artists impartial. Why should they be? Black artists bring their own revealing perceptions to art, including to the art of portraiture.

A portrait describes the sitter, but it describes the artist who made it, too. Those 19th-Century whites who “grossly exaggerated” the distinctive features of black men plainly weren’t making faithful likenesses. Instead, they were creating damningly vivid portraits of their own exaggerated grossness.

Douglass’ comment is quoted in the catalogue to an insightful exhibition of 70 photographic works by 13 artists working in the United States between 1889 and 1989. “Black Photographers Bear Witness: 100 Years of Social Protest” was organized by Deborah Willis for the Williams College Museum of Art in western Massachusetts, to commemorate the centennial of the graduation of the school’s first black student, Gaius Charles Bolin. Concluding an extensive 2 1/2-year tour, the show is on view at the California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park through Oct. 6.

In one respect the timing is fortuitous. Today, many regard Booker T. Washington as the philosophical predecessor to Clarence Thomas, George Bush’s conservative nominee to a seat on the Supreme Court. In the show, C. M. Battey’s reverent 1915 portrait of the famously articulate advocate of accommodation to the established structures of white society (and Battey’s boss at the Tuskegee Institute) portrays Washington in a bluntly dignified manner common to a politician’s or executive’s formal portrait.

A few yards away from this subtly haloed image is a more tumultuous 1951 picture by Marvin and Morgan Smith. It shows an NAACP picket line at a fashionable nightclub whose discriminatory refusal to seat the cabaret star, Josephine Baker, had not been successfully challenged in court.

“A complete and shameless whitewash (sic) of the long-established and well-known discriminatory practices of the Stork Club,” thundered NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall, whose subsequent seat on the Supreme Court may soon be filled by Clarence Thomas. As debate begins to focus on the dissonant judicial philosophy of the nominee, the crucial history that unfolds in this exhibition assumes particular urgency.

The show opens with a devastating, four-part “Portrait of a hanging” (1896), photographed in Montana by 71-year-old James Presley Ball. The grouping includes a formal portrait of William Biggerstaff, a former slave, two pictures of local officials proudly posing with Biggerstaff’s shrouded head in a noose and, finally, a death portrait of the hanged man crisply laid out in his coffin.

The solemn formality brought to the sequence by Ball’s camera is its most shocking feature, for it sanctifies the barbaric deed with a frontier pomp and circumstance.

After this extraordinary opener, the show could be loosely divided into five chronological parts, which have much to say about the social evolution of black life in the United States and the parallel evolution of photography. Blacks made pictures almost from the moment the camera was invented--Ball began just six years after, in 1845--and the show has a wide range of work.

First, an “alternative” is represented to the demeaning, caricatured picture of black life Douglass complained about. Take Battey’s “Tuskegee Institute, Carpentry Class” (circa 1915): As surely as the depicted figures would wield hammers, nails and lumber in the construction of a house, the artist used the tools of lighting, point of view and composition to construct an idealized, classically ordered scene of rational harmony.

The social, political and artistic aspirations of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance and after are chronicled in the romantically evocative pictures by the great James Van Der Zee and in the journalistically crisp documents of the Smith twins, Marvin and Morgan. Soon, the very different precedents of these three seem to merge in the well-known work of Gordon Parks.

Part poetic commentary and part photojournalistic document (Parks had participated in FDR’s Farm Security Administration photo project--the only black to have done so), pictures such as his “Black Children with White Doll” (circa 1942) are concise visual essays in both American social history and the formal structure of camera work. As a delimiting model for black children, the pretty white doll echoes the preponderance of white-made images that circulate in official channels.

Not surprisingly, the largest section of the show records various aspects of the postwar civil rights movement, which coincided with the image-mad arrival of the media age. Several recall the earlier efforts at creating an alternative to oppressive visual stereotypes, although now the machinery to be fought was not art but the pervasive engine of mass media. “Selma March, Alabama” (1965) by the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Moneta Sleet Jr., is bluntly incisive: Two black men in white-face have scrawled the word “vote” into the white makeup smeared across their foreheads.

Also among these is one of the most beautiful images in the show. “Savior’s Day Gathering, Chicago Colosseum” (1966) is an undulating cloud of white robes and veils punctuated by scores of black female faces, made by staff photographer Robert Sengstacke for the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. A firmament of heaven-on-Earth is conjured.

Finally, younger artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Pat Ward Williams use their work as a means by which to deconstruct the mediated mechanisms of contemporary image making. Notably the only women among the 13 artists, they are part of a larger phenomenon in recent art in which the second-class status afforded women in our culture finds its appropriate voice in photography, historically regarded as a second-class medium for making art.

Add to this equation the factor of color and the mix represents potential, if as-yet unfulfilled, volatility and power. “Black Photographers Bear Witness” tells a momentous story of both freedom and art.

At the California Afro-American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, (213) 744-7432, daily through Oct. 6.