A Look at Blacks in L.A. Through Different Prism

Editor Toyomi Igus and photographer Roland Charles felt that the image of the Los Angeles black community as reflected in movies and television didn’t fit the L.A. African-American world they knew.

“I couldn’t find my life anywhere,” Igus told me. “I didn’t see it on TV. I didn’t see a reflection of my life, except on the Cosby show, the Huxtables, and people would tell me that’s not typical (of black families).”

Actually, it was pretty typical of Igus, whose parents were prosperous professionals.

So she and Charles conceived a unique collection of pictures by African-American photographers, “Life in a Day of Black L.A.: The Way We See It,” now on exhibit at the UCLA University Extension Design Center on Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade. You can meet the photographers at the center from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday.

The collection, sponsored by AT & T and Eastman Kodak Co. also is available in a book with the same title, published by the UCLA Center For Afro-American Studies.

The idea was to break stereotypes, to take African-American life beyond the stereotypical mass media image described by Igus and Charles in the forward to the book: “Black youths are all gangbangers; welfare recipients are black single mothers too lazy to work; black men do not support their families.”

I saw the point Igus and Charles were making. As a reporter, I have observed many aspects of black life--politics, religion, education, culture. Even so, the pictures gave me a fresh look at the variety of L.A.’s African-American scene.

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The photographs, the work of 10 talented professionals, are excellent. To look at the pictures is to be drawn into the lives of the subjects.

What was most striking was the ordinariness of the subject matter. Most of the pictures recorded the everyday activities of unknown men, women and children, mainly of the middle class. Yet the skill of the photographers takes the pictures far beyond what you might see in a family album.

In one shot, Curtis Felton and his son, Dominic, who is holding a basketball, stand together, looking over the city from the Baldwin Hills. In another, a stylishly dressed couple are standing in front of their his and hers Mercedes-Benzes. A third shows attorney Artis Grant working in his downtown office.

Artist Pat Ward Williams sits in her Los Angeles studio. There’s a photo of Sunday brunch at Aunt Kizzy’s restaurant in Marina del Rey. Two boys--one black, the other Asian--were photographed riding skateboards on a Mid-Wilshire street. One photographer caught friendly looking Los Angeles Police Officer Godfrey Bascom on the streets of Southwest L.A.

The collection also shows the downside of life. A homeless woman stands outside a car she calls home. Bishop Carl Beam is photographed outside the headquarters of the Minority AIDS Project. The rubble of Florence and Normandie avenues, a flash point of the spring riots, is seen through the shell of a burned-out TV set. And there is a shot of a long line of mourners attending the funeral of a young man, presumably the victim of violent death, at the Inglewood Cemetery.

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While the collection and book are titled “Life In a Day of Black L.A.,” they portray a life that is not much different than in Asian, Latino or white L.A.

The pictures show people living quiet, unexceptional lives, working, collecting material possessions, going to clubs and churches, gossiping at the barber shop and beauty parlor, surfing, skateboarding and jogging--pursuing the Southland’s good life.

This is an area-wide phenomenon. What the photographers have shown can be seen every day in Crenshaw, Baldwin Hills, Altadena, Pasadena, and in the new suburbs of the eastern San Gabriel Valley, and western Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where many African-American families are moving.

These photographs do not set blacks apart. Instead, they tell us what we have in common. As photographer Howard Bingham wrote in the book, the pictures “have the power to heal and nurture a country that is still in search of identity. The language they speak goes beyond color and culture; they embrace all humanity in sepia tones.”

This is a great message for today’s tense times, particularly in L.A. Hopefully, we will one day receive the same message on movie and television screens.