PHOTOGRAPHY : Portraits of a Lifetime : Guy R. Crowder started his own Los Angeles photo agency in the ‘60s. An exhibit of his work offers a tour of the community’s most important historical events and people.

When Guy Crowder started taking photographs in the early 1960s, little did he know that he would come to meet six U.S. presidents. That he would be standing on the podium next to Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel moments before Kennedy was assassinated. That he would cover Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral, Muhammad Ali’s fights, Motown’s Supremes, Temptations and Four Tops, and Mayor Tom Bradley’s 20 years in office.

Crowder began his photography career in South-Central Los Angeles, shooting high school football games, church events and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. And at that time, as a black man, he couldn’t get a job with mainstream newspapers or the wire services, Associated Press and United Press International. “When I first started to apply as a photographer at the Los Angeles Times, the Herald Examiner, the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, AP and UPI, I was told from certain newspapers that I was overqualified,” Crowder said. “There weren’t any black photographers working for The Times or the Herald Examiner, especially the Herald Examiner.”

He did not remain frustrated or bitter; instead, these closed doors fired up an entrepreneurial spirit within him. He decided to open his own business--”to make my own black UPI,” he said--in which he would distribute photographs to several community newspapers that rarely had full-time staff photographers.

After 30 years in the community and on the road, Crowder has amassed 350,000 to 400,000 images that stand as a historical record of Los Angeles’ African-American community. Nearly 150 of his photographs depicting local and national dignitaries in the spheres of politics, sports and entertainment will be on view beginning Sunday in the exhibit, “Camera and Community: A Celebration by Guy R. Crowder,” at Cal State Northridge’s Art Galleries.

The show was organized by CSUN’s Center for Photojournalism & Visual History in conjunction with Black History Month, and made possible by Crowder’s agreement to place his negatives in the center’s archives. There, his work will be preserved and made available to CSUN students and the public.

“Guy has been privy to nearly every important event within the community because of his news service operation. I think he has the finest and most comprehensive single collection of the African-American community in Los Angeles over the last 30 years,” said Kent Kirkton, a CSUN journalism professor, the center’s director and show’s curator.

Kirkton spent many late nights with Crowder and CSUN graduate student Jonathan Game in Crowder’s Crenshaw-area studio, going through his files to select a reasonable number of images for the show that would accurately represent his enormous body of work.

“I think we did a good job, but you just can’t do it with 140,” Crowder said. “I could do a show of that many pictures on Mayor Bradley alone. Or Kenny Hahn alone. I can do that many on Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke.”

One finds pictures of superstars here: Magic Johnson, Ray Charles, Sammy Davis Jr., Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. But there are also photographs from a 1978 Easter parade, of author Alex Haley at a book signing at the May Co. in Crenshaw Center (1977), Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall at a USC Moot Court competition (1983), Coretta Scott King at the 92nd Street School (1972) and Wynton Marsalis with children at Baldwin Hills School (1989).

Local politicians, including Bradley, former Supervisor Hahn, Burke, Rep. Maxine Waters and City Councilman Nate Holden, appear in photographs among colleagues and movers and shakers in other fields. Crowder also captured visits to the community by state and national figures such as George McGovern, Ted Kennedy, Barbara Jordan, Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson. And there are a few images of the 1965 Watts riots and the Black Panther and Symbionese Liberation Army shootouts.

“Jonathan and I began looking at Guy’s collection with I think what we would call a mainstream press perspective,” Kirkton said. “By that, I mean we were thinking, what are the big events? Well, there’s the Watts riots, there’s the Panther shootout, there’s the SLA shootout, there’s this year’s riots.”

However, they said they realized those catastrophic events were only a small part of his collection.

“And frankly, they’re not representative of the community,” Kirkton said. “The real strength of this show is that it is an alternative to the view of the African-American community presented by the mainstream press, or just maybe our own perceptions of it. Maybe it’s not fair laying it on the press, but if you’re a reader of mainstream press, you mark the history of the black community with one set of events. And if you’re a reader of the black press, you may well mark it with a different set of events.”

Crowder, 53, a native of Beaumont, Tex., graduated from high school in Compton. He was encouraged to be a photographer by his father-in-law, a photographer who had a studio.

“He kept bugging me about getting involved,” Crowder said, “so I started running around with him. He had connections with a lot of newspapers, especially the Los Angeles Sentinel, and with business people, some political leaders--mainly church people. It seemed exciting, so I went back to school and started studying more on it. He got the shyness out of me.”

In those early days, Crowder said he “had a police radio in my car, and I used to go to all the accidents, the shootings, you name it. I would ride till 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. I had a family to feed and I was hungry.”

On weekends, he would shoot a high school game and maybe a Laker game Friday night, a USC football game Saturday, a junior college football game Saturday night and a Rams game Sunday.

Sunday nights, he’d be in his South-Central Los Angeles garage developing the pictures, which he’d then distribute to several newspapers including Tempo, West Coast News, the Metropolitan Gazette, the Sentinel and the Southwest Wave.

Crowder credits Jesse Unruh, then the powerful speaker of the California Assembly, and Frank Holoman for getting his business rolling. Holoman worked for Unruh, owned the newspaper Tempo and became an assemblyman himself.

Unruh “was a pioneer in the black community who gave a lot of young black political persons jobs. Everybody saw me walk around shooting pictures for Jess and said, ‘I guess he must be all right,’ ” Crowder said. “By that time, a gentleman by the name of Douglas Farrell had become an assemblyman. I started working for him, and then I graduated right on up to Merv Dymally and Bill Greene.”

His political clientele expanded again in 1973. Hahn asked him to come to work for the county.

“He said I would be the first black photographer for the county. I said, ‘Mr. Hahn, I’ve got a good business going.’ He said I wouldn’t have to give up my business, so I took the job, and it’s been wonderful,” Crowder said. He has worked for the Board of Supervisors ever since and is now the county’s assistant chief photographer.

By the time Hahn offered Crowder the county job, the mainstream press and Jet magazine had expressed interest in hiring him, but his business was successful, and he wasn’t interested.

“I’ve had a very wonderful life in photography. I think to a certain extent I would have had a lesser life if I’d gone to work for a daily,” he said. “Money-wise, I was better off. I’ve traveled extensively doing my photography.” And he has gotten for himself those plum assignments that surely would have gone to photographers with seniority at a mainstream daily.

Crowder can remember getting off the plane coming back from Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral and going straight out to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for the Academy Awards. He covered the first Super Bowl in 1967, Apollo spacecraft liftoffs in Florida in the early ‘70s and several of Muhammad Ali’s fights. Working for Motown, he traveled with many of the label’s artists, including the Supremes, Temptations, Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Marvin Gaye.

Some of his favorite assignments though, are less flashy and closer to home. Photographing Hahn’s local birthday celebrations for Martin Luther King Jr. stands out, as does going to Watts with Bobby Kennedy in 1968, greeting visiting U. S. presidents with Bradley and covering Nelson Mandela’s 1990 visit to Los Angeles.

Crowder says that over the years, he really wasn’t conscious of creating a body of work that chronicled the life of his community.

It was Kirkton, who founded the Center for Photojournalism & Visual History to preserve the history of the alternative press, who pointed out to Crowder the documentary aspects of his collection, and offered him a place where his material could be properly preserved.

“One of the basic intentions of the center is to recover that stuff before it gets lost forever,” Kirkton said.

And Crowder’s historical record could continue to grow, as he has no intention of retiring.

“I’m still young; I’ve still got a lot of life ahead of me,” he said. “I enjoy what I’m doing. I think I’ve got another 20 years. I intend to get on with Clinton, see what he’s got on the ball.”

Where and When What: “Camera and Community: A Celebration by Guy R. Crowder.” Where: CSUN Art Galleries, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge. When: A reception for Guy R. Crowder will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Sunday in the main art gallery. Crowder will also present a lecture at 10 a.m. Monday, when the gallery will be open until 4 p.m. Regular gallery hours, beginning Tuesday, will be 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and noon to 4 p.m. Mondays, through March 27. Price: Free. Group tours are available. Call: (818) 885-2226.