Collection Honors Photographer of African American Life in Southland

Harry Adams didn’t call himself a photojournalist--had never even thought of the word until someone mentioned it to him.

His photographs, which chronicle African American life in Los Angeles over 30 years, represent journalism in its humblest form: community news.

Here are long-forgotten receptions, banquets and balls. There are group shots, women posing at garden parties, trophies being held aloft. They are like Adams himself--workmanlike and of-the-moment. They are the kind of photos that earned him the moniker “one-shot Harry”--though in life, even his wife called him “Adams.”

On Saturday, 11 years after he died of a heart attack while on assignment, this workaday journalist was hailed for his rare contribution, not just to journalism but to history.

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The occasion was a presentation of Adams’ photos to a group of his friends and subjects, who gathered at Cal State Northridge to begin the huge task of identifying the people in them.

The pictures were recently bequeathed to the university by Adams’ widow, Lorraine. There are so many, hundreds of thousands, that she has not had time to sort them.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Adams worked for black publications in Los Angeles, showing up for work, clicking the shutter, and earning his pay, day after day, year after year.

He worked when photography was a trade, not an art, and his pictures are neither dramatic nor provocative.

These are not the startling images of African Americans that defined his era. No Black Panthers or civil rights marchers being attacked by German shepherds.

Yet they reflect a part of history ignored by the mainstream press’ indifference to the ordinary affairs of black Americans.

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During an era most often recalled for assassinations, civil-rights battles and riots, Harry Adams shot church socials, fancy weddings and little girls in ballet class. He shot African Americans going about life as usual, at leisure, not at war.

“This is people at their best,” said CSUN journalism professor Kent Kirkton, curator of the collection and director of the school’s Center for Photojournalism and Visual History. “Well-dressed people. People engaged socially and politically . . . the black bourgeoisie.”

There are famous faces in the mix. But they are pictured, not as the prophets, martyrs and icons they became, but as they were then: People who stirred local news events wherever they went.

There is Malcolm X, a face in the crowd in the back of a room at a court hearing in Los Angeles. Martin Luther King Jr. on his way to a church speech, flanked by local notables. James Baldwin grinning uncomfortably for the camera at a book signing, surrounded by pretty women. Adams’ pictures catch them passing though community news pages on their way to history.

The Sentinel in those years was a crusading voice for integration. Its battling tone was set by publisher Leon H. Washington Jr., who took the paper’s “don’t buy where you can’t work” campaign to the streets after founding the paper in the 1930s.

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Although Adams was present during many of these efforts to integrate sports and housing, he was not especially political, said his widow, Lorraine. Gruff, kind and “a good provider” is how she described him. As for the civil rights struggles of the day, “If you discussed something like that, he would just say, ‘I covered that,’ ” she said.

Adams was more at home with society page assignments. But there, too, his goal was just to get the shot in the paper. “To Harry it was more of a craft than an art form,” said Roland Charles, a photojournalist and acquaintance of Adams who attended Saturday’s gathering.

“He would show up with his press camera, take 10 of the most important people in the black community, line them up, flash once, and say, ‘OK, I’m outta here.’ ”

Adams was a man of many careers, first an M.P. in the military, then a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, and later a barber and photographer.

CSUN hopes to organize a selection of photos for a museum exhibit next year.