His Camera Is Aiming to Get Past the Subject of Color

The full title of Pomona College’s current main exhibition is “Becoming Visible / Forjando Presencia: Faces of Africa in Latin America, Photographs by Tony Gleaton.” It represents something of a one-man crusade.

The show of some 60 exceedingly beautiful prints is installed in the Montgomery Art Gallery and was curated by its director, Marjorie L. Harth. Images depict people of African descent who live in Mexico, Central and South America. Any white American who knows of this circumstance and remembers there was a significant African slave population south of our borders in the colonial period may wonder why Gleaton chooses to make it an issue.

Well, being an artist, Gleaton is free to choose his subject matter. Maybe it’s not an issue. Maybe it’s a theme that just happens to fascinate Gleaton personally. As it turns out, it’s a bit of both.

Gleaton was born in Detroit in 1948. His family moved to L.A. when he was 19. He studied photography at UCLA. He is, as Harth reports in her brochure essay, of mixed European and African background but is so fair and blue-eyed he has trouble convincing people he’s partly black. For perfectly understandable reasons he became interested in how black people who don’t fit historical stereotypes tend to become forgotten. He photographed African American cowboys, for example, when few realized they’ve been around since frontier days.

Gleaton’s pictures of blacks living in Latino cultures are an extension of his personal empathy, but they gently confront his audience with larger questions about their own preconceptions.

In addition to blond and redheaded Mexicans, there are those who appear mixtures of every conceivable combination of Mexican, European, Asian and African ancestry. Such apparently ecumenical cross-fertilization can create the impression that racial prejudice is minimal in Latin America. Certainly mixed marriages are not uncommon. Gleaton makes the point graphically in “The Marriage of Maurilio and Teresa.” He appears predominantly black; she looks like a Mexican Indian.

When Gleaton worked in Mexico, he didn’t just have trouble convincing his subjects he was black, he had trouble getting many of them to acknowledge they were. “Black,” according to Harth, “applied to an individual is a pejorative term in Latin America; the darker one’s skin--the further from white--the lower one’s status.”

Such a state of affairs might justifiably enrage a man like Gleaton. Instead, he’s chosen the high road. The only image in the exhibition that reads like a protest is one of two young men titled “There Are No Blacks in El Salvador.” The boys look at the lens as if to say, “Oh yeah? So who are we?”

Mostly, however, the photographer looks with the eye of a poet rather than that of an accuser. His pictures are posed and compositionally arranged to appear as spontaneous scenes in the everyday world. An admirer of the Baroque realism of Caravaggio, Gleaton uses dramatic lighting to lend a sense of urgency to the ordinary.

Repeatedly, the resulting images present people whose physical beauty and spiritual nobility border on the unbelievable. Which is not to say we don’t believe them, but that we stand in wonder at the fact that we do. “A Child of Yemaya” shows the head of a young black man emerging from the waters of a lake. Somehow it’s like the birth of Adam.

Gleaton makes us constantly aware that his subjects are poor and live close to nature. “Family of the Sea” depicts a black fisherman beaching his battered rowboat while his indigenous wife and baby look on. All they appear to have in the world is one another.

A shot of young girls clowning and embarrassed suggests this is their first time in front of a camera. “Hat and Shade” shows a burly guy you could trust with your life.

These are pictures of people who know life is sweet, even when it’s tough. Four dark-skinned toddlers are delighted with their battered white doll. A guy who manages a flophouse hotel is proud to have a job where he can wear a white shirt and tie. A boy intently practices the clarinet in a threadbare classroom. If Gleaton rebukes anyone, it’s those who have more and enjoy life less.

* Pomona College, Montgomery Gallery, 333 N. College Way, Pomona, through March 29, closed Monday, (909) 621-8283.