Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King Jr.. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

"exhibition currently on view at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, pays tribute to one of the most acclaimed photojournalists of the last century"


Grey Villet, A portrait of LIFE in America

May 15, 2017 -
United States , written by L'Oeil de la Photographie


Fidel Castro, Hometown Greetings, 1959 ©Grey Villet


Born in South Africa, Grey Villet traveled America and the world for LIFE magazine like an observant explorer, mapping its emotional contours in the faces and lives of its people. His in-depth, personal studies of the American scene of the 1950s through the 1970’s illuminated the complex reality of those years with a truth that, in his own words, were “as real as real could get.” His images of presidents and revolutionaries, sports heroes, and everyday people struggling for their rights tell an emotional and compelling story of an era that shaped the present. This exhibition currently on view at Monroe Gallery in Santa Fe, pays tribute to one of the most acclaimed photojournalists of the last century.

Slideshow here.



Grey Villet, A portrait of LIFE in America
May 5 — June 25, 2017
Monroe Gallery
112 Don Gaspar Ave
Santa Fe, NM 87501
USA


Saturday, January 24, 2015

"inspired by the photographs of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that are everywhere again"




 
 Barry Blitt drew the January 26, 2015 cover, inspired by the photographs of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that are everywhere again. “It struck me that King’s vision was both the empowerment of African-Americans, the insistence on civil rights, but also the reconciliation of people who seemed so hard to reconcile,” he said. “In New York and elsewhere, the tension between the police and the policed is at the center of things. Like Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, Martin Luther King was taken way too early. It is hard to believe things would have got as bad as they are if he was still around today.”
 
 
 
 
 
Martin Luther King Marching for Voting Rights with John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Douglas, James Forman and Ralph Abernathy, Selma, 1965
Martin Luther King Marching for Voting Rights with John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Douglas,
James Forman and Ralph Abernathy, Selma, 1965
 



 
 
 
 
 

Friday, October 4, 2013

The Memphis blues again: Photojournalist Ernest C. Withers



Ernest C. Withers/©The Withers Trust
Sanitation Workers assemble in front of Clayborn Temple for a solidarity march, Memphis, TN, March 28, 1968


Via PASATIEMPO
The New Mexican's Weekly Magazine of Arts, Entertainment & Culture
Friday, October 4, 2013 5:00 am



The photographer Ernest C. Withers had the good fortune to find himself at the right place at the right time, if Memphis in the 1950s and ’60s could possibly have been the right place and time for any African American. He must have been sometimes nervous as he navigated the byways of his native city and of the larger American South during that era of racial apartheid. Nonetheless, he showed a canny talent for observing trouble from close up without having it consume him personally. People let him get near, but he kept his photographer’s distance. This essential skill enabled to him to produce an extraordinary portfolio documenting the summit events of the civil-rights era.

On Friday, Oct. 4, an exhibition of his work opens at the Monroe Gallery of Photography, where it remains on display through Nov. 24. Sidney and Michelle Monroe have curated the show, which displays 40 photographs from an archive that runs well into the thousands. “In selecting the prints,” Sidney Monroe said, “we have tried to highlight images of the greatest significance from when Memphis was an epicenter of African-American life. Obviously, that means a number of images relating to civil rights, but Memphis was also a center of music at that time, and baseball was flourishing there. This was all part of the world Withers documented.”


Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. resting in Lorraine Motel following March Against Fear, Memphis, TN, 1966
Ernest C. Withers/ ©The Withers Trust
 
 
Withers, who was born in 1922, maintained a studio on Beale Street, which had long been the main drag for the Memphis music industry; remember W.C. Handy’s “Beale Street Blues,” an early classic of its genre? By the 1950s, a new generation of music-makers was filling the hot and heavy Memphis air with traditional blues as well as the emerging sounds of soul, funk, and rock ’n’ roll. Images of many of these ground-breaking artists line the walls of the show — B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, James Brown, and Isaac Hayes, among others. Baseball proved to be a parallel passion for Withers. He was already establishing his career when Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s color barrier in 1947, and he was there to document the decline of the Negro Leagues and the rise of African-American superstars on newly integrated diamonds: Larry Doby, Ernie Banks, Roy Campanella, Willie Mays, and others of their colleagues.

His work was not limited to famous names. “He had nine children,” Monroe said, “and he earned a good living by constantly hustling up work. When he was not out shooting a news event, he was hustling to shoot parties, weddings, anything that was going on locally.” The pictures of his music-star friends may excite us today, but when he was in a club, he was also snapping pictures of audience members, who bought their photo-portraits on the spot for a buck and a half.
 
Nonetheless, what made Withers irreplaceable was his ubiquity when the civil-rights movement crashed and banged through the American South. “He was kind of like the Woody Allen character Zelig,” Monroe said. “He was everywhere at once.” From his home in Memphis, Wither crisscrossed the South tracking the statesmen of the movement, including Medgar Evers, James Meredith, and, of course, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “He was renowned in these circles at that time, and he was trusted by the leaders of the movement and their families. He was friendly with Martin Luther King. Often Dr. King would specifically ask him to come document some event that was being planned. In that sense, he could be considered an insider in the movement. He was there at some of the most intimate moments. He was even given entrĂ©e to funerals; he photographed Medgar Evers after he was killed, and he took a photograph of King lying in his casket.”
 
Withers could document a great deal of civil-rights history without leaving his hometown. One of his most striking images depicts a solidarity march of sanitation workers in Memphis on March 28, 1968; it was to support these workers that Dr. King traveled to the city, where he would be gunned down a week later. The African-American demonstrators carry identical signs — perhaps a hundred of them — starkly declaring “I Am a Man” in what seems a river of humanity cresting behind a dam. Withers would also travel at the drop of a hat to place himself close to the action — for example, to witness King joining Rev. Ralph Abernathy in 1956 to ride a newly desegregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama; to observe the “Little Rock Nine” in Arkansas that same year; and to attend Evers’ funeral in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.
 
Withers constantly fed his black-and-white images to magazines including Life, Time, Newsweek, and Jet, and some of his pictures became iconic. Other photographers were also crowding around, to be sure, and they are well known to Monroe Gallery, which specializes in photojournalism. “Every one of those photographers was really one of a kind,” Monroe said. “Another was Charles Moore, a photographer based in Alabama, and he was very active when things started happening in Birmingham. He was white, but he had access because he was local. Often local photographers had first access to events; but when the national press would show up, things could get ugly.”
 
Unfortunately, Monroe said, “Withers’ story is a familiar one for photographers of the ’50s and ’60s. There was such a proliferation of magazines then that they could earn a good living being a news photographer. When the 1970s crept in, Americans were turning to TV at the expense of magazines. Life magazine folded. Everyone wanted color photos, which created issues for photographers and were harder to process for magazines. Withers was like many other important news photographers of his day; they were growing older, they had covered momentous moments in history, but they figured their work was basically done.” In his later years, Withers mostly busied himself photographing goings-on of essentially local interest in Memphis. Around the year 2000 there was a resurgent interest in civil-rights photography in general, and Withers accordingly enjoyed renewed acclaim. That year, a show of 125 of his photographs was exhibited at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, and then traveled to the Philadelphia Art Alliance; the show’s catalog, titled Pictures Tell the Story: Ernest C. Withers Reflections in History, has become a collector’s item. “Faced with increasing inquiries about his work, he went back to his negatives and started to make prints, though not a great deal. He was starting to be known again, but then he died in 2007.”
 
A curious coda to his career arrived in 2010, when it was reported that Withers had been an informant to the F.B.I. about the civil-rights scene in 1969 and 1970. “That stirred up a lot of concern. But from all we’ve been able to research, and from the accounts of his family, it becomes clear that a lot of people in the movement knew full well they were being watched.” Throughout his career, Withers was famous for attending civil-rights events with three cameras hanging from his neck. With one, he took pictures for the white press; with the second, for the black press; with the third, pictures for his own files. “He tried to remain friendly to the F.B.I. They would ask him for pictures, and he would have his three rolls of film. He knew what he was willing to give to them and what he was not. There is no evidence that the F.B.I. ever paid him, and no evidence that anything he provided them ever compromised anyone or anything. During his lifetime, Ernest Withers told people repeatedly that he actually avoided some meetings because he didn’t want to be privy to certain information that might be too sensitive. You could say he took the path of least resistance, and during those years that path actually allowed him to keep doing his work as he wanted. When you look at the work, the photographs speak for themselves.” ◀
 
details
Ernest C. Withers: A Life’s Work
▼ Opening reception (Withers’ daughter Rosalind Withers is scheduled to attend) 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 4; exhibit through Nov. 24
Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., 505-992-0800

William Edwin Jones pushes daughter Renee Andrewnetta Jones (8 months old) during protest march on Main St., Memphis, TN (The little girl grew up to become a doctor) August, 1961
Ernest Withers: William Edwin Jones pushes daughter Renee Andrewnetta Jones (8 months old, who grew up to become a doctor) during protest march on Main St., Memphis, Tennessee, August, 1961 (caption as written by Withers); image ©Withers Trust

      

Thursday, August 15, 2013

50th Anniversary of the March on Washington


 Jackie Robinson, March on Washington, 1963
©Steve Schapiro: Jackie Robinson, March on Washington, 1963
 

On August 28, 2013 citizens from across this country will converge upon our nation’s capital to commemorate and celebrate the historic March On Washington which occurred 50 years ago on August 28, 1963.
 
This site provides information and updates on the numerous commemorative marches that are being planned throughout this country. In addition, this site provides citizens an opportunity to leave their remembrances and pictures of the march that changed the world.
 
 
 
 
Related: 

 TIME:  “One Dream” — a multimedia commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington and the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech

Exhibit: 1963

50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Museum to open balcony where U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King was shot



Dr. Martin Luther King assassination, Memphis,Tenn., April 4, 1968; Photograph by Joseph Louw

WASHINGTON (AFP).- The motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee where US civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 is being opened to the public, a spokeswoman said Friday.

It is the first time that visitors to the erstwhile Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum, will be able to stand on the very spot outside Room 306 where King was gunned down by sniper James Earl Ray.

Connie Dyson, the museum's communications coordinator, said the upper-floor balcony will be open from November 19 as the historic landmark in downtown Memphis undergoes a $27 million facelift due to finish in early 2014.

"It is our most unique artifact, the balcony," Dyson told AFP by telephone.

"But with the entire Lorraine building being closed during renovations, we wanted to offer the public an access to the balcony and the room where Dr King stayed, since that was one of the highlights of the (pre-renovation) tour."

With its slightly disheveled bed, black dial-up telephone and unfinished cups of coffee, Room 306 has been left untouched since the evening when King, 39, was fatally shot at the height of the civil rights movement.

"Nobody's ever stayed in the room (since King's death). It's been a shrine ever since," Dyson said.

Visitors who until now could peer into Room 306 via a sealed glass window along the interior hallway will, during the renovations, "get a chance to peek... from the outside," Dyson added.

Ray, a white drifter with a criminal record, was convicted of shooting King with a rifle from a building across the street from the Lorraine. Sentenced to 99 years in prison, he died in April 1998 at the age of 70.

In October 2011 King became the first African American to be honored with a monument along the National Mall in Washington, engraved with words from his stirring 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech for racial equality.
 
 
 
Picture dated April 4, 1998 shows former Memphis sanitation workers Eugene Brown (L), James Jones (C), and Lafayette Shields (R) standing in front of the National Civil Rights Museum, the site where Martin Luther King was assassinated, after a memorial service for the late civil rights leader in Memphis. The motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, where US civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968 is being opened to the public, a spokeswoman said on November 2, 2012. It is the first time that visitors to the erstwhile Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum, will be able to stand on the very spot outside Room 306 where King was gunned down by sniper James Earl Ray. AFP PHOTO/FILES/Andrew CUTRARO.


via Artdaily.org
© 1994-2012 Agence France-Presse

Monday, October 1, 2012

Worcester Art Museum exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.




 Joseph Louw, South African, about 1945-2004, The Death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Lorraine Hotel, Memphis, April 4, 1968, Gelatin silver print, gift of David Davis, 2011.148

 Iconic news photographs of 1960s on view in exhibition at Worcester Art Museum

Via artdaily.org


WORCESTER, MASS.- Worcester Art Museum announces its major fall exhibition, Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation, opened September 29 and on view through February 3, 2013. The exhibition features some of the most powerful and provocative American photographs of the 1960s.

The photographs chronicle world events during the turbulent decade of the 1960s. From disturbing assassinations, the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, the thrill of space exploration, and the lightheartedness of pop culture, this exhibition represents a range of human emotion. The photographs are from the museum’s permanent collection. The photographs were originally collected by David Davis, as a way to recall and reflect his memories of the era.

The photographs also reveal the activities of news gathering and publishing in the 1960s. Many are vintage wirephotos or file photographs from newspaper and magazine archives. These were used in editing, layout, and as camera art for the creation of printing plates. In the 1990s, when news outlets transformed their imaging libraries to digital formats, these objects were discarded or released onto the market. Many of the prints were stamped or inscribed on the back with a record of each use, and in this way they reveal their own history, and carry powerful qualities as artifacts.

“The Worcester Art Museum was among the very first American museums to exhibit photographs as works of fine art,” said Matthias Waschek, director. “In 1961, coincidentally the time that the Kennedy to Kent State era began, we established a curatorial department of photography and began building a permanent collection. These holdings now represent a survey of the history of photography in the United States in its fascinating variety. To the post-Baby Boomer generations, this exhibition has the power to awaken them to the correlation between their present lives and the not-so-distant past.”

Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation was organized by David Acton, curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Worcester Art Museum. He has organized nearly 100 exhibitions at the museum, and published extensively on Old Master, American prints and drawings, and the history of photography. Notable among his exhibition catalogues are A Spectrum of Innovation: Color in American Printmaking 1890-1960, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints, and Photography at the Worcester Art Museum: Keeping Shadows.

“Then, as now, pictures were the medium by which most people experienced the wider world,” said Acton. “Photographs created a common experience, plotting a historical arc of embracing familiarity. Kennedy to Kent State presents a selection of these pictures, providing a glimpse of that turbulent time. Many of the images transcend reportage. In their momentary imagery, refined compositions, and humanity, they attain the stature of true works of art.”

In 2000, David Davis founded the Schoolhouse Center for Art and Design, home to the Driskel Gallery of Photography, and the Silas Kenyon Gallery of Regional Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Davis acquired the famous Vietnam photographs by Nick Ut and Eddie Adams, he began his 12-year project to collect a survey of the iconic images by which Americans experienced a transformative period of their history.

“I wished to do something that I have not seen before,” said Davis, “to present a kind of storyboard of the 1960s. From the time I entered my teen years until that of my college graduation, there were assassinations, an unpopular war, a trip to the moon and the rise of the protest movement and counterculture. It was a confusing, unsettling, exciting, and ‘far out’ time to grow up.”

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth: "I went to jail for a good thing, trying to make a difference."




Steve Shapiro: Rev. Shuttlesworth's confrontation with Sheriff Clark at start of Selma March



Image:
AP Photo

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth right, escorts Dwight Armstrong, 9, and his brother Floyd, 11, from the Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham, Ala, Sept. 9, 1963. State troopers, on order from the governor, opened the school but turned the African Americans away. 


AP Photo
Seated from left, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. 

The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who was bombed, beaten and repeatedly arrested in the fight for civil rights and hailed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for his courage and tenacity, has died. He was 89.    Read the New York Times obituary here.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare

 Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle






PHOTOGRAPHY
How Photography Shifted the Balance of the Civil Rights Movement


Leigh Raiford — Twitter and Facebook may be the civil uprising tools du jour, but they certainly weren't the first. Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare discusses how photography helped bring Southern brutalities to light and sustained the African American Civil Rights movement.


Figure i.1. (above) - Firemen blast protestors with high-pressure hoses, corner of Fifth Ave. North and 17th Street, Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963. Photograph by Charles Moore. (Charles Moore/Black Star)

For nearly two weeks in early May of 1963, national and international audiences rose each morning to images of violence, confrontation, and resistance splashed across the front pages of their major newspapers. Black-and-white photographs paraded daily through the New York Times and the Washington Post depicted white police officers in Birmingham, Alabama, wielding high-powered fire hoses and training police dogs on nonviolent black and often very young protesters (figures i.1, i.2). Organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), "Project C" (for "confrontation") brought center stage the publicly unacknowledged terror, violence, and daily inequities African Americans had long suffered at the hands of white southerners. Through forced confrontations between blacks and whites, between constitutional right and segregationist practice, between the genteel, progressive image of the New South and the dehumanizing Old South reality, the thousands of men, women, and children who participated in Project C confronted a watching world with the contradictions of contemporary southern race relations. They vividly and visually challenged an entire economic and social regime of power.

A year later, SCLC's leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., recognized the importance of such vivid imagery in galvanizing support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. King wrote of the campaign in his book Why We Can't Wait, "The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught - as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught - in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world." For King, the visual media proved a crucial component in capturing "fugitive" brutality, holding it still for scrutiny and transmitting this "naked truth" to watching and judging audiences.


How Photography Shifted the Balance of the Civil Rights Movement

Figure i.2. - William Gadsen attacked by police dogs in front of 16th Street Baptist Church, during a nonviolent protest, Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963. Photograph by Bill Hudson (AP Photos/Bill Hudson)
  

King praises photography and film for their work of exposure, revealing through mechanical reproduction facts that had remained hidden and therefore difficult to prove. By the time King penned Why We Can't Wait, he had witnessed, deployed, and been the subject of photographs of movement events both spectacular and quotidian. He believed deeply in their power to image African Americans as U.S. citizens who, like their white counterparts, were deserving of equal treatment. Images of the broken body of Emmett Till, of whites' abuse of four African American North Carolina A&T students sitting in at a Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter, of baseball bats and firebombs that greeted Freedom Riders in Mississippi and Alabama bus stations each reveal how vulnerable African Americans were when demonstrating for the most basic and fundamental of rights. They laid bare to nonblack audiences what African Americans of the Jim Crow era had long known, seen, and experienced. With bright enough lights and an army of cameras trained in the right direction, images were central to changing public opinion about the violent entrenchment of white supremacy in the South and that system's overdetermination of black life and possibility. The visual proved a tool as effective as bus boycotts and as righteous as nonviolence.


But white violence and black resistance are not the only captives imprisoned within the camera's luminous glare and vigilant eye. For many viewers today, almost the entirety of the civil rights movement is captured, quite literally, in the photographs of Birmingham 1963. These images have shaped and informed the ways scholars, politicians, artists, and everyday people recount, remember, and memorialize the 1960s freedom struggle specifically and movement histories generally. The use and repetition of movement photographs in contexts as varied as electoral campaigns, art exhibits, commercials, and, of course, academic histories have crystallized many of these photographs into icons, images that come to distill and symbolize a range of complex events and ideologies. These icons, in turn, become integral to processes of national, racial, and political identity formation. Even as these photographs mark movement participants' attempts to rewrite the meaning of black bodies in public space, the photographs also imprison - frame and "iconize" - images of legitimate leadership, appropriate forms of political action, and the proper place of African Americans within the national imaginary. The repeated use of many of the more recognizable photographs of African American social movements has had a "surplus symbolic value" in the work of constructing and reconstructing our collective histories. And they become guides to appropriate forms of future political action. Photographs become tools to aid memory. We are invited, expected, even demanded to recount and memorialize. To remember. But what exactly are we being asked to remember? How are we being asked to remember? And to what end?

King's apt phrase "imprisoned in a luminous glare" as metaphor for the work of the camera in African American social movements alerts us to the dialectical relationships between mass media and mass movements, photography and race, history and memory. It also suggests the tensions between captivity and fugitivity, the contradictions inherent in attempting to fix that which by its nature is mobile and mercurial. It calls attention to how mass media attempt to capture mass movements, photography tries to name and regulate "race," and history works to tame memory. The photograph in particular imposes a unitary vision and helps fix the meaning of that which it records. It provides the illusion of seeing an event in its entirety as it truly happened.


How Photography Shifted the Balance of the Civil Rights Movement

Figure i.3 - Crowd watches Birmingham protests; Birmingham, Alabama, May 3, 1963. Photograph by Charles Moore. (Charles Moore/Black Star
  
Just as Project C has become a touchstone of the civil rights movement, the photographs themselves have come to epitomize the power of photography in this moment. Even photographs as compelling as these cannot tell the whole story, cannot imprison all. One method of reading images would have us turn to the blurry figures appearing at the edges of the Project C photographs, Birmingham's other black youths (figure i.3). Not so properly attired or as well-behaved, these young, poor men and women refused to participate in the nonviolent actions that captured the world's attention.


They were less interested in the desegregation of public spaces than in economic equity. In the photographs we might catch them with their arms folded, intransigent witnesses. But outside the picture's frame they threw bottles and shouted obscenities at Bull Connor's police force. Subsequently, they were disciplined by the Birmingham police, by the organizers of Project C, and by the photographic frame that excised them from the documentary evidence of those events. The now-iconic photographs from Birmingham 1963, as noted by King, imprison Jim Crow order; yet what remains elusive in this framing is the expansive expressions of black political desire, constantly changing and evolving over the course of the twentieth century.

From IMPRISONED IN A LUMINOUS GLARE: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN FREEDOM STRUGGLE by Leigh Raiford. Copyright © 2011 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu


Leigh Raiford is associate professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley.


Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle is available from the University of North Carolina Press and Amazon.com


 How Photography Shifted the Balance of the Civil Rights Movement

Saturday, January 15, 2011

PHOTO LA: DAY TWO



It was a beautuful day in Santa Monica, we heard it topped 84 degrees! But, inside the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium it was a very, very busy day at Photo LA.



The Monroe Gallery booth (#A-102) has garnered several reviews, and seems especially relevent this Martin Luther King holiday weekend..



Please join us at Photo LA, which continues Sunday and Monday.


Related: Monroe Gallery at Photo LA

PHOTO LA, DAY 2: THE ANNIVERSARY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING'S BIRTHDAY

Today is the anniversary of Martin Luther King's birthday.




Monroe Gallery, Booth A-102 at Photo LA.

Third row from left, top is a rare vintage print of the Funeral Procession for Martin Luther King by Lynn Pelham; below is Charles Moore's iconic photograph of  Martin Luther King, Jr. being "Arrested on a Loitering Charge, Montgomery, September 3, 1958"; below is Steve Schapiro's photograph of the Freedom Bus Riders from the summer of 1964.




And, Bill Eppridge's gripping photographs from the Neshoba Civil Rights Murders. To the right, Steve Schapiro's photograph of Martin Luther King during the Selma March, Bob Gomel's classic photograph of Malcolm X and Cassius Clay the night before Clay would declare his conversion to Islam and changing his name to "Muhammad Ali", and Rosa Parks.

Next right row: Grey Villet's photographs of the Little Rock Nine, Martin Luther King, and Steve Schapiro's shocking photograph of Segregationists in 1964.

More updates from Photo LA soon.

Friday, January 14, 2011

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR, BORN JANUARY 15, 1929

Martin Luther King, Alabama, 1965
Steve Schapiro: Martin Luther King, Alabama, 1965


Martin Luther King, Jr. was born at noon on Tuesday, January 15, 1929 at the family home, 501 Auburn Avenue, N.E., Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Charles Johnson was the attending physician. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the first son and second child born to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. and Alberta Williams King. Also born to the Kings were Christine, now Mrs. Isaac Farris, Sr., and the Reverend Alfred Daniel Williams King. The Reverend A.D. King is now deceased.

He married Coretta Scott, the younger daughter of Obadiah and Bernice McMurry Scott of Marion, Alabama, on June 18, 1953. The marriage ceremony took place on the lawn of the Scott’s home in Marion, Alabama. The Rev. King, Sr. performed the service, with Mrs. Edythe Bagley, the sister of Coretta Scott King as maid of honor, and the Rev. A.D. King, the brother of Martin Luther King, Jr., as best man.

Four children were born to Dr. and Mrs. King:
Yolanda Denise (November 17, 1955, Montgomery, Alabama)
Martin Luther III (October 23, 1957, Montgomery, Alabama)
Dexter Scott (January 30, 1961, Atlanta, Georgia)
Bernice Albertine (March 28, 1963, Atlanta, Georgia)

Full biography here.
Source: The King Center

Related: Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

Monday, July 5, 2010

STEVE SCHAPIRO EXHIBITION REVIEW IN SUMMER ISSUE OF ARTNEWS

Steve Schapiro


Monroe Gallery of Photography

Titled "American Edge," this survey brought together 57 photographs taken primarily in the 1960s, highlighting Steve Schapiro's many iconic images from the apex of the civil rights movement. There is a cinematic quality to the handheld camera work featured in his slightly grainy black-and-white prints.


Steve Schapiro: Summer of 1964 Freedom Bus

Images like On the Road, Selma March, 1965 and Summer of 1964 Freedom Bus convey the restlessness of the time. Martin Luther King Jr's Motel Room Hours After He Was Shot, Memphis, Tennessee,1968 is particularly penetrating and mournful. The photograph shows an open suitcase on the floor next to a television set tuned to the local news. The TV announcer is frozen in time with a picture of King (and the dates 1929-1968) floating just above and to the right of his head.

Schapiro photographed many of the seminal political events of the decade, receiving his assignments through the legendary Black Star agency. which sent him to cover Robert F. Kennedy's successful 1964 run for the New York Senate seat.

Several candid and nostalgic photographs of the young senator were featured in the show.

A respected and sought-after portraitist, Schapiro also photographed numerous celebrities of the day, including Allen Ginsberg, Ray Charles, Andy Warhol, and Muhammad Ali. Yet, the photographs of RFK and MLK held real sway here. They have the emotional power and documentary immediacy to place us in the midst of those turbulent and crucial years. - Darius Himes

©ARTnews
SUMMER 2010

See the exhibit on-line here.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

RENOWNED CIVIL RIGHTS PHOTOGRAPHER CHARLES MOORE HAS DIED

http://monroegallery.blogspot.com/2010/03/monroe-gallery-at-aipad-photography.htmlBy Michelle Rupe Eubanks

Staff Writer
Copyright THE TIMES DAILY

 Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 3:30 a.m.

Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Charles Moore died Thursday at his home near West Palm Beach, Fla.

He was 79.

Moore was born in Hackelburg and rose to fame in the 1950s and 1960s as a result of his almost accidental career as a photojournalist.

As the lone photographer on the scene at Martin Luther King Jr.'s arrest in 1958, he captured the violence and emotion inherent in the scene. In the years that followed, Moore would take some of the most enduring shots of the Civil Rights Movement: the Selma march, the riots at Ole Miss and the tragedy of the hoses and dogs turned on those in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham.

For much of his career, he worked for Life magazine.

Shannon Wells, the photographer at the University of North Alabama who worked with Moore throughout her career, said his influence on photography will not soon be forgotten.

Moore was often in Florence to share his work and expertise.

"What can you say? He was an icon," she said. "He always took the time to teach and mentor other photographers, especially young photographers. He always wanted to share his career."

In 1991, a chronological collection of his photographs as well as his biography was printed as "Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore."

Andrew Young, who wrote the introduction to the book, said the Moore's photographs are the legacy of what those who lived through the Civil Rights Movement endured in order to find equality.

"Many of us were treated like rats, even during the most daunting days of the movement, as Moore's photographs of the fire hose attacks in Birmingham's Kelly Ingram park graphically illustrate," he writes. "All of us must hope and pray that the lessons learned and the lives lost during the first years of the movement will be remembered and honored to infinity."

A memorial service for Moore is planned for later this year.

Monroe Gallery of Photography will exhibit several of Charles Moore's photographs during the AIPAD Photography Show March 18 - 21.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

REMEMBERING MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

On this day, we honor Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King. Jr.

Letter From Birmingham Jail
April 16, 1963



Ernst Haas: Martin Luther King, Birmingham Jail, 1963



"While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work.

...But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid."



Charles Moore: Martin Luther King, Jr. Arrested on a Loitering Charge, Montgomery, September 3, 1958



Steve Schapiro: Martin Luther King, Selma, Alabama, 1965



Stve Schapiro: Martin Luther King, Alabama, 1965


Steve Schapiro: Martin Luther King, Alabama, 1965



Steve Schapiro: On the Road, the Selma March, 1965