February 10 in Santa Fe: Steve Schapiro, "Eyewitness"

Steve Schapiro: CORE "Stall-In", 1964 World's Fair, New York

STEVE SCHAPIRO: EYEWITNESS

Santa Fe--Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, is honored to announce an extensive exhibition of photographs from key moments in the Civil Rights movement by one of the most respected American documentary photographers, Steve Schapiro. The exhibition opens with a reception for Steve Schapiro on Friday, February 10, from 5 to 7 PM, and will continue through April 23.

Schapiro’s photographs are made more timely with the recent Presidential campaign and election. President Trump’s recent criticisms of civil-rights leader John Lewis drew widespread criticism and have done little to reassure those uneasy about the transition from the nation’s first black president to a president still struggling to connect with most nonwhite voters. This was the first presidential election since the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and there are lingering concerns Attorney General Nominee Jeff Sessions may further roll-back civil-rights protections.

“EYEWITNESS” celebrates the completion of a project based on James Baldwin’s 1963 book, “The Fire Next Time”. Steve Schapiro’s photographs documenting the civil rights movement from 1963 – 1968 are paired with essays from “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin in a major book to be published in March.

Schapiro covered many stories related the Civil Rights movement, including the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the push for voter registration and the Selma to Montgomery march. Called by Life to Memphis after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Schapiro produced some of the most iconic images of that tragic event. When the civil rights movement came to a crossroads during the Selma-to-Montgomery march of 1965, photographer Steve Schapiro captured an iconic moment from the march in an image of Dr. Martin Luther King linking arms with fellow civil rights activists John Lewis, the Rev. Jesse Douglas, James Forman and Ralph Abernathy. The image captures the leadership, the unity, and the strength of the civil rights leaders, who faced violence from law enforcement as well as death threats during their fight for voting rights for African Americans.

Steve Schapiro: Martin Luther King Marching for Voting Rights with John Lewis, Reverend Jesse Douglas, James Forman and Ralph Abernathy, Selma, 1965

Schapiro discovered photography at age of nine at a summer camp. Excited by the camera's potential, he would spend the next decades prowling the streets of his native New York trying to emulate the work of the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. His first formal education in photography came when he studied under the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, and shared Smith's passion for black and white documentary work. From the beginning of Schapiro’s career, he had already set a mission for himself: to chronicle the “American Life”. 

Schapiro spent several weeks in the South with James Baldwin and became involved in many civil rights stories; he traveled with Bobby Kennedy on his Senate campaign and Presidential campaign; and did photo essays on Haight Ashbury, the Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation, and Protest in America. He photographed Andy Warhol and the New York art scene, John and Jacqueline Kennedy, poodles, beauty parlors, and performances at the famous Apollo Theater in New York. He also collaborated on projects for record covers and related art. As picture magazines declined in the 1970's and 80's he continued documentary work but also produced advertising material, publicity stills and posters for films, including, The Godfather, Rambo, The Way We Were, Risky Business, Taxi Driver, and Midnight Cowboy. From 2000 through 2003 he was a contributing photographer for American Radio Works (Minneapolis Public Radio) producing on-line documentary projects. Schapiro has photographed major stories for most of the world’s most prominent magazines, including Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, People, and Paris Match.

Since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s seminal 1969 exhibition, Harlem on my Mind, which included a number of his images, Schapiro’s photographs have appeared in museum and gallery exhibitions world-wide. The High Museum of Art’s Road to Freedom, which traveled widely in the United States, includes numerous of his photographs from the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. Recent one-man shows have been mounted in Los Angeles, London, Santa Fe, Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. Steve has had large museum retrospective exhibitions in the United States, Spain, Russia, and Germany.

Schapiro continues to work in a documentary vein. His recent series’ of photographs have been about India, Music Festivals, Mercicordia, and Black Lives Matter. Schapiro’s work is represented in many private and public collections, including the Smithsonian Museum, the High Museum of Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum and the Getty Museum. He has recently received the James Joyce Award and a fellowship to University College in Dublin.

 

Gallery hours are 10 to 5 daily.. Admission is free. For further information, please call: 505.992.0800; E-mail: info@monroegallery.com.

The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography

The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography
January 19, 2014 – May 17, 2014
Organized by NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale as part of its Foto Fort Lauderdale initiative and curated by Peter Boswell.

Via NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale

In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale will present an exhibition featuring the imagery of renowned photographer Bob Adelman. Adelman’s unique vantage point at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement led him to produce some of that era’s most iconic images. The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography, presented by AutoNation, will be on view at NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale from January 19 – May 17, 2014. Featuring 100 black-and-white and color photographs, the exhibition will provide a context in which viewers can revisit these years of struggle and consider how and why certain images have become emblematic of the era.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Museum will present a series of special programs and events.

Between 1963 and 1968, Bob Adelman was a photographer for the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and other civil rights organizations. His work granted him unique access to the movement’s most important events and figures, and he forged close ties with such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr. , Malcolm X, John Lewis, and James Baldwin. His work was featured in major publications of the civil rights period.

Events documented in the exhibition include: the Freedom Rides; the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations during which demonstrators were hosed and attacked by police dogs; the 1963 March on Washington, which culminated in Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream" speech; voter registration drives; the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March; and Martin Luther King,Jr funeral. A number of the photographs on view in the exhibition have never before been published.

Adelman has photographed cover stories for many magazines including Esquire, Time, Life, New York, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and Paris Match, and has photographed or written more than a dozen books and produced many others, including King: The Photobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Abrams, 2004). Adelman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and several Art Directors Club Awards. His photographs have been exhibited the Smithsonian, the American Federation of Arts, and other institutions, and are included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He currently lives in Miami Beach.

The Movement: Bob Adelman and Civil Rights Era Photography is presented by AutoNation. Additional support provided by the Community Foundation of Broward; Simkins Hollis Law Group, PC, in loving memory of Dr. Anna Atkins Simkins; the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Committee, Inc.; W Fort Lauderdale and Media Partner CBS4.

On this day, in 1961, thirteen civil rights activists dubbed Freedom Riders began a bus trip through the south

 

Via The Guardian

Jim Powell  guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 May 2013 05.22 EDT

Freedom riders - picture of the day

A photographic highlight selected by the picture desk. On this day in 1961 the 'Freedom Riders' began their bus trip through the American South. Thirteen Freedom Riders left Washington, DC, in two separate buses with the aim of challenging segregated public transport in the South

Freedom Riders Julia Aaron and David Dennis sitting on board an interstate bus escorted by two National Guardsmen holding bayonets, on their way from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi

Paul Schutzer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty


Related:  On this day, in 1961, thirteen civil rights activists dubbed Freedom Riders began a bus trip through the south, carrying on the fight for justice sparked by Martin Luther King Jr.

 Via PBS:   Freedom Riders is the powerful harrowing and ultimately inspirational story from award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson of this six months in 1961 that chanved America forever. This saga, based on Raymond Arsenault's book of the same name, features testimony from a fascinating cast of central characters: the Riders themselves, state and federal government officials, and journalists who witnessed the Rides firsthand.

Watch a preview of Freedom Riders below

Watch Video Visit Website

AIPAD: Bill Eppridge and Steve Schapiro Selects

Via PHOTO/arts Magazine

AIPAD 2012 (part 2)

"Susan May Tell is a career fine art photographer and photojournalist, with a very impressive background. She is currently the Fine Arts Chair for ASMP/NY. As one might expect, her magnet draws her towards classic black & white photography, photojournalism and documentary work.

One of the highlights of the afternoon for Susan was meeting, photographing, and being photographed by Bill Eppridge, surely among the greats of modern photojournalism. Eppridge is most well known for his iconic image of the busboy supporting the head of Robert Kennedy as he lay dying from a gunshot wound in 1968. His work was being shown by Monroe Gallery (419). Another image Susan noticed and loved at Monroe Gallery was Steve Schapiro's Freedom Rider Jerome Smith, Mississippi (1965)."

Related: Long Road to Freedom, Steve Schpairo and Jerome Smith

             Santa Fe, Rétrospective Bill Eppridge

            Raw File:  “Hard-Boiled Photog Blends the Old With the New"

New Yorker Photo Booth: Recounting the Freedom Riders and Attacts on the Press

Maryland National Guard units patrolling the streets outside a laundry establishment after an outbreak of racially motivated violence

The view from The New Yorker’s photo department

Via The New Yorker
Photo Booth

July 21, 2011

Calvin Trillin Remembers Donald Uhrbrock

Posted by Elissa Curtis

 

In this week’s issue of the magazine, Calvin Trillin writes about his experience as a young reporter for the Atlanta bureau of Time, in 1960 and 1961. In the piece, Trillin describes a scene in which the photographer Donald Uhrbrock, who was covering the Freedom Rides for Life, was assaulted at the Trailways bus station in Montgomery, Alabama. Trillin, Uhrbrock, and Norman Ritter, the Life correspondent based in Atlanta, had followed the Freedom Ride bus from Birmingham in a car. When they arrived, the police caravan that had escorted the bus from Birmingham “melted away at the city limits,” Trillin writes.

“A man in a short-sleeved white shirt and a necktie—he looked like, say, a bus dispatcher—approached a TV cameraman, pulled out some sort of club, and took a swing,” Trillin told me. “The man in the white shirt seemed to be the leader of a small group of men who were there to attack first the press and then the Freedom Riders. Don was photographing this, and, of course was attacked himself. When they tried to get his cameras, he said he’d give them the film, and he handed it over. All this time, we were slowly moving down the parking lot toward the street, with violence breaking out sporadically. Suddenly, a man appeared and said something like ‘Let’s get them out of here.’ He said it with such authority that the attackers, presumably not knowing whether he was police or some high-ranking thug, let him push us toward a cab that was at the curb. He turned out to be a former Montgomery Advertiser reporter who’d arrived on another bus for a visit and had simply taken charge. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know his name. As we got near the cab, I felt Don handing me a roll of film. ‘Put this in your pocket,’ he said. The roll he’d handed his attackers was blank. This roll had on it the picture that appeared in Life,” of one of the attackers kicking the TV cameraman.

Uhrbrock was a Pulitzer Prize-nominated photographer whose work for Life in the fifties and sixties covered the first astronauts, the civil-rights movement, and the Cuban missile crisis. A selection of his civil-rights-era photographs follows.

Photographs by Donald Uhrbrock/Time & Life Pictures/Getty

Calvin Trillin, working for Time, interviewing John Lewis in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1961

A cameraman being kicked by an unidentified man during a Freedom Rider demonstration

A lunch-counter scene. Many sit-in movements succeeded in desegregating lunch counters and other public facilities in the South

 A proponent of continued segregation

An African-American man is arrested in an encounter with white high-school students who were chasing other African-Americans

Martin Luther King, Jr., is escorted by police officers to a hearing on charges of probation violation following his arrest for assisting a student sit-in

A nonviolent protester is taken away by police at a civil-rights demonstration

Maryland National Guard units patrolling the streets outside a laundry establishment after an outbreak of racially motivated violence

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2011/07/calvin-trillin-donald-uhrbrock-civil-rights.html#ixzz1Sl0pibBz

Freedom Riders museum opens in Montgomery, Alabama

Paul Schutzer: Freedom Riders Julia Aaron & David Dennis sitting on board interstate bus as they and 25 others are escorted by 2 National Guardsmen holding bayonets, on way from Montgomery, AL to Jackson, MS, May, 1961

The Associated Press

Friday, May 20, 2011
4:43 a.m.

Montgomery's former Greyhound Bus Station is reopening as a museum honoring the Freedom Riders on the 50th anniversary of the day they were attacked in the capital city.

The Alabama Historical Commission has prepared the museum in downtown Montgomery and says several of the original Freedom Riders, including Georgia Rep. John Lewis, are scheduled to attend the dedication at 10 a.m. Friday. (Full schedule here.)

The Freedom Riders were trying to integrate Southern bus stations when they arrived in Montgomery on May 20, 1961. They were beaten by an angry white mob because no law enforcement officers were on hand.

The new museum is a few blocks from some of Montgomery's other civil rights attractions, including the Rosa Parks Library, the Civil Rights Memorial and the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church.



----On the 50th anniversary of a night when a savage mob trapped Riders and others in a church in Montgomery, Alabama -- with no guarantee that they would not torch the church and everyone inside -- LIFE.com looks back at one of the most terrifying, and pivotal, moments

PBS "FREEDOM RIDERS" DOCUMENTARY TO BROADCAST MAY 16

Paul Schutzer: Freedom Riders Julia Aaron & David Dennis sitting on board interstate bus as they and 25 others are escorted by 2 National Guardsmen holding bayonets, on way from Montgomery, AL to Jackson, MS, May, 1961




Kennedys, King Recall 1961’s Freedom Riders
Via Bloomberg


With a thriller’s pace and the emotional heft of a battlefield journal, PBS’s remarkable new documentary “Freedom Riders” recounts the bloody anti- segregation bus rides of 1961 that helped kill Jim Crow in the Deep South.

Combining new interviews with the aging riders with harrowing footage of their brave, battered younger selves, “Freedom Riders” brings to vivid life a wrenching moment in American history. Fifty years on and with the movement’s successes long charted, this installment of PBS’s “American Experience” reconstructs those tense weeks with edgy momentum.

In May 1961, civil rights activists, both black and white, boarded several Greyhound and Trailways buses in Washington D.C., en route to New Orleans. At various points, including Birmingham, Alabama, and Jackson, Mississippi, the nonviolent participants would challenge state laws by ignoring signs separating “whites” and “coloreds” at bus-station waiting areas and diners.

Though hardly naive, the riders (and, quickly enough, the nation) were stunned by the savage response. In Anniston, Alabama, a full bus was torched and the riders attacked with baseball bats as they disembarked. Birmingham police, led by the defiantly racist Bull Connor, looked away as the local Ku Klux Klan beat male and female civil-rights activists senseless.

Call From Kennedys

“Freedom Riders” also delves beyond the history-book basics, revealing behind-the-scenes machinations of the nation’s most powerful men.

President John Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, consumed and distracted by Cold War politics, were drawn inexorably into the headline-making Southern chaos. Martin Luther King, at first opposed to the dangerous campaign, soon became a symbol of the movement, even as younger activists questioned his relevance.

With a thorough roster of interviewees, writer and director Stanley Nelson weaves together various strands and perspectives into propulsive storytelling. Among the participants: John Patterson, the governor of Alabama who refused a telephone plea for help from the Kennedys, and John Seigenthaler, an administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy sent to quell the violence.

But the story belongs to the riders: Charles Person, a Morehouse College student and youngest member of the first wave of activists; Diane Nash, a student leader in Nashville, Tennessee, who organized replacements when the initial riders were beaten and arrested; and Jim Zwerg, a white student from Wisconsin attacked by Klansmen.

Those three are just a few of the more than 400 people who eventually boarded the nation’s buses that summer in the name of civil rights. Nelson does them all justice.

“Freedom Riders” airs May 16 on PBS at 9 p.m. New York time. Check your local listings.

(Greg Evans is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Greg Evans at gregeaevans@yahoo.com

50 years later, Freedom Rides still resonate

The first Freedom Ride took place on May 4, 1961 when seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses bound for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional.


In the first few days, the riders encountered only minor hostility, but in the second week the riders were severely beaten. Outside Anniston, Alabama, one of their buses was burned, and in Birmingham several dozen whites attacked the riders only two blocks from the sheriff's office. With the intervention of the U.S. Justice Department, most of CORE's Freedom Riders were evacuated from Birmingham, Alabama to New Orleans. John Lewis, a former seminary student who would later lead SNCC and become a US congressman, stayed in Birmingham.
 
 

Joseph Postiglione

(Collection of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute)

The aftermath of a mob attack on a Freedom Ride bus in Anniston, Alabama

CORE Leaders decided that letting violence end the trip would send the wrong signal to the country. They reinforced the pair of remaining riders with volunteers, and the trip continued. The group traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery without incident, but on their arrival in Montgomery they were savagely attacked by a mob of more than 1000 whites. The extreme violence and the indifference of local police prompted a national outcry of support for the riders, putting pressure on President Kennedy to end the violence.

The riders continued to Mississippi, where they endured further brutality and jail terms but generated more publicity and inspired dozens more Freedom Rides. By the end of the summer, the protests had spread to train stations and airports across the South, and in November, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued rules prohibiting segregated transportation facilities.  (via CORE)

More: It’s been 50 years now, but there are times when Charles Person still finds it hard to talk about the summer of 1961 without his voice breaking.

Steve Schapiro: Summer of 1965 Freedom Bus Riders