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Transcription below by: Jamy Myatt (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

Dorthea Lange and Social Documentarian Influence

Now, there's a "third hat" which I need to get back to if I could. Through Minor, at some period while on a trip to California where my wife grew up, I met Dorothea Lange. Dorothea Lange, of course, was one of the major photographers of the Dust Bowl thirties. I had two or three meetings over a couple of years with Dorothea. They were very short. I came in and showed her my portfolio. She talked about what it was like to be a social documentarian, which is a completely different thing from photojournalism or movement propaganda. This is what she and the Farm Security Administration team did. They tried to document social change in America. And, like Minor, this was a life-calling for her. She was able to instill in me a sense that this was a life-calling. She talked about becoming a photographer being like taking up monastic orders. You had to give up all of the easy stuff and the frills in your life and just pare down and focus on this. There was a lot you had to give up in order to achieve something. I knew I didn't want to take pictures like Minor's, although I do from time to time. But I knew very much that I wanted to work in Dorothea's tradition. So that was the third hat that I wore, that of social documentarian, looking at this weird society of Southern white and black culture that I'd come into. It felt like I was stepping onto the surface of Mars at times. I did not understand the mindset, particularly of white Mississippi.

I did an assignment for Time when Ross Barnett gave up his governorship to—who was the governor who followed him? Time wanted the Inaugural and I photographed the Inaugural. They published the head and shoulders of Paul Johnson giving his inaugural speech. But with my Time credentials, I was like invisible. I could move anywhere in the scene and photograph anything I wanted. So I photographed as a social documentarian. I knew that Time would never publish any of these photographs. I just wanted them—beauty queens on floats, black sanitation workers scooping up the horseshit from the prancing colonels on their horses who followed through and all this stuff. I felt like a spy. So I sometimes combined the two things. But I was aware of photographing in three different manners, at different times, sometimes combining them, sometimes not.

Did any of the photographs you took in the Dorothy Lange tradition make it to mainstream media?

Not really. The mainstream media was interested in what was happening, you know, currently. These photographs were more manner of life in the South. What it was like to be black in rural Mississippi. What it was like to be white in urban Mississippi. I didn't really shoot them for publication. I haven't gotten to this, but I did organize and fund a team of documentary photographers in the summer of '64. That was the critical summer when so much happened. I am now curating a show that's going to open in Salt Lake City next spring and travel. It is called "This Light of Ours" after the photographers of the Civil Rights Movement. A lot of that stuff is in this show. This is not so much about the big events, but the Movement itself—what it was like, how it grew, the people, and black life in the South. A lot of stuff. So those photographs may be more enduring, actually than the other material. But they didn't get to see much of the light of day at that time. I didn't care because I thought that they would have their own life. It would probably be later, and at a different venue. That's proving to be the case.

Getting back to the Civil Rights Movement, in particular to the summer of 1964 because so much was happening, can you tell us about one or two experiences that really stick out to you? Can you tell us what was going on and what was going on in your mind and the photographs that you took during one or two events that really stick out to you?

How to organize this? The summer of '64 was shaping up during the early spring and late winter of 1964 when Bob Moses and some of the Mississippi people reached a decision to bring a thousand college students—mostly from Ivy League colleges—south to work in the Movement.

Transcription below by: Noemi Teppang (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

It was a very critical decision and a difficult one. There were a lot of people in the Movement who didn't want white kids working around their projects. This was not true of native Mississippi people. They wanted it and they welcomed it. They knew that this was how change would come. Bob and others were also aware that they were probably inviting some people to their deaths because this work was so dangerous. So that was weighing in. It weighed on Bob all summer long, particularly after the first weeks when three civil rights workers were killed in Nashoba County.

So I was thinking, what can I do? What can I add to this? I had tried a couple of years earlier to start a documentary project working with a couple of photographers in New York but we never got it off the ground. This is a tough thing to do. I thought about that and I decided that I would try to get a group of photographers together to photograph the process of social change through the summer. So I conceived of and wrote up a proposal for something called the "Southern Documentary Project."

I wrote to Dorothea. She agreed to be my advisor. She thought that probably we were too hot and too politically motivated to do what she called true objective social documentary work. So she kept a little distance, but she encouraged me, and she agreed to advise. She was very much a mentor for this. I then went to New York to try and raise money and failed utterly. I recruited Danny Lyon and Dorothea suggested a photographer from Fresno, George Ballis, who joined me. Finally, it was getting late and I had no money and I was getting desperate. I stopped by Black Star, which eventually became my agency. At that point, I was just kind of talking to Black Star. I stopped and talked to Howard Chapnick, who was the editor and director of Black Star. I told him what I wanted to do and that I couldn't find any money. Howard got on the phone and in ten minutes, he raised $10,000 for me. Ten thousand bucks doesn't sound like much today, but in 1964, I could run a six person project on that for eight weeks. So I went back to Mississippi with the money and I helped SNCC put together a team of SNCC photographers for the summer. I got my own folks together and we rented cars and got out in the field. I just finished a book, Mississippi Eyes, which will tell the story of the Southern Documentary Project and all the stuff that happened to me.