The world in black and white
Menil Civil Rights exhibit shows the power of photography to make a difference
Bruce Davidson, "Woman Being Held by Two Policemen," © Bruce Davidson© 2010 Hester + Hardaway
Dan Budnik, "March on Washington: Martin Luther King Jr. moments afterdelivering his 'I Have a Dream' Speech, Lincoln Memorial," 1963 (Aug. 28) © DanBudnik© 2010 Hester + Hardaway
Elliott Erwitt, "Alabama," 1955, © Elliott Erwitt© 2010 Hester + Hardaway
Dan Budnik, "March on Washington: Waiting for the Bus," 1963 © Dan Budnik© 2010 Hester + Hardaway
Dan Budnik, "Students Praying for Jailed Voting Rights Activists, Dallas CountyCourthouse, Selma, Alabama," 1965, © Dan Budnik© 2010 Hester + Hardaway
One wall is devoted to capturing the quieter moments of the civil rights era.Photo by Steven Thomson
Images of turmoil in Cairo's Tahrir Square ricocheted across the Internet with the grassroots uprising against President Hosni Mubarak. The flurry of photographs available online depicting the nonviolent coup gave a face to a turning point in the history of the Middle East.
Although revolutionary for the region, this phenomenon is an echo of the photographic depiction of the grassroots civil rights struggles in 1960s America, currently on view at the Menil Collection. The exhibition, titled The Whole World Was Watching: Civil Rights-Era Photographs from Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil, sheds light on the trajectory of civil rights history, which gained such critical momentum largely in thanks to the rapid dissemination of images enabled by television and new printing technology.
"The civil rights movement was all about how images of cruelty, of violence, segregation were for the first time being distributed across the country and drawing attention to the situation in the southern U.S.," explains associate curator Michelle White, who organized the show alongside Danielle Burns, curator at the Houston Museum of African American Culture and the African American Library at the Gregory School.
While the book, Art and Activism, published last year, documented the righteous civil rights campaigns of John and Dominique de Menil, The Whole World Was Watching is a physical manifestation of the family's commitment to equality. The 36 photographs on view are just a selection of the 230 images donated by Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil.
"This exhibition has everything to do with the philosophy of the Menil Collection," says White.
The exhibition's photographs are loosely grouped around specific events, such as the march on Washington, Birmingham bombing and the voting rights campaign of 1965. White hand-picked the images based on those with the highest visual and emotional impact. In Bruce L. Davidson's photograph, "Woman being held by two policemen," an African American protester outside the Southern Christian Leadership Conference writhes between two law enforcement officials while a seemingly innocuous movie masthead looms across the street, advertising a film with the words, "Suspense," "Excitement," and the movie title Damn the Defiant.
"What's extraordinary about these photographers," says White, "is that they were putting themselves in incredibly dangerous situations. Some were arrested, many were hurt."
A 1964 work by Danny Lyons depicts the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee member Clifford Vaughs under arrest by a gas-masked National Guard squad. Notes the curator, "That's the power and danger of photography."
These black and white photographs may seem foreign to contemporary viewers, but their profundity derives from the realization that they were taken a mere four decades ago. "This is a not the distant past we're seeing," she says, citing, "Only forty years ago, when black people in Alabama constituted 57 percent of the population, less than one percent of those eligible to vote were registered."
Although these images were meant to communicate a series of events, the compelling compositions makes them works of art unto themselves. The left wall of the small exhibition room (painted light beige to evoke old newsprint) focusses on the quieter, albeit equally frightening, moments of the era. African American children rejoicing in a Brooklyn fire hydrant spigot are juxtaposed with a Louisiana mother holding her baby beside a Ku Klux Klan poster and an unemployment line in Fort Worth.
The Menil exhibition is being held in conjunction with a show at the Gregory School that also features photographs from the Carpenter and de Menil bequest. Rather than remaining a hermetic art enclave, the exhibitions are meant to be shared with the entire city.
A bike excursion through historic sites in Houston's African American timeline has been organized with Tour de Houston, with stops throughout the Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards. The ride will kick off at 8:30 a.m. on March 26 and May 14. Come July, Gerald O'Grady, former fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard, and founder of the Rice University Media Center, will curate four evenings of civil rights era films, and lecture on how film and photography became critical tools for bringing about social change in the 1960s.
The Whole World Was Watching: Civil Rights-Era Photographs from Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil is on view through Sept. 25.
