PHOTOGRAPHY

The Black Panthers, framed

In the cultural crucible that was 1968 Oakland, a pair of unlikely candidates took up the task of documenting the Black Panthers on film.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

May 16 2004

During the summer of 1968, two white, middle-aged photographers threw themselves into the thick of the Black Panther storm. Just months earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Robert Kennedy, too, had been killed.

The Democratic Convention in Chicago was racked with riots. The Vietnam War raged. And in Oakland, the Black Panthers preached revolution, clashed with the police and tried to mobilize their community while fending off infiltration by the FBI.

"This was one of the most intensely polarized, exhilarating, dramatic time periods you could find," recalls Kathleen Cleaver, who at the time was the Black Panthers' "communications secretary." "The propaganda was that the Black Panthers are violent, that they're racist, they're dangerous … and that they want to kill white people, which was absolutely untrue."

To mitigate the militant public image — J. Edgar Hoover had labeled the Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States" — Pirkle Jones, now 90, and his wife, Ruth-Marion Baruch, who died in 1997, slipped into the fray.

Over a fractious four-month period, the couple snapped a series of emblematic shots encompassing paramilitary guards, gunshot-riddled storefronts, men with guns, and women with children as the Panthers campaigned to free Huey P. Newton. The party leader had been charged with voluntary manslaughter in the death of a police officer. He was convicted and later released from prison on appeal; a subsequent trial resulted in a hung jury.

"At that time, people were upset that we were doing this," Jones says by telephone from his home in Mill Valley. "I had professional clients who said, 'What in the world are you doing photographing Panthers?' I'd just sort of shrug my shoulders. I did not make a big speech about it. I did the talking through the photographs."

Even Jones' mentor, Ansel Adams, concerned for their safety, warned the couple to steer clear of the Panthers.

The group had been formed two years earlier when Newton and Bobby Seale hammered out a 10-point program protesting police brutality and the draft while calling on black people to arm themselves for self-defense. In Oakland, the Panthers launched free breakfast and literacy programs, but it was the arrests, gunfights and legal battles that garnered most of the headlines. In 1967, for example, a group of Panthers was arrested in Sacramento after protesting a new bill that made it a crime to carry a loaded gun in public.

"It was too hot to handle," Jones recalls, going on to explain that an exhibition of the photographs that winter at San Francisco's De Young Museum was nearly canceled. Union leaders and art critics intervened, the show went on as planned, and now, 36 years later, 45 of those black-and-white images can be seen at the 18th Street Arts Center.

Viewed 3 1/2 decades after the fact, the images still compel, but they no longer seem likely to provoke panic attacks. "When you look at the pictures, can you find any danger? You've got Panthers with walkie-talkies, people with pensive expressions. There are a few pictures of people with guns. But there's a lot more pictures of people with children than with guns," says Cleaver, who now teaches at Emory University Law School. "These are very humane photographs, and that's what made Pirkle's and Ruth-Marion's images so distinctive."

It was precisely the couple's pro-Panther stance that prompted a visit from the FBI midway through their project. "One day," Jones says, "I got a visitor at the front door who said he wanted to come in and talk to me about the Black Panthers. I looked him in the face and said, 'I don't want to talk about the Panthers.'

"When we set out to do this, we were right up front that both of us were sympathetic to this problem. In the back of our mind, what we were doing was a response to the negativism around these people — we wanted to show that there's another side to the Panthers besides what was being presented in the press."

Some Panthers weren't pleased

Armed only with their cameras, Jones and Baruch occasionally encountered hostility from the Panthers themselves, but for the most part they roamed freely, chronicling Panther activity. In exchange, Jones and Baruch shared their work with the party. "We brought pictures to the Panthers practically every week for them to use any way they wanted to, in their publications and so forth," Jones says. "Kathleen was very excited by the images."

One afternoon, on the steps of the Alameda Court House, he took a picture of three Black Panthers that would become a power-to-the-people icon. "When I brought the photographs over to Kathleen, she looked through them and pointed to this image and said, 'That's a poster!' "

Jones himself drove to the printers and returned with a batch of 1,000, which were distributed throughout Oakland.

By the time Jones began working on the Panther project, he and Baruch were thoroughly steeped in the photographer-as-activist ethos through collaborations with Dorothea Lange, the social realist famed for her Dust Bowl portraits during the Depression. Jones also taught at the California School of Fine Arts (now called the San Francisco Art Institute) and produced, throughout his career, landscapes and nature photographs in the vein of Adams, which were widely admired for their purely formal compositional qualities.

Tim Wride, author of "Pirkle Jones: California Photographs" and organizer of the Los Angeles installation of "Black Panthers," says Jones' and Baruch's photographs need to be understood as objects that deftly blur the lines between documentary, art and propaganda. "These photos function in all of those areas," he says, eyeing a group of slides at the 18th Street Gallery. "For example, this [photo of the] bullet-ridden front window of the Panthers headquarters — Pirkle saw that as much political statement as it is formal statement. He's the first to say that the mere act of taking a photograph is a political act."

Though both photographers aimed to cast the Panthers as working-class heroes, each used different means, according to Wride, assistant curator of photography at LACMA.

Baruch specialized in intimate portraits, "while Pirkle did more of the 'establishing shots.' He was really good in organizing these more chaotic movements because he has this innate sensibility for choosing images and organizing them into a really understandable and passionate moment."

Clayton Campbell, the 18th Street Center's co-executive director, believes the pictures serve as more than artfully composed exercises in nostalgia. "This exhibit presents images that are formally beautiful and rigorous as artwork, yet there's a bigger worldview about it," he says. "At this moment in time politically, these pictures allow a whole generation of young African Americans, or young men and women of any community, to see that you can really get organized, you can make your community better, you can have an impact on the world around you."

For Wride, the images, also available in book form ("Black Panthers," Greybull Press), raise issues of incontestable contemporary resonance. "Right now in this country, we're in a battle where image is key. Do you show certain images having to do with certain political events and political moments, or do you not, and whose choice is that, and who chooses the images and how are they taken? That dialogue was happening then, and I think that dialogue is happening right now. If this exhibit raises those kinds of questions, then we're doing our job."

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Black Panthers

Where: 18th Street Arts Center, 1639 18th St., Santa Monica

When: Mondays to Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Ends: July 23

Contact: (310) 453-3711