Black Power!!!

Black Power!!! is a news/journalism as well as a 'street' photo,

taken at some time in the past and may be emblematic of a certain

time in America's cultural history. Your comments and critiques are

invited and most welcome. (If you submit a harsh or very negative

rating, please submit a helpful and constructive comment to help

improve my photography.) Thanks! Enjoy! John

Background is too washed out. A bit more detail in the highlights would make it easier on the eye.

The background had to be washed out -- the photo was taken in full sunlight with black skin and it was exposed for the tones of the black skin and the tonal range of the subjects.

 

However, this is a photo about 'black power' and as a result it intentionally was shown dark. These people were very black and although most cameras and people printing photos of dark-skinned people print them lighter than they are in real life, this is printed as they were in real life. In effect photo verite, for realite.

 

In part that was desirable to show the menace of all these stares -- black protestors staring at me, the white photographer. And I assure you that these stares were on account of my color, not because I was carrying a camera, because these people were there to BE photographed and to show the menace that they are expressing (and may have had a good laugh about it later).

 

It was apparent on stage in New York at a place where the group which played the rock anthem which performed the hit 'Time (Is On My Hands) appeared at the 'Magic Circus' in New York, and each bodyguard of this black group was purposefully large, black and very menacing . . . menace as a trick or device to gather attention and to make a point (about the menace of 'black power'.)

 

In part, this photo shows a certain amount of hatred, stored up and collectivized against white people in general (not against me personally because they had no knowledge of me).

 

To have placed more detail in their features -- in effect to have made a portrait of each of them, would have destroyed, I think, the collective menace they have presented here.

 

Thanks for the comment.

 

(maybe you had to have been a white man there at the time with a camera.)

 

John (Crosley)

This photo was reproduced 'dark' to show primarily the faces and to emphasize the menacing stares. To have emphasized the tonal variations in the clothes or other dark parts of this photo would have created an unnecessary distration with the menacing stares.

 

If anything, perhaps the 'eyes' should have been lightened a little on the rearmost two subjects.

 

John

This is well captured- all eyes on you. I like how they are all equally in focus; you can visit each one (I keep going back to the girl in the middle). There are just a few minor background elements that aren't perfect (hat behind middle girl, legs coming out of glasses) but they are not distracting and, I know, are extremely difficult to control on the fly.

You are right about not being able to control the elements in the street. This is not a 'framed' static photo. These were demonstrators who were marching and protesting. They were moving and I was moving also. To get a photo of them at all, in focus or not was an achievement, and a result of being 'stopped down' with a very wide angle lens, let alone being properly framed.

 

This photo is almost a diamond frame (or a paralellogram sideways), if one views it as I do.

 

Or viewed another way, it is made up of layers, with the front woman, the first layer; the second woman, the second layer, and the rear woman and the tall man the third layer.

 

It's almost a 'class picture' of protestors and one would be excused if one were to think that it were a 'setup' composed and framed, because the shorter person(s) are in the front, and the taller in the back.

 

Those are reasons I chose to post this problematic photo.

 

In fact, this photo long has been problematic for me, too good to ignore and not good enough for prizes (I thought), but increasingly it has become emblematic of its times.

 

Thanks for the comment.

 

John

I was intrigued by the shot because of it's period hairstyle and clothing. I like the shot, and yes, you're absolutely right, you properly exposed for your subject matter - the background is not of a concern. I think though, that without your extensive caption, I don't feel the "menace" coming from these young people at all; this could be a protest, or they could be at a bus stop, and they're a little dismayed at being photographed. If it was protest, you need to let the picture show the trappings of a protest - this, I'm afraid, does not. But it is a good period picture of the era.

Or a hair stylist advert!

Wonderful composition and tones .Regards ,judy

well, very good.. the composition and the faces.... how old is your b/w work? best regards Stefan

The older B&W works dates from when I bought my first camera -- 1968 -- and was almost immediately published in New York Times, New York Daily News, and my film was purchased for worldwide distribution by Time and the Time-Life Syndicate. You can date the earliest from the reaction to the Martin Luther King Assassination, (Picking Up the Pieces, elsewhere), the photo of the arms raising the cross bearing the photo of the assassinated Bobby Kennedy, and of course, the dress.

 

This particular photo was taken after I returned from Viet Nam where I gave my photography its first real, big-time workout. This was on 'riot duty' outside San Francisco State College (now University, I think) where S.I. Hayakawa embodied the conservative, pro-war Administration as institution president and 'radicals' from the anti-war protestors to these black students who were against anything 'white' (look at them looking at white me!!!! It was a time when a black friend went to a Muhammad Ali (was he Cassius Clay then?) party in a hotel and told of Ali declaiming against all the 'White' linen, and wondered where the 'black' sheets and towels were (I think it was the Plaza Hotel, N.Y.C. where that happened.)

 

This was in San Francisco, 1969, when any moment might mean a bomb was uncovered (I saw at least one pulled out of a building, and got far too close for personal safety diminishing its explosive threat because of its small (pipe bomb) size.

 

The protest line here at any minute could break out into violence between police and demonstrators, which meant keeping vigilance.

 

And, as an aside, if you've seen the movie Gimme Shelter about a Rolling Stones Rock Concert at Altamont Pass in neighboring Alameda County, press warned me about a particularly large, aggressive guy whose whole presence seemed to be to wait for the aggression to come to a head, and then engage in enormous violence shielded by others' uproar. I think I spotted him in the crowd of the movie 'Gimme Shelter', a rock concert where an attendee was stabbed to death in a never-solved murder. I have my unprovable suspicions.

 

That also was the time I got shot on my way to a race riot, and after being released from the hospital, was driven by police through the middle of a race riot in which two were killed, allin a marked police car with engine trouble -- and later was trapped in the police station by rioters with only two cops on duty, one with a shotgun who held off the rioters.

 

(That was before Viet Nam, and good training, I found.)

 

(I never served in the military, medical reasons, and then a high draft lottery number, but that didn't stop me from going to Viet Nam.) I wanted to find out for myself what it was all about and came back plenty confused.

 

Microscopes (my eyes and closenes to the scene) don't always make good devices for examining larger questions that calls for working myriad questions.

 

(I've always wondered about this photo -- not good enough to be one of the best, but too good to throw away. Pixel processing has helped. In the print (negative no longer available), the woman's face, foreground, is somewhat fuzzy, but unsharp mask in Photoshop CS came to the rescue and now it's improved, I like the photo much better after staring at the woman, right, being fuzzy for three decades.

 

John (Crosley)