By Stephen Wolgast
July 2021 - Journalism is about reporting the truth — or at least the closest to truth we can get by deadline.
Reporting the truth, and having our work believed as truthful, has grown much more difficult in the last several years. First, digital cameras made everyone a potential news photographer. Then we had the cry “fake news” taken up by cynics who apply it to any reporting that doesn’t match their beliefs.
When a swath of Americans don’t believe your motives, getting your point across can be next to impossible.
On top of ubiquitous cameras, factor in the ease of deception. That’s a real bogeyman. Software tools that are easy to use are the genie escaping the lamp because when everyone can splice photos together, alter the color and set up a shot, can anyone with a camera be trusted? Teens who’ve never thought of ethics can even bring to life a Mathew Brady portrait or alter a Nancy Pelosi press conference.
With fake photos and videos so easy to create, how can photojournalists find themselves believable and trustworthy again?
Here’s one answer. Do more than take pictures, and do more than make photographs.
Make stories with the camera. Stories that are true and honest, but also interpretive and reflect your response to the subject. Photographs that relate the experience of the subject are more likely to be believed when the photographer becomes the vessel for the subject’s thoughts, anxieties and dreams.
Eugene Richards is photojournalism’s leading example of a nontraditional storyteller. It’s as if he lives the lives of the women and men whose tales he tells, giving his photographs the perspective of his subjects instead of his own.
Does that get him closer to the truth they have to tell? Empathy is not a guarantee of accuracy. But someone with the soul to understand others’ emotions seems to have a sixth sense.
Richards is one of them. His new book shows us what it means to live in the Arkansas Delta as Black men and women a year before many Americans’ eyes were opened by George Floyd’s killing in May 2020.
“The Day I Was Born” takes its title from its epigram, a quote from Joseph Perry Jr., one of Richards’ subjects, who sets the tone for what follows.
“The day I was born I was black. You went to a black school. You knew that, ’cause you didn’t go to school with no white folk. There weren’t no white teachers, wasn’t no white nothing.”
Perry’s words sound like a lament, but they’re also a declaration of the status Black residents in Arkansas lived under, a time when living separately meant living unequally.
For an outsider like Richards, the question becomes how to relate a story like Perry’s in a way that’s fair to him and honest about the times without relying on the viewer’s pity. It’s not an easy ask for an outsider, though Richards, a Massachusetts native, spent four years in the Arkansas Delta starting in 1969.
But the thing about Richards is this: Telling other people’s stories, in their own voices and through their eyes, is the kind of reporting that Richards has been doing for years, and he’s unrivaled at it.
Standing out in his photography books, including this one, is the amount of text. But the words aren’t Richards’, and they don’t come from an eminent scholar or a celebrity with a pet cause. The women and men in his photographs speak directly to you in their uninterrupted recollections.
We hear about their struggles and frustrations, the harrowing racism and violence they endured. We listen as they recount their accomplishments, too, such as raising children and grandchildren and even starting a business.
What stands out the most to me, in the cataclysmic months of protests over police misconduct, political unrest and wild conspiracies, are the tight restrictions Black people lived under. Most Americans, even white kids growing up in the suburbs, learn about the legal racism that led to the civil rights movement. Bird’s-eye views of history, however, rarely carry the weight of one person’s searing memory.
“People don’t understand, when I was coming up, was against the law for more than two black people to be standing there,” Stacy Abram recounts. “We could be arrested if we assemble on the corner, three or four of us. The federal laws came during that time,” the Civil Rights Act, “so you had the freedom of assembly. But since we wasn’t human — was always three-fifth human — we didn’t have the freedom of assembly.”
It wasn’t the only right in the First Amendment that had been denied to Blacks. Abram continues:
“We had the freedom of speech, the First Amendment of the Constitution give, but we couldn’t speak. We had the freedom of the press, but we couldn’t take our stories to the press, because we wasn’t human.”
Listen to his voice. He’s explaining the past through the rights he couldn’t exercise. You could read it in a history book, and you probably did, but in the cadence of his sentences, in the repetition of Americans’ rights and the repetition of Blacks’ restrictions, you can hear his anguish.
And in case you don’t, he makes the point even clearer.
“A dog was considered a dog, a cat was considered a cat, a cow was considered a cow, but because from the Supreme Court came the ruling that we was to be counted as three-fifths of a man, you couldn’t consider us human.”
The most telling words, like Abram’s, tend to be spoken from the heart. Bringing out those feelings from a source takes time and sympathy, and the result is a road map for Richards’ photography.
So how does he take those feelings and turn them into visual journalism? In “The Day I Was Born,” it’s through spare images of the Mississippi River Delta.
Birds flying away from a bare tree, an empty road cutting through two empty fields.
A man walking his dogs past a dilapidated gas station, rusting steel standing in contrast to a lush patch of weeds.
The fallen heart-shaped memorial at the “black people’s cemetery,” which if it weren’t for the small metal grave markers would look like nothing more than a rutted expanse of mud with a few flowers incongruously popping up. Water droplets spot his lens, emphasizing the imperfect scene, and the sky, gray as in the other pictures, withholds the vibrancy of color typical of the South.
Each of these is a photo of absence, of what could be but isn’t. The cemetery, in particular, pocked by gullies of water, is a bitter example of what it means to be three-fifths of a man in the South.
Richards’ landscapes set the stage for his portraits. As in all his work, Richards’ portraits are the opposite of anything directed. Instead, they give you the feeling that you would have if you were in the room with his subjects, passing time without any rush, listening to a story or maybe just sitting without anyone saying anything as the humidity seeps into your pores and keeps you from doing anything in a rush.
Antsy children at a church service hope the pastor will wind up.
Three generations of a family sit on Grandma’s porch, relaxing and talking while Grandma cuddles the toddler, giving her a kiss.
Joseph Perry working in a grain hopper as raindrops pelt him and the red steel and the empty bag of grain.
Old-growth trees reaching for the clouds but shrouded by the cracked, fogged-up windshield of an abandoned car.
Then there’s the photo of a man who grew up in the closet, went to Memphis to study art at college and returned to Arkansas, where he learns to be comfortable not fitting in. In one photograph Timothy Way sits at home in a black shirt and beaded necklace, magazine photos taped to his wall, next to a window dressed with curtains patterned with pink and white roses. (Timothy Way created the cover art for the book.)
His childhood was difficult.
“Now maybe I’m blocking being in pain,” Way says, “but I had some inner thing within me because of the art. If it wasn’t for that, I might have committed suicide.”
Listening to his voice and looking into his eyes, you begin to understand the depth of Richards’ work and the vision that sets him apart.
“The Day I Was Born”
By Eugene Richards
Many Voices Press, 2020
160 pages, $60
Cover art by Timothy Way
At first, you see someone comfortable at home, surrounded by what makes him comfortable. You can also see something different, in the glamour photos on the wall, different because we expect those in the bedroom of a teenager, not an adult, particularly one who’s faced the toll of caring for his ailing grandparents.
It’s the combination of the story he tells about himself, which is much longer than this tiny excerpt, and the story Richards tells about Way that’s just as revealing of Way, once you get to know him through the interview he gave Richards.
And that’s where Richards takes you: into the lives of others, not just through pictures of people in substandard homes. He lets their stories inform his photography, and together, their words and his eye become journalism that’s just as rich and just as layered as a novel or a classical painting.
Stephen Wolgast holds the Knight Chair in audience and community engagement in news at the University of Kansas. His email is [email protected]. He has been an NPPA member since 1994.
