"Photographs TakenChapter 11 in Everyday Life"MAREN STANGE Eboiiy's PhotojoumaUstic

Discourse

IN ITS INAUGURAL ISSUE of November 1945, the monthly magazine Ebonyfamously editorialized that it would "try to mirror the happier side ofNegro life—the positive, everyday achievements from Harlem to Hol-lywood. But when we talk ahout race as the No. 1 prohlem of America,we'll talk ttirkey."' Like Life nine years earlier. Ebony was an instant suc-cess; its initial printing of twenty-five thousand sold out in hours, andanother twenty-five thousand copies were immediately prepared. Aftersix months, puhlisher John H. Johnson announced that the magazinewould accept advertising;^ eventually he secured accounts unprec-edented for black journalism. Between 1949 and Î952 the magazine vir-tually doubled its size;^by the 1970s Ef7on:y's circulation had grown totwo million, and it was estimated to reach six miUion readers by 1980and nine million per issue by 1992."*

A heavily illustrated "consumer" magazine with feature stories inphoto-essay format as well as other modes of photojournalistic display.Ebony, though monthly, was consciously modeled on the weekly Life,by 1945 tbe primary vehicle for conveying the news visually to a massAmerican (and, increa.singly, intermitional) audience, and it is hard toavoid comparisons. As inaugural executive editor Ben Burns noted, "Ihad copies of Life constantly in front of me to emulate, and I did soreligiously" in assembling early issues.^ There were, however, significant

207

2o8 MAREN STANGE

variations. One was E/j<m}i's "Speaking of People" department, posi-tioned to cotrespond to Life's "Speaking of Pictures." In contrast to theLife section, which called attention to the photographic medium itself.Ebony's department offered several pages of black-and-white photographsshowing people casually posed, clearly in their homes or workplaces,crowded four or five to a page almost like family-album snapshots. Thosefeatured in early issues included a television news cameraman, a womanbank manager, a couple who each held Ph.D.'s, and an aquarium pro-prietor—all readily recognizable members of the middle class.

Ebon^i's editorial foregrounding of depicted people rather than de-picting medium is one indication of how sharply different were themagazines' uses of photography, and how relatively complex was Ebony'sgoal of mirroring "positive, everyday achievements" in the segregatedsociety of pre-civil rights United States. Eiwn^ editors deployed pho-tography that would not only uphold familiar codes of journalistic ob-jectivity but also detach images of blacks from their pervasive ass(x:iationwith equally familiar cultural representations as spectacular and/or de-graded Others and victims, to be shown only "in a superficial or a cari-catured way or as a problem," in photographer Roy DeCarava's words.^In the language of semiotic analysis, E/jon r̂'s visual intervention soughtto dismantle and construct anew the coded system of signs that signi-fies what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., bas called the "Public Negro."^ Ebony'simages would detach, or disarticulate, racialized icons^—tbat is, the rec-ognizable black face and body—from the familiar markers of degrada-tion, spectacle, and victimization to which they had always been linkedif represented at all; the pictures would, instead, reproduce iconic black-ness articulated to equally naturalized and sanctioned symbols of classrespectability, acbievement, and American national identity. As hadearlier re-formers of popular visual discourse, Ebony relied on the pre-sumed "transparency" of photography's indexical representation of its"real life" referents—the medium's "special status witb regard to thereal"—to uphold its discursive interventions.^

Ebony's photographs showed, overwhelmingly, people, falling for themost part into four stylistic categories: informal snapshot-like portraits,journalistic character studies, formal portraiture or glamour shots, and,least common, classic documentary reportage. In part because it wasmonthly, the magazine rarely carried the kind of dramatized spot news

"Photo^aphs Taken in Everyday Life" 209

coverage found in newspapers or weekly magazines. Tcx), its contestatorystance toward hegemonic racial and social "trutbs" constrained possi-bilities for "universal," autonomous, or aesthetically "original" images.Although Ebony's photographs displayed recognizable journalistic con-ventions, they were generally not expressive. They eschewed tech-niques—such as dramatic lighting and camera angles, severe cropping,or soft focus—that were readily found in mainstream mass-circulationmagazines as well as more aesthetically ambitious photography, andwhich invited viewers to emotional response. The magazine rarely de-ployed the photographic medium's full range of stylistic and expressivepossibility.

To some extent, financial considerations enforced this diminution;photographs in early issues consisted primarily of inexpensive stockphoto agency packages and publicity pictures.^ In addition, althoughAfrican Americans had been active as professional and artistic photog-raphers since the medium's invention, "in the late 1940s not a singleNegro worked as a staff photographer at Life, Look, or any other na-tionally circulated magazine or metropolitan newspaper," so Burnsturned as well to white freelancers."^ The magazine hired its first full-time staff photographer, Griffith Davis, only in 1948." Despite theachievements of freelance contributors including Gordon Parks, WayneMiller, and Marion Palfi, not until Pulitzer Prize-winning Moneta Sleetjoined Ebony in 1955, finding his compelling theme in the heroism ofthe Civil Rights Movement, did the magazine's images regularly displaydistinctive stylistic consistency. Herbert Nipson, joining the staff in1949, undertook much photo-editing with Burns as comanaging editorand eventually became executive editor.'^

Thus it is unsurprising that discussion has generally bypassed thephotography that attracted Ebony's mass readership in order to focuson story content and textual expressions of editorial ideology. Ratherthan using Ebony's photography to explore elements of what bell hookscalls African-Americans' "hi.storical relationship to the visual,"'^ mostcommentators note the magazine's abundance of "latter-day HoratioAlger stories," analyze its advertising, or focus on its coverage of the1960s Civil Rights Movement.'"^ Historian Jacqueline Jones, noting thatin the early 1950s Ebojiy had more black readers tban any otber blackot wbite periodical, argues that Ebony "served as a militant advocate of

2IO M.AREN

black civil rigbts" in the immediate postwar period; but she mentionsEbony's photography only to find it "at first glance . . . contradictory"in regard to women's issues and offers no further analysis of it apart fromthe magazine's story content." I

Ebtmy and other "race publications" of the time responded to thedemographic shifts that the war accelerated, above all the formation ofa larger and more dominant northern "black bourgeoisie."'^ This was,in Johnson's perspicacious vision, a "new Black consumer class" with a"keen yearning to see itself in the glossy pages of a national magazine—living, loving, dreaming, achieving."'^ Better education, fewer racialbarriers, and higher incomes in wartime defense work and, later, newlyaccessible white-collar jobs (as well as unionized industrial work) en-abled a larger proportion of northern city dwellers to enjoy relative af-fluence and status in a wider range of occupations. During the 1940s,the proportion of northern dwelling African-American men in clericaland related work more than doubled, and that of women clerical workersquadrupled."^ By 1950. African Americans in white-collar work madeup more than one-fifth of the northern population, but only one-sixthof the (still more numerous) southern population. As even E. FranklinFrazier's blisteringly negative assessment acknowledges, tbe black presssucceeded wben it responded to the "mental stimulation" and "awak-ened imagination" of city dwellers, for all of whom, irrespective of edu-cational and class level, "tbe nortbern metropolis opened a new worldof ideas and adventure."''' ,

Ebony appealed to such urban readers because it could "draw a largercircle" than had earlier black magazines, argues formerai editor Wil-liam Berry. Acknowledging city dwellers outside the small black elitewhom previous black magazines had specifically addressed, regular Ebonyfeatures might spotlight "the boxer, the banker, the haberdasher, thefanner, tbe debutante, the policy king, tbe faith healer, the educator. . .so long as he worked hard" claims Berry.̂ "̂ Too, Ebony presented work-ing wives and mothers in a "positive, and frequently positively heroic,light" in the postwar years. Ebony editors—including Northwestern-trained Era Bell Thompson after 1947—believed women to be a sig-nificant, perbaps majority, proportion of their readership, suggestsJacqueline Jones, citing numerous features, profiles, and editorial dc-

"Photographs Taken in Everyday Life" ill

partments that "stressed the intelligence and diverse accomplishmentsof black women."^'

Nevertheless, Ebony had to please advertisers as well as readers.Costing twenty-five (later thirty) cents and featuring covers in colorby 1946, the magazine's beginnings were notably "mild [and] moder-ate," claims journalism historian Roland E. Wolseley.^^ Former editorBurns (a white leftist who prt>bahly wrote most early editorials) callsEbony's rejection of the racial militancy characterizing the black pressduring World War II "daring," even as he disparages Johnson's concernto placate the white media and particularly advertising agencies. Ebonyemphasized ".searching for black achievements to crow about" tatherthan witnessing racial injustice, insists Bums; it found a "sure-fire for-mula that it continued to follow for decades: first, only, higgest."^'

In its first years, the magazine (perbaps purposely) established noconsistent format and, highly sensitive to readers' opinitms and prefer-ences, was "unique" among national, large-circulation magazines in its"public attention to reader response," writes Paul Hirsch.̂ ** It ran alengthy "Letters and Pictures to the Editot" section and "Backstage"column on its own production processes and personnel. It carried onlya few invariable featutes, and masthead content categories oftencbanged, regularly incKiding entertainment and sports, as well as aclianging selection from topics such as foreign affairs, religion, race, pets,medicine, business, sex, the military, education, and (in the 1940s) over-seas. At the back of the book were "Date with a Dish," on cooking,and "Negro Home.s of America," often featuring entertainers' or politi-cians' houses, and a "fashion" story that seems frequently to have re-quired scantily clad models.

Along with advertising, the magazine soon incorporated (evenmore) "sexy atticles, cheesecake pictures, and other come-ons," aver-aging 150 pages in 1952 and boosting circulation to a half-million untilthe recession of 1954.'^ Wayne Miller photographed a "tea [marijuanalparty" in September 1948 (46-51) (Figure 1); bis January 1948 coverstory "Babies By Special l>livery" showed the birth of a baby in a SoutbSide home (9-15) (Figure 2); Miller's feature piece on nightclub per-formers who were female impersonators ran in March of that year (61-65). Typical (and typically inexpensive) feature stories were "The

Z I Z MAREN STANCE

Figure I. Wayne K Milk-r, ManjHtitui Smo/ter. Wayne F. Miller.

Abortion Menace," in January 1951, which used staged pictures of anx-ious-appearing young women interspersed with wire-service photos ofdoctors convicted of performing illegal abortions (21-26), and, in Feb-ruary, "Is Dope Killing Our MusiciansT by Cab Calloway, featuring pub-licity shots of well-known performers recently convicted of drug-relatedoffenses (22-28). To counter sagging circulation in the mid-1950s,Johnson offered a "new Ebony" devoid of "objectionable sensational-ism" and stories "unsuitable for circulation to young people" as one

'Photofrraphs Taken in Everyday Life" 213

Figure 2. Wayne F. Miller, Newborn Boiry. Co/iyrig/ii Wayne F. Miiíer.

prominently featured letter to the editor noted; the change worked,again increasing home circulation and advertising revenue.^^

Many feature photo-essays in these years used the kind of small,snapshot-like black-and-white images carried in "Speaking of People."A November 1950 story on the perenially popular topic of interracialmarriage, for example, included pictures of nearly twenty families; a two-̂page central spread offered ten photographs of smiling couples, manywith children, strung along tbe top and bottom of the pages.^' Deci-sions on picture size were prohably economically determined: smalletpictures made more advertising space available, and essays wete simplerand quicker to lay nut. Also, such layouts lent the weight of numhers

214 MARIEN ST

to their topics, and the small size minimized possible picture flaws. Butsucb considerations should not preclude a critical reading of the waysthese essays work formally to construct {or deconstruct) representationalcodes. Thus, for instance, the spread of snapshot-like portraits describedabove can be seen to refer to the "walls of images in southern blackhomes." There, suggests bell hooks, snapshots and sometimes studio por-traits—informal self-representation that "did not resemble or pleasewhite folks' ideas about us"—constituted private, familial, sites of op-posititin. Hooks suggests that black life in general under segregationincluded a "passionate engagement" with all "informal photographicprocesses" because African Americans realized rhe power of spon-taneously made snapshots to "expose" and "rebel against" sanctionedrepresentational conventions whose Eurocentric aesthetic inevitably in-corporated stereotypical "colonizing fantasies."^*^ Thus, perhaps more byluck than intention, Ehmy's small images and crowded layouts may havehelped to draw its "wider circle" of readers especially because thesegraphic features connected the magazine's representation of currentAfrican-American life to older, valued family practices.

In ctintrast to the image-crowded layouts of feature photo-essays.Ebony's two-page "photo-editorials" consisted of a two-(rather thanthree-) column page ot text opposite a newsworthy full-page photograph.In May 1946, the text titled "The Negro Veteran Tests America" faceda carefully framed, utterly static picture of two card-playing convalesc-ing soldiers, one hlack and one white, photographed by Gordon Parksfor the federal govemment's Office of War lnftirmation (OWl) (40-41 ).In March 1946, photographer Gordon Coster's full-page closeup char-acter study of an interracial trio of CIO packinghouse unionists "splen-didly symbolized . . . racial unity" for an editorial titled "Labor's LoveGained" (44-45). Like these, most large-scale pictures that appearedwith feature stories were conventionally posed and framed and depictednoncontroversial people or suhjects in the clear, well-lit style that his-torian Tina Olsin Lent has called rhe "mass-appeal aesthetic" foundthroughout mainstream pictorials.^^ These half- or full-page imagessbowed celebrities (whose portraits might have been free), notable po-litical figures, or "Hrst, only, biggests."'^^

Unremarkable as they may ntiw appear. Ebony's tactics of visual rep-resentation directly challenged harshly enforced codes. "The large num-

"Photo^aphs Taken in Everyday Life" 215

her and variety of inherently racist images in American culture attestto a particularly American preoccupation with marginalizing blackAmericans by fltniding tbe culture with an-Other Negro, a Negro whoconformed to the deepest social fears and fantasies of the larger soci-ety/' writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. To escape such dehumanizing ste-reotype was to dig "out from under the codified racist debris of centuriesof representations of blackness as absence, as nothingness, as defotmityand depravity."" It was not only tbe "tens of thousands" of negativecaricatures appearing as cartoons, postcards, salt and pepper shakers, teacosies, children's games, and dolls, hut also the exclusion of AfricanAmericans from all white-controlled purportedly objective mass mediavisual content that executed that "preoccupation."^^ Until the early1950s, the New Orleans Times-Picayune had a "rule that hlacks were notto appear in photographs it published, not even as patt of a background,"writes journalism bistorian Ira Harkey.^^ Jessie Jackson has recalled the"night o( whiteness" imposed by a hometown paper with "never a pic-ture of a Black wedding" nor "a story aKiut a local Black businessman"nor "a decent obituary."'** In his memoirs Gates remembers being"starved for images of ourselves," "searchlingj" television and "de-vour[ing]" Ebony and Jet to find them.^^ Deborah Willis likens her firstencounter with Roy DeCarava's complexly beautiful Harlem photo-graphs to "a veil [being] lifted."^^

Life, from 1940 until at least 1960 tbe "worldwide leading picturemagazine," practiced this "whiteout," as Johnson called it, assiduously.''Tracing the magazine's presentation of black Americans in "scenes ofeveryday life" through 1972, Mary Alice Sentman found such material"markedly absent," and she found coverage of "black America" gener-ally only a "minute portion" of the magazine's content.'^ Similarly, his-torian Wendy Kozol's study of the centrality of the family to Life's"representation of current events" found that images showing "repre-sentatives of 'America'" in the years 1945 to 1960 were "always (of|white families" who were always middle class. "Other kinds of families[and individualsl appear in the magazine as representatives of social is-sues or political problems," she writes, "but never as representatives of'America.'"''^ Pboto bistorian Bill Gaskins notes tbat only twenty-threecovers in Life's history as a weekly featured blacks,'*^ and bistorian JamesGuimond shows that, in the many pictures and photo-essays celebrating

2i6 MAREN STANGE

progress, prosperity, and "the American way of life" in Life, in Lncifc, orin 1940s and 1950s United States Information Agency pamphlets, "vir-tually everyone" is white, middle class, and a member of a small nuclearfamily.'̂ ' Life's special issues on topics such as "America's Assets," "ThisPleasant Land," or "U.S. Growth," likewise represented a white nation.An essay on "Great American Churches," for instance, showed onlywhite congregations and ministers, and one on the General Motors Cor-poration showed only white employees. No persons of color appearedin Life's 1946 tenth-anniversary special issue, and in a 1950 special is-sue on "American Life and Times, 1900-1950" hlacks appeared onlyin one historical picture in a nostalgia essay."̂ ^

Even as blacks and other persons of color were excluded from me-dia constructions of a national, consensual discourse of progress, pros-perity, and respectability, their images were used for other purposes. Inits early years. Life did not hesitate to recycle familiar comic stereotypes,featuring "the watermelon theme" in tw<i first-year issues and writingunabashedly of "mammies" and "pickaninnies.""^^ And like other massmedia. Life relied not only on "a dramatization of the pleasant," as HenryLuce called it, but also on sensational reporting to boost readership.'*'^In Life's heyday, when "about half the population of the United Statesread at least one issue . . . in every three-month period,"''^ there was vir-tually a "protocol" that allotted the representation of pleasant and/ortypically American experience to middle-class white subjects and pre-sented "outsiders"—foreigners and people of color—as designated vic-tims "whose sufferings and corpses can be photographed and packagedas 'sensations,'" suggests Guimond. In war reporting, dead white Ameri-cans were generally shown "lying quietly," with faces obscured, but view-ers could see the faces and other close-up details of black, Asian, andforeign victims.'*^ Contemporary artist Pat Ward Williams's well-knownpiece "Can you be BLACK and look at this?" reproduces a photographof a lynched black man chained to a tree, whicb appeared "uncredited"in an early Life issue, ber accompanying text questioning possibilitiesof adequate or appropriate response.^' I

Discussing such images, Elizabeth Alexandet reminds that "Blackbodies in pain for public consumption have been an American spec-tacle for centuries."'^'^ In an essay addressing the recent proliferation of"post-mottem" images of murdered young black men, Deborah McDowell

"Photographs Taken in Everyday Life" 217

atgues that "U.S. culture apprehends Black Americans, e.specially BlackAmerican men, largely through . . . photographic technology," that"their Kxlies have historically made good spectacle, have become searedin the nation's optical unconscious," and that the long history of view-ing "black death [as] good spectacle" is implicit and "haunting" in eventhe most current, ostensibly respectable photojournalism.'^''

When Life did attempt a serious social coverage, the visual mark-ers of difference and "deviance" were carefully coded and verbally em-phasized. A 1938 Life photo-essay, "Negroes: The U.S. Also Has aMinority Problem," introduces its subject as "a minority more sharplyset off than any of the world's other minorities."^^ Ten years later,Gordon Parks's first photo-essay for Life, "Harlem Gang Leader," aboutseventeen-year-old Red Jackson, was slightly more subtle.^' The publi-cation of the story, which Parks himself proptised to editor Wilson Hicksand which tan as a feature photographic essay, led to a staff position."^^

As Parks clearly understood, he could expect the magazine topresent Red as a social problem of some complexity, but not as a com-plex human heing. The central, climactic image in the narrative of ganglife shows "a night brawl" in which "Red's gang battles another suspectedof killing their buddy" (102-103). This blurred, decentered composi-tion, which occupies more than a full page, catches silhouetted figuresin agitated fnotion to convey an overall impression of violent confron-tation rather tban the magazine's usual clear display of content. Thenext largest image—a full page—shows Red and another hoy peeringinto the coffin of a gang member who had been "found dying on aHarlem sidewalk"; they were, according to the caption, scrutinizing thewounds visible around the corpse's mouth for signs that he had beenmurdered by a rival gang rather than dying of natural causes as the po-lice claimed (IC*O). Several smaller pictures elaborate the theme of vio-lence (98-99, 101). From the essay's opening two-page spread, whichcollages an artily silhouetted profile of Red hy a shattered window overa panorama of "the crowded tenements and the cluttered, dreary streetsof Harlem, the U.S.'s higgest Negro community" (96-97), Parks's pho-tography seems chosen for emotional connotation rather than clear vi-sual content.

Within the bounds of such popular discourse, endlessly recycling"codified racist debris," Ebony and other black pictorials intervened by

2i8 MAREN STANCIE

seeking to picture African Americans as "everyday, ordinary humanAmericans."^' It is in this context that bell hooks valorizes even tbemost mundane photographic documents and foregrounds photography'spower as "the central instrument" to "disprove representations of us cre-ated by white folks." "The degrading images of blackness that emergedfrom racist white imaginations and circulated widely in the dominantculture . . . could be countered by 'true-to-life' images," she insists.Though hooks leaves the meaning of "true to life" un interroga ted, heressay's comments on black families' "obsession with images of self-representation" help clarify her emphasis on "photographs taken in ev-eryday life," that "announced our visual complexity."^** Three Ebonyfeature stories represent key ambiguities and tensions inherent in themagazine's visual project, revealing the necessarily uneven and sometimesdisjunct steps in its process of simultaneous dis- and re-articulation.

An early foray into sensational reportage was the May 1946 lead,"America's Year of Decision," witb "exclusive bloody photographs of aTennessee race riot" obtained, claims Ben Burns, free of charge as a "re-jected photo package" from Life magazine's only black editor. EarlBrown. After comparing 1946 to 1919, "the worst year of racial vio-lence in all U.S. history," tbe article pinpointed events in Columbia,Tennessee, as an "ominous omen of tomorrow" and featured pictures ofwhite-perpetrated violence credited to Roger Atkins." The half-pagelead image of two white men with rifles is captioned "Stalking NegroPrey," and a following full-page shot of a prone body shows a "woundedNegro . . . bleeding in a Columbia street." Black women and men areshown witb hands raised being searched and then "lined up and jailedin a sweeping [police] roundup." As we have seen, images of equiva-lent violence perpetrated hy (and upon) people of color would havebeen unexceptionable in Life and other mainstream media; but, accord-ing to Burns, the complaints of several Ebony advertisers about the nega-tive portrayal of whites in this essay provoked Jtihnson's "ironclad rule"prohibiting any coverage of "race riots" in future issues.^^

Though Johnson's unwavering eye on the bottom line does suggesttbat pleasing white adverti.sers was a primary motivation—and this is-sue was Ebony's first to carry advertising—these images depart signifi-cantly from Ebony's own carefully constructed visual parametersdelimiting black achievement and respectability. Images of white vio-

"Photof!raphs Taken in Everyday Life" 219

lence against black htxlies continue a process in which "black peoplehave paradoxically had to witness their own murder and defilement in(trder lo survive and then to pass along the epic tale of violation,""proposes Elizaheth Alexander; Robyn Weigman points out that whetheralternative ot mainstream, newspaper stories documenting "the scenesof violence ¡and] , . . graphic detail of the practices of torture," espe-cially lynching, served to reiterate African Americans' "secondary so-cial positiim thrt>ughout the twentieth century." Weigman argues thatall such stories "defined and policed" African Americans as "innately,if no longer legally, inferior," and they "extended the function of lynch-ing as a mode of surveillance."^** On these views, the Columbia imagesuphold narratives of subjugation and inferiority that Ebony aimed todisrupt.

"Reporter with a Camera" featured Gordon Parks in July 1946—just prior to his joining Life—as a classic "first and only" success story,incorporating several of his accomplished photographs (24-29). Parkshad begun his professional career in Chicago and contributed to earlyEbony issues;'** after a period of documentary apprenticeship at the FarmSecurity Administration (FSA) Photography Project in Washington, hewas then working on the Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ) project,beaded by former FSA director Roy Stryker, and would join the staff ofLife in 1948.'«-' Fjiiphasizing Parkss "high-paying [SONJ] contract" andglamorous work life, the essay includes some anecdotes ahout his earlylife later mentioned in his several autobiographies. A range of high-quality photographs by Parks and his SONJ colleagues were available(presumably free of charge), allowing L b̂on)! editors to cratt a visuallyeffective piece. Like a classic Life photo-essay, it flows visually as wellas textually; smaller shots organize narrative to advance the explica-tion of Parks's life-story, and several full and half-page pictures punctu-ate it. Column-sized images show Parks "baggage-burdened" onassignment, in the "cbaotic baven" of the SONJ darkroom, and on"dawn patrol" at his writing desk (25). The larger pictures are examplesof his documentary work anchored to the life-story theme with tidbitsof information about wbere and h(nv Parks got the shot. These ev(x:a-tive images—a Now England farmhouse, a grease-besmirched workman,a row of six "sardonic Canadian 'tough guys'" (Figure 3)—show howskiltüitly Parks had mastered the photojournalistic re^iertoire even before

2 2O MAREN STANOE

Fif(ure 3. Gordon Pnrks, Canadian Tou^ Guys. Standard Oit (.New Jersey),Collections: P/ioto^afAic Archives, Uninersirii o/Louí.si'Élíe.

joining Life (24, 26, 27). However, only one of the documentary im-ages used by Ehmy shows pet)ple of color.

A final essay page is devoted to Parks's home life in "the uniqueinterracial community" of Parkway Gardens, New York, where CecilLayne posed Parks with hi.s family on the toboggan and in his spaciousliving room (29). The essay's "first and only" narrative line successfullycontains two kinds of images: Parks's own pbotographs made on assign-ment to far-flung (hut white-inhabited) places wbicb testify to the per-suasive powers of documentary photography, and photographs of Parksand his family, whose sober conventionality articulates these attractivefigures to readily (.liscernible markers of glamour, comfort, and succe.ss.

In 1951, Richard Wright's essay "The Shame of Chicago" brokeEbor\y precedent to give photographer Wayne Miller a byline accom-panying the author's, and it used exclusively tbe evocative South Sidepictures Miller had made during a 1946-1947 Guggenheim Fellowshipawarded to photograph "The Way of Life of the Northem Negro." Likethe Parks story, the six-page Wright piece combined documentary im-ages with celebrity glamour. Burns had been Wright's colleague on the

"Photographs Taken m Everyday Life" 221

Daily Wmker in the 1930s, and the first issue of Ebony featured Wright.^'The new essay was commissioned in fall 1950, just after Wright hadreturned to Cbicago to film scenes for a movie version of his best-selling1940 novel Native Son, set on Chicago's South Side. Finally publishedin Decemher 1951, the essay coincided with the film's Hollywood pre-miere.''^

Wright's skillfully organized text interwove general impressions withaccounts of the filmmaking project. Overall, the city offered a "singleimpression of industrial dominance that spelt a kind of queer and uniquepoetry," making Chicago "powerfully and impressively ugly." Visiting"old neighborhoods that held . . . a thousand tangled memories," hecommented on the sometimes bizarre proximity of newly flourishingbusinesses and civic neglect, so that owners of cars that were "gleam-ing and new" parked on "piles of garbage." His surprise to find none ofthe "condemned, empty buildings. . . [that he] had written about inNative Son" is explained by the increased immigration of the war yearsthat caused "tlmse empty and condemned buildings . . . to be usedagain!" Frustration over hotel reservations for the film crew reveals that"Chicago was still Chicago (where) the old racial lines and attitudesstill ruled"; as do Wright's accounts of placating a South Side precinctcaption and bribing corrupt police in order to complete the locationfilming.

Returning in conclusion to housing, "the crux of it," Wright pressedhome points that must have given Johnson pause. "The racial situa-tion here is an intentionally fabricated one and the whites want to keepit that way," insisted an anonymous member of the Human RelationsCommission. Urban anthropologist Louis Wirth explained that "theslums of Chicago's South Side are subsidized in the sense that they arekept like that. It's deliberate." Wright links such comments to "the.shameful Cicero riot" of the previous summer, the largest and most vio-lent of numerous recent incidents oí white harassment and intimida-tion of black families hoping to live in white neighborhoods. In lightof the tinderbox situation Cicero represented, a rebutting photo-editorial's claims for "many Negro families living next door to whites, insome of the finest homes in city," for "undeniably tremendous gains scoredby Negrties . . . in the past decade," ring hollow The editorial's temporizingprtKlamations—Wright's reporting was at once "trenchant . . . honest.

222 MARKN STANCH

Figure4. Wayne H Miller, (Jhifygu /t.'iit:jnL'nt.N, ÍÍL'ÍIJ- View. Gupyright Wayne F. MÍÍ/LT.

sincere and distinguished" and "warped, often-naive and incomplete"—sound fabricated and forced (100).

Wright was an accomplished amateur photographer who may haveknown Miller's South Side work.''* Miller's striking opening spreadshows the once-abandoned and now reoccupied tenements from theback; despite hanging laundry and other signs of life, no people are vis-ihle (24-25) (Figure 4). The rickety wooden back porches create agridded wall that blocks out the sky, alIegorÍ2Íng the barricades longimposed by "unwritten restrictive ct)des enforced by terror and vio-lence," as the editorial affirms (I(X)). Just as the article title superim-posed against this image recalls Lincoln Steffens's Progressive-eramuckraking jt)urnalism, tbe phott>graph rehearses tenement studies fa-miliar from early social documentary; "An Old Rear Tenement inRoosevelt Street" from the Jacob Riis Collection at the Museimi of theCity of New York, for instance, constructs a similar view from the 1880s.Other Miller pictures show the dirt, disorder, and ugliness that Wrightfound, and they detail makeshift living arrangements—a sled piled highwith coal sits in the snow by spindly wooden tenement stairways (26)(Figure 5). Prices in a store window show "the high cost of living" (26),and churches "spring up everywhere in basement flats and store fronts"

"Photographs Taken in Everyday Life" 223

Figure 5. Wayne F. Miller, C/iicago Tenements in Winter. Copyr^ht Wayr\e F. Miiier.

because "spiritualism flourisbes among [the] insecure" (27). In the onlycloseups of people, an unidentified mother "pleads for her son with ju-venile officers" in a courtroom (30), and a newborn receiving oxygenat segregated Pro\'ident Hospital faces a "life span . . . much shorter thanwhite Chicagoans" (28).

Miller had gained a remarkable entre throughout the South Side;his Chicago work includes packinghouse picket lines and railroad workers.

224 MAREN STANDE

midwives and newsdealers, baseball players and nightclub entertainers.^Many of these images might have effectively complemented Wright'sessay; however, the statically composed, scantily-pecipled photographsthat were selected appear subtly dated, as if relics of a bygone era, de-spite their actual currency. Their stylistic references to classic documen-tary traditions, exemplified by the Riis Collection parallel, distanceimplicitly the wretched conditions they show, just as the editorial as-sociates Wright's text with "the throes of depression" (100). The essayincluded neither any images of Wright—who played the lead in thefilm—nor the authorities he quotes. Such an unusual, for Ebony, es-chewal of the chance to exploit celebrity glamour indicates the impor-tance of undermining Wright's authority and mediating the impact ofhis essay.

As we have seen. Ebony had access from the start to highly skilledjournalistic and documentary photography, wbich it sometimes featured.Nevertheless, the display of creative talent, photographic expressivity,or socially critical reportage was not necessarily a high priority in theseyears. More important was the magazine's transformative work on ex-tant and familiar iconic signs of blackness. The scope of this work wasconstrained hoth aesthetically and politically, inevitably to be foundboth insufficient and enabling. To appreciate it is to understand andvalue anew the terms, boundaries, and possibilities of our presentdiscourses.

Notes1. "Bnckstafie," Ehmy, Novemher 1945, 1; this is volume 1, number 1. I thank

Regina Neal and Barhani Radin for acquainting me early on with this material.2. information on Ehmy's early years can be founJ in Roland E. Wolseley, The

Black Press, U.S.A., "2d ed. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990). 142.Ben Burns, Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Joumahm (Jackson; Univer-sity Press of Mississippi, 1996) recounts his experiences as editor at the Chi-cago Defender and then editor-in-chief at Ehmy unril 195S.

3. Paul M. Hirsch, "An Analysis of Ehonv: The Magazine and Its Readers," Jiiur-nflii.sni Quarterly 45, 2 (Summer 1968): 264.

4. Hirsch, "An Analysis," 269; Wolseley, Black Press, 142; "From Negro Digest toEb<my,}et, and £M," Ebony, Novemher 1992, 54.

5. Bums, Niti^iGriiiv, 85.6. DeCarava is quoted in my "'Illusion Complete within Itself: Roy DeCarava's

Photoyrnphy," in A Modt-ni Mosaic, ed. Towsend J. Ludington (Chapel Hill:University of North Carotina Pre.ss, 200D). 279-305.

7. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Face and Voice of Blackness," in Facing History:

"Photographs Taken in Everyday Life" 225

The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940, ed. Guy C. McElroy and Chris-topher C. French (Washington, D.C: Bedford Arts, Puhlishers in associationwith the Corcoran Gallety of Art, 1990), xxv.

8. Photography's rtlarion to "the real" is in R<isalind Krauss. "Tracing Nadar," Oc-lohfir 5 (Summer 1978); 5; her essay discusses photo^rarhy's indexical status atlength. "Articul.uion" is defined as "any fotm of semiotic organization whichengenders distinct combinable units," in Robert Stam, Rohert Butgoyne, andSandy Flitteriiian-Lewis, Neu- Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (New York:Routledfie, 1992), 32. IMining "to articulate" as meaning both "to express" and"to join tot-ether," John Storey usefully summarizes articulation as a key con-cept In nt-o-Gnimscian perspectives on culture, sugge.sting (after Chantai Mouffeand Stuart Hull) that popular culture, as a "contested landscape" tif culturalnegotiation, is In constant processes of disarticulation and re-articulation bycontending s(KÍal group.s, in his Intrcyiucttny Guide to Cultural Theory and PopularCulture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), H - H . 1 contend herethat this process of negotiation and struggle to specify the meanings of repre-sentational codes by controlling the articulation of their elements was a cen-tral task at thi.s moment of Ebony's visual intervention. For discussion of therelation of photography to social reform, see my 5>mÍ7nl.s of Ideal Life: SocialDocumentary Ph<tt(»fiTfl/)/i:y in America, /890-Í950 (New York: Camhridge Uni-versity Press, 1989).

9. Burns, Nitt;y Griltv, 86.10. Ibid.. 98: Deborah Willis. Blflcíí Photographers, 1840^(940: An Illustrated

BiO'Bibliography (New York: Garland. 1985), and Willis, An illustrated Bio-bih-liography of Black Photographers. /940-I988 (New York: Garland, 1989), andWillis, Reflections in BIÍIC/Í; A History 0/Blacle Photographers ¡840 ro the Present(New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), detail the history of African-Americanphotographers.

I t . Bums, Niin Gritty, 98.12. Wolseley, Black Press, 246.13. Bell hooks, "In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life," in Picturing Us; Afri-

can American identity in Photogrc^hy, ed. Dehorah Willis (New York: New Press,1994). 52.

14. Irwin n. Rinder. "A Sociological Lixik into the Negro Pictorial," Piiylon 20. 2(1959): 74; see Laurel Frances Hollowaty, "Achievement. Equality of C^por-tunity and Equality of Access: Ideology and Aesthetics in Advertisements inUfe and Ehmy, 1945-1975." (Ph.D. diss.. University of Califomia at Irvine,1984); Leslie S;irgent. Wiley Carr. und Elizabeth McDonald, "Significant Cov-erage of Integration by Minority Cîroup MaRaiines,"Joum£il n/Human Relationsn , 4 (1965): 484-91. compares "racial integration pictures" in Ehoiiv and Lifemagazines; see Valerie Stephanie Saddler. "A Content Analysis of Ebony's andLi/e's 1955-1965 Reporting on Black Civil Rights Movement Issues" (Ph.LTdiss.. Ohio University. 1984).

I 5. Jacqueline Jones, Labor 0/ Lot'C, iMbor of Simm>: Black Women, Work and theFamily, from Sinvery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 269-70,

16. Jobn.son founded Johnson Publishing Company in 1942; his inaugural NegroDigest continued later as Black World until 1976, and his weekly newsmagazine]et (1951) proved another enduring success. Competitors have included NewYork City's monthly Our World. "The Picture Magasine for the Negro Family."puhlished hy John P. Davis from 1946 to 1955. and, in the 1950s, GeorgeLevitan's large-format Sepia and later his short-lived Hep, Jive, Soul Ctmfessiom

220 MAREN STANGE

and ßron;:e Thrills, which never really challenged Johnson. Bums, Nitty Grittv.39.

17. Rinder notes as well a race pride and a pa.ssionate group identification; see his"Sociological Look," 169; the "new Black consumer cbs.s" is in William EarlBerry, "The Popular Press as Symbolic Interactionism: A Social and CulturalAnalysis of Ebony 1945-1975" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1979), 71;Johnson's quote is in "Introduction," Et)ony, November 1990, 26.

18. E. Franklin Frazier. Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe. 111.: Free Press, 1957), 48-49.47,49.

19. Ibid., 176.178.20. Berry, "Popular Press," 70. I21. iones,L/i/xír(i/í,oi'e, 269, 270.22. Wolseley counters Jones's view of Ebony's "aggressively integrationist" stance

and mix of "optimism and rage" in the 1940s. Wolseley, Black Press, 142; Jones,Lahor of Lm>e, 270.

23. Burns, Nitty Gntty, 88. 94.24. Hirsch, "Analysis of Eiiony," 263.25. Wolseley, Black Press, 142, Hirsch, "Analysis of Ebony." 264.26. Letters to the Editor, Ehmy, September 1955, 10; Wolseley. BLick Press, 142.27. "The Case Against Mixed Marriage," Ebony, Novemher 1950, 52-53.28. Hooks, "In Our Glory." 50-51.29. Tina Olsin Lent, "Situating The Americans: Rohert Frank and the Transforma-

tion of American Photography" (Ph.D. diss. University of Rochester, 1993),48.

30. See, for instance, "Ball Playing Councilwoman," Ebony, November 1950, 48,and "Mr. Death," Ebimy, January 1951, 29.

31. Gares, "Face and Voice of Blackness," xxix.32. Ibid., xxix,xliv.33. Ira Harkey, quoted in Carolyn Martindale, The White Press and Black America

(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 55.34. JevSse L. Jackson, "Growing Up with Ebony," Ehmy, Novemher 1995, 50J.35. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People, A Memoir (New York: Vintage Books,

1995) 19,23.36. Willis, "Introduction: Picturing Us," in Picturing Us, 4.37. Rudolph Janssens and Gertjan Kalff, "Time Incorporated Stink Club: Tbe In-

fluence of Life on the Founding of Magnum Photos," in American Photographsin Europe, ed. David F. Nye and Mick Gidley (Amsterdam: VU University Press,1994), 223; "From Negro Digest" 52.

38. Mary Alice Sentman, "Black and White: Disparity in Coverage by Life Maga-zine from 1937 to 1972,"_;()ur7iii/i.̂ m Quarterly, 60 (Autumn 1983): 508.

39. Wendy Kozol, LlFE's America: Family and Nation in Posiu'ar P/ioto/'owmu/isin(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 13.

40. Bill Gaskins, "The World According to Life: Racial Stereotyping and Ameri-can Identity," Afterimage 21 (Summer 1993): 16.

41. James Guimond, American Phntograp/iy and the American />eam (Chapel Hill:University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1991), 170-71.

42. Ihid., 172-73.43. Sentman, "Black and White," 504, 506-507; Gaskins, "The World According

to Li/e," 16.44. Guimond, American P/iotogra/i/iy, 157.45. Janssens and Kalff, "Time Incorporated Stink Club," 223.

"Photographs Taken in Everyday Life" 227

46. Guimond, Amcriam Photography, 157, 158.47. Williams writes that she found the image in The Best of Life (New York: Time-

Life B..)ok.s, 197Î).48. Elizabeth AloNander, "'Can You Be BLACK and Look at Tliis.'': Reading the

lliKlncy Kitig Vidco(s)," in Black Male: Ri'lJrescntatiim!. of Masculimty in Con-icmfxirary American Art, ed. Thehiia t;t)lJcn (New York: Whitney Mu.seum ofAmerican Arr, 1994), 92.

49. IV-1-Htrali E. McHowell, "Viewint; the Remains: A Polemic on Death, Spectacle,and the IBIackl Family," in The Familial Ga^e, ed. Marianne Hirsch (Hanover:University Press of New England, 1999), 154-

50. Cjaskins, "The World According to Life," 15.51. "Harlem Gani; Leader," Photographs for Li/c hy Gordon Parks, Life, 1 Novem-

her 1948. 96-106; page numbers henceforth are given in parenthesis in the text.52. Gordon Parks, To Smiif in Autumn, A Memoir (New York: W.W. Norton &

Cotnpany, 1979), 45.53. Eixmy. IVcember 1945,23.54. Ht)oks,"lnOtprGlory,"5l.55. Burns, Nitty (iiiiiy, 95. Bums names rhe photographer as Edward Clark, appar-

ently incorrectly.56. Ibid-, 95-96.57. Alexander, "C:;in You Be BLACK," 105.58. Robyn Weiguinn, American Anüiomies: T/ie(m?ing Race and Gender (Durham,

N.C: Duke University Press, 1997), 91.59. Burns, Nitty Gritty, 98.60. Sec Parks, To Svúle in Autwmn and A Choice of Weapons.61. "Black a>v in Br.Hiklyn," Ehmy, November 1945, 19-22.62. Michel Fabro, The l.hifinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Banun (New

York: William Morrow & Co.,197Í), 350.63. See my "'Not Wbat We Seem': Image and Text in 12 Million Black Voices," in

(cf)noEr(ií>/iÍL'S of P<mer, cd. Ulla Haselstein, Berndr Ostendorf, and Peter Schneck(Heidelberg: C. Winter Press, 2001 ) for Wright's Chicago photographic work.

64. Miller wtuked closely with Edward Steichen on the 1955 Family of Miin exhi-bition and biiok, contrihuting several picrtires. His Chicago work can be seenin Ehmy and in Wayne F. Miller, Chicago's South Side. Í946-I9')8 (Berkeley:University of (California Press, 2000).