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19 Matt Herron The mantle of civil rights photography was not a one-size-fits-all garment. There were as many styles to this work as there were civil rights photographers, or at least so it appears looking back over the years and reconstructing the experiences of these activist photographers of the sixties. But if most of us approached our task clad in our own personal outlook and strategies , the opportunities and problems we faced were remarkably similar. To begin with, we moved through an extraordinarily rich visual environment. As anyone who has looked at civil rights photography will instantly recognize, the faces, the landscapes, the confrontations all yielded immensely powerful images. For many of us those intense, brief years gave rise to our best photographic work, and for all of us those times remain among the most profound, formative experiences of our lives. Tamio Wakayama remembers the joy he felt driving through that tunnel of a road north of Jackson, all overgrown with kudzu vine, and seeing it broaden out above Yazoo City into the vast expanse of the Mississippi Delta. “It was like reentering the land of my boyhood in southwest Ontario in Canada,” he remembered . “Those broad fields studded with sharecropper shacks seemed to have that same organic integrity— the shacks not so much man-made as just growing out of the soil. It felt like my home.” And that’s the way he photographed it—lonely structures married to the earth, black farmers raising food for their families. But of course that was only one way of looking at the Delta. Maria Varela found a darker vision: barren mudchoked roads, crumbling plantation shacks, lively but impoverished kids dancing for her camera. And for all of us, the core of our work as well as the root source of the movement’s strength lay in those cohesive black communities, centered around church and bound together by common struggle. There we found the faces upon which were written histories of hard living, but also of resilience, humor, and, above all, hope. Truly, it was a visual feast for anyone with eyes to see. But why did it sometimes not seem like a feast to us? Perhaps because our work could be hard and sometimes very dangerous. Unlike the photojournalists, who viewed a quite different civil rights movement through the lens of guaranteed assignments and comfortable expense accounts, we operated with meager resources, sleeping on floors, living out of suitcases and the trunks of our cars. We bought our 35mm Tri X in hundred-foot rolls, spooling it out at night into film cassettes, which allowed us to shoot our pictures for a penny a frame. Our darkrooms were a precious resource—we lacked the luxury of shipping our film to professional labs in New York—and often they were temporary affairs, set up in a bathroom that continued to serve a dual purpose. And automobiles were a constant problem. They broke down and had to be repaired, not only to get us from A to B, but sometimes to save our hide in a high-speed chase. Bob Fitch recalls his financial arrangement with Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He took over as a volunteer photographer for SCLC when they found it too dangerous to send black photographers into the field to shoot the project pictures they were supplying to African American newspapers in the North. “I became a sort of one-man Photographing Civil Rights 20 Associated Press. I covered everything—from camera click to stamp lick, as I called it. I shot the pictures, souped the film, made the prints, wrote the captions and mailed them out. SCLC covered my travel expenses and they paid me fifteen dollars a week room and board. That was it. But I could walk down to the newsstand on Tuesday afternoon and see my pictures in every black newspaper.” Some of us were staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and lived on SNCC’s standard weekly stipend of $9.64 (after deductions!). Others, like myself, supported families on occasional news assignments from northern magazines, which allowed us to photograph for the movement. Considering SNCC’s scanty funds, it is remarkable that Executive Director Jim Forman was willing to devote resources to building a team of photographers, a professional darkroom, and a communications unit headed by Julian Bond (working with Mary King) that issued press releases and sent photographs and research reports to media and liberal...

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