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Bronzeville:
Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-1943 by Maven Stange Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Compelling Once you start looking at the photographs
in Maven Stange’s new book, Bronzeville:
Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-1943, you’ll be captivated by what you
see. The collection of rarely seen photos reveal the creation of a city
within a city in Chicago following the Depression, as Bronzeville became the
capital of Black America. The massive migration from the South to northern
cities created overcrowding and interracial conflict. See it all from the
lens of a group of photographers who worked intensely over several periods in
the early 1940s to document what they saw. Here’s part of what Stange has to
say about the collection of photos: Chicago's
"Bronzeville" was a "city within a city," the
"second largest Negro city in the world" in the 1940s, St. Clair
Drake and Horace Cayton wrote in Black Metropolis. The South
Side, seven miles long and one-and-a-half miles wide, stretched from 22nd to
63rd Streets between Wentworth and Cottage Grove, its boundaries resolutely
fixed by whites' intimidation and restrictive covenants. Supporting five
hundred churches and three hundred doctors, it was the "capital of black
America" in the 1940s, supplanting Harlem as the center of black culture
and nationalist sentiment, home to such notables as Joe Louis, Mahalia
Jackson, Congressman William Dawson, Defender newspaper editor John
Sengstacke, Ebony magazine publisher John H. Johnson, and Nation of
Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Its flourishing literary and artistic circles
constituted a "Chicago Renaissance" comparable to Harlem's earlier
flowering. As African Americans had continued the northward
migration begun in the teens, becoming more urban than rural by the 1960s,
Chicago absorbed wave after wave of newcomers. The Depression years saw a 20
percent increase in the city's black population, who lived for the most part
mercilessly overcrowded. Population density was seventy thousand per square
mile on the South Side; the death rate exceeded the birthrate by 2 percent.
The war years, a moment of renewed migration, saw some sixty thousand more
new arrivals between 1942 and 1944, swelling the black population to 337,000,
one-tenth of the city's total and double what it had been before World War
II. Buildings abandoned and condemned in the 1930s were reinhabited during
these years as the Black Belt remained, in Richard Wrights words, "an
undigested lump in Chicago's melting pot." Nevertheless, bolstered by
relative affluence and increasing education, active in the struggle for civil
rights, and attuned to new media and technologies, the postmigration
generations Wright called the "first-born of the city tenements"
enjoyed and produced a various and sophisticated culture now familiar
worldwide. In April 1941, photographers Russell Lee and Edwin
Rosskarn spent two weeks on Chicago's South Side, eventually producing more
than a thousand documentary images. The photographers worked for a New Deal
federal government agency, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which
supported a photography project to record and publicize conditions in rural
areas and in the towns and cities that were the destinations of rural
migration. Later that year, FSA photographer John Vachon also visited the
South Side, and in 1942 Jack Delano, working for the federal governments
Office of War Information (OWI), made hundreds more photographs there. The
Lee-Rosskarn coverage was spurred by plans for a book, Twelve Million Black
Voices: A Folk History of the Negro
in the United States, which appeared in October 1941
with text by Wright and photo-editing by Rosskarn, who had been hired by the
FSAs Historical Section-Photographic, as the photography project was
officially titled, to work primarily on exhibition and book design. The
later, more positive wartime coverage helped to bolster government claims for
an inclusive American society with opportunity for all. Presenting for the first time a major selection of
the FSA/OWI South Side coverage, this book explores the interracial
collaboration, and the larger historical and cultural contexts, that enabled
it. These photographs, little seen until now, record a community at a moment
when epochal social change encouraged a vision of a common American future.
At once commemorating and interrogating the struggles, styles, and structures
of black urban life in segregated America, the pictures are compelling today
just as they were in the 1940s, when Horace Cayton commended their
"sharp and graphic terms." The immediate purpose for making and
circulating FSA pictures was to publicize and build support for President
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs specifically combating rural poverty
and promoting the resettlement of citizens displaced by agricultural depression,
drought, and technological advance during the Great Depression. From the
Section's very beginning in 1935, its director, Roy Emerson Stryker,
attracted young photographers who would prove to be enormously inspired and
talented. Including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and the artist Ben Shahn,
they envisioned an autonomous mandate that encompassed the creation of a
visual record of the country as it emerged from depression and entered the
Second World War. Stryker, trained in sociology and economics, was familiar
with earlier social documentary photography and believed in its potential to
reveal harsh social truths to an often-complacent middle class, provoking
needed reform. Stryker and the Section photographers were advantaged by
advances in camera technology and in mass-reproduction techniques; smaller,
more flexible cameras and faster film allowed them to dramatize photography's
truth claim with freshly spontaneous, seemingly immediate imagery, and they
could circulate pictures to vast and appreciative audiences gathered by the
new mass pictorial magazines. Focusing initially on rural Southerners and
Midwesterners, the photographers soon regularly visited farms, small towns,
and cities throughout the country. One-fifth of images were "project shots,"
duly recording the benefits provided by government-funded initiatives ranging
from the Shasta Dam to the Ida B. Wells Homes in Chicago, and the files
include a considerable amount of industrial work, labor protest, and urban
life. When the Section was transferred to the OWI in 1942, the photographers
helped to support the war effort; in the Section's final year, Stryker
directed them to concentrate on "shipyards, steel mills, aircraft
plants, oil refineries, and always the happy American worker."" The
pictures, now stored at the Library of Congress and available to the public,
total approximately two hundred thousand. They constitute an extraordinary
archive, no less today than when author Richard Wright praised it in 1941 as
"one of the most remarkable collections of photographs
inexistence," its "comprehensive picture of our country"
offering "quite an education." Stryker ensured that the projects photographs were
used in museum exhibitions and in a notable series of photo-and-text books,
as well as in more topical forms of journalism and government publicity. At
its demise in 1942, the project could claim exhibition venues including the
Museum of Modern Art and Grand Central Station, as well as regular
appearances in periodicals including Life, Look, Time, The
New York Times, and Fortune, and a dozen books
illustrated with FSA pictures. In addition to Twelve Million Black
Voices, these included James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men, Dorothea Langes and Paul
Schuster Taylors An American Exodus, and Archibald MacLeish's Land
of the Free. In recent years, scholarship has traced the
project's institutional history, delineated careers of individual
photographers, and debated both the project's and the photographers'
contributions and limitations. Critiques have foregrounded the FSA’s
valorization of programmatic, government-engineered progress rather than
grassroots initiative, and they have noted the ways that some Historical
Section pictures cast their subjects as the passive objects of relief
measures rather than active social agents. Nevertheless, the Section's work
has remained a paradigm of documentary practices and aesthetics; it is seen
to exemplify the use of photography as a way not only of comprehending
patterns of culture and social organization, as Sally Stein has written, but
also of graphically revealing them to large audiences. The immediate circumstances of the United States in
these years—including the ways that the public apprehended news and
social facts just before television—have receded from popular memory, even as
some Section images remain globally recognized icons. They stand out even now
in our dense and pervasive visual culture, and we can readily imagine how
powerfully they signaled a new visual aesthetic at the dawn of masscirculated
photojournalism in the 1930s. The vast majority of pictures in the FSA file,
often less graphically arresting, remain richly informative about the country
in those years. They bear witness not only to material conditions, but also
to the photographers' determination to record and express important social
and cultural truths, including the changes they perceived as
industrialization and urban and suburban migration intensified, and defense
industries expanded. Today we can trace these developments clearly in the
pictures. Treat yourself to haunting
and memorable images of a time gone by as you turn the pages of Bronzeville. Steve Hopkins, July 25, 2003 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the August 2003
issue of Executive
Times URL
for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Bronzeville.htm For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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