Tuesday, February 18, 2014

African-American history, from family albums to museum walls

Although the photographer Hugh Bell had been part of “The Family of Man” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, he later realized inclusivity went only so far when he called to pitch a story to an editor at Esquire.

“I had a beautiful, poetic, romantic idea,” he recalled. “She said: ‘That’s great. Come up and tell me about it.’ ”

When he got there, the editor looked around.

“She said, ‘Where’s Hugh Bell?’ I said, ‘Ah, I got it. You didn’t expect me to be a black photographer.’ ”

The disappointment of that painful epiphany lingered in his voice and eyes as he recounted it decades later for the documentary “Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People,” which has been well received at the Sundance Film Festival and elsewhere. The film, which was directed, co-written and co-produced by Thomas Allen Harris, is a sweeping narrative that traces from the 19th century to the 21st how African-Americans presented themselves in their own photos, often in stark contrast to how they were demeaned and stereotyped by the larger society. Inspired by “Reflections in Black,” a book by Deborah Willis — one of the film’s producers — it deftly blends historical images from before and after the Civil War, with family albums and photographs by such luminaries as Gordon Parks Jr. and Carrie Mae Weems.

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