Transcripts For CSPAN3 Newly Discovered Black History Photog

This possible. To those of you joining us for the first time, a warm welcome, and an invitation to explore the wide range of programs here. Before we begin, now is the perfect time to turn off your cellphone or anything else that might make noise during the program. Thank you for doing that. A team ofy of 2016, New York Times staffers discovered dozens of unpublished photos in the papers archives. Some were published in a multimedia series, unpublished black history. The monthlong series covered the history behind the photos and garnered 1. 7 million views and thousands of comments. We are thrilled to welcome two of the authors involved with creating the book inspired by their discovery unseen , unpublished black history from the New York Times archives, which is available for purchase and signing following the program. Darcy eveleigh is a contributing photo editor at the new york editor of creator and gue. Timely mor Rachel Swarns is a journalist and author who writes about race and Race Relations and is a contributing author for the New York Times. She is the author of american tapestry, which was published in 2012. Moderating the conversation is rea combes, the curator of film and photography at the Smithsonian Museum of African American culture. She also serves at the head of the center for African American media arts. Please join me in welcoming darcy, rachel, and rea. [applause] i would like to echo laurens wonderful comments and say thank you so much for joining us tonight. I think we are in for a delightful conversation. I am so thrilled to be here with these two dynamic women. I wanted to start off by asking you to give us the context, situate how you were able to uncover and find so many photographs that have not been published before. Well, our coauthor, dana kennedy, another writer of the book, had come to me can you hear . Ok. Is that better . More. Ok. How are we doing . Ok. Everyone can hear me now . Sorry. My coauthor dana kennedy approached and asked if there was something we could do from the New York Times Photo Archives that would be of interest to young africanamerican readers. Immediately, i thought of an idea. A couple years prior, the former New York Times picture editor, john morris, who was 95 years old, came to visit the times. I had the opportunity to sit with him for an hour. I asked john, is there anything in the archives i should be going back to look for . John immediately grew agitated and said go back and reedit everything. He said they didnt let us run the right pictures. They had to edit for space constraints for the print newspaper. They had to edit for the style of the times of the day a , stiffer picture, somebody clearly looking at the camera. John knew what was left behind. The idea stuck with me. So, when dana approached and said is there something in there, i said yes, there is something in there. Rachel, dana, damien, and i started with a list of names. Who could we name that the times might have covered . We started with Martin Luther king, rosa parks, all the familiar names you would expect us to start with. But what happened was the discovery beyond that, the accidental finds, the names we never in a million years expected, the ordinary people. That is really what drew us in. Eventually, the book started to take shape because we wanted to include those unknown people. How long did this process take . How many photographs are we talking about . Havehe times knows they 10 million print photographs in the archives. Of the 10 million in the archives, one third are from Staff Photographers, one third are from wire agencies like Associated Press and getty images, and another third are publicity type images. So if you have three and a half million staff photographs, they had the negatives stored from those. So if one print got made, there are potentially 35 frames left over. Or more in some cases. We will show you some examples in the book. Some photographers shot hundreds of rolls of film for one or two pictures. And we are talking early 20th century through present . Restarted i think we hired the first Staff Photographer in the i believe it was the 1920s. 1920s. The negative collection is pretty well intact from the late 1940s on. There was a culling in the early years, unfortunately, but from the 1940s on. So with this call to do something for black History Month or related, you had this thought in your mind from your conversation, and then a team of colleagues came together and went through 3 million photographs . [laughter] i get asked how many i went through. I dont really know. It was a lot. I spent months on the floor with stacks of negative on a loop going, what is this . We started with the idea that we would look at we would have an image or a series of images every day for the month of february. That was our idea. We thought there would be amazing images that had never seen the light of day before. Which is awesome and you will get to see that. But it was also an opportunity for us to look at the New York Times as an institution, and how we covered and didnt cover africanamericans. So basically, it was kind of a scramble in that first month or so, the first few weeks. Darcy started in november. We were sitting around the table in january and literally going through images and afterwards for the book. But the initial intention was for it to just live online. And in print. For interactivity and social engagement. That is right. I think we realized very soon after that this could be more than that. Because there was such an incredible response to these images. People saw themselves in some of these images, some of the parade photos. We asked people to engage with the images. Right away, people said how can we get them . We were realizing, goodness, we have to make these available. I would like to ask how you went about conceptualizing, because when you have such a vast amount, and the initial thought was unpublished work, can you talk us through either how you had to triangulate the fact that it was unpublished, and or how you conceptualize what got in . You already mentioned that it was like one a day. But for the book. We had amazing images, but what was interesting to us in process, too, were the images we cannot find and the people who were not there, and perhaps why they were not there. Most of our photographers were based in new york. We had some in washington, too. But we are talking about a time where we have most of the images from the 1940s on but we have yet to find bearden, the artist. Richard wright, w. E. B. Dubois. You know. Surprising. One of the first things we went to look for was Martin Luther king. Low hanging fruit. That. We know we shot him. I started with the most popular photo that i knew of him, which was a portrait that the times ran hundreds of times. I went back to reedit that film expecting to see a portrait series. When in fact, that was not the case. It turned out he was at a round table events. He was speaking. He left the event, and he was attacked, egged. The next day, there was a page one story at the top of the page about the attack. It happened in brooklyn and , there was no photo. The photograph they showed that day was the portrait. It didnt make sense for the story. It didnt run. When i opened up the pictures, it wasnt even a series of portraits. It was some distant shots of this roundtable event that the press photographer took. At the end of the event, they went home. And then the attack took place, and they were not there. They were not there. They had gone home already. I got my shot, im leaving. Epitomizes, sort of what happens when the press isnt there. I was going to say, in a way, that speaks to what at the time perhaps was deemed newsworthy. This was not a newsworthy picture. They probably rushed that portrait out. It was such a beautiful portrait. They rushed out, and it became o for 50 years. Were you able to find surprises even within what we would consider low hanging fruit . Part of what we wanted to look at was to think about how the choices were made. After all, these were amazing photos that had remained unpublished. Why . So, we have some photos of prominent people, and then we looked and we talk about well, why didnt this and we will show you some of these that was a lot of the exercise. Well why . , and there are many, many reasons why. We were a newspaper that was dominated by text. It was not the kind of newspaper that we are now. I think thats what the photo editor was saying. They were limited sometimes. Sometimes it was just practical, you only had so much space. Sometimes it was issue with getting film. And there were harder questions where we did wonder. Darcy is a photo editor. Researchers, reporters saying, why wasnt that person there . Were looking at the one that was published and saying, hmm. We were the institution at a time when american institutions were marginalizing people of color, so there was some of that. As you are speaking, i was wondering, did your research allow you to look as you were theorizing as to why some images were in and some were not, did you look at other publications like the Washington Post, l. A. Times, or others and see if they ran a different image of the same story . I did some research with the daily news imagery and amsterdam news imagery. The amsterdam was a black and white newspaper that covered everything and they had wonderful pictures. The daily news was a picture paper. I did not go through the Washington Post archives. I was looking more at the locals because we covered local stories. It was a different time. Again, the gray lady. Their stories were 400 words. Our stories were 1500. Their pages were stories. Hours was stories and ads. The advertising was taking up the art space on the page. Fascinating. I would love to see if we could go through some of the images and there may be some stories. Before we get into that, i would ask each of you, is there an image in this cooperative experience where you are working as a team, trying to get selections for the book, was there one that each of you would have loved to have in there that didnt make the cut that you would love to share with us . I know you talked about music. Its not a singular image, its a category for me. We had amazing coverage of music and jazz at the New York Times. They spent a lot of Energy Sending photographers to these events. And at the end of our ordering this book, we realized we had so much music that i had left some behind. I didnt want it to be strictly a book about that genre, but the collection of music photography is spectacular. That does beg the question, how did you go about ordering, organizing, figuring out . We didnt want a book that was going to be like, politics, music, sports. We did not want that. Part of the experience that was really wonderful for us as journalists was the discovery, really. We were looking. Sometimes we found stuff, sometimes we didnt. Sometimes we thought we didnt have it and then darcy did find it. I think we really wanted readers and viewers to have that sense of surprise. Each page you wanted something different. That is exactly how we found it. So, not chronologically. Not chronologically. We worried it would be too heavy in the 1960s if it was chronological. The point was really, i found this today, i found this today. I found nothing today, but tomorrow we will find something. I wanted the reader to experience that. I want the pages to turn and for people to be surprised. So, tell us what you found. Show us some of the things we found. Here we go. So, this is the opening of the book. This is 1971. This is an organization that was based out of new york. I am forgetting the acronym. They were doing good work in the new york area. They were angry with the New York Times that they were not covering the progress they were making in the community. They accused the New York Times of only writing stories about the negative, crime, violence, to some extent politics, but leaving out the positive contributions that black new yorkers were making. So, a big protest gathered at the old New York Times building on 43rd street. And a massive gathering happened out there. As the day went on, unfortunately, things turned violent. They lit trucks on fire. Police came. There were dozens of arrests. And this was all taking place in front of the office. The next day in the paper, there was a big two column remember, the times back then was a broadsheet, oversized paper. There was a big twocolumn story and no photograph. Yet nearly every single one of the Staff Photographers had gone out there that day. This blew my mind. There must have been 40 or 50 rolls of film from this event, and not a single image made the paper. And it was so unbelievably violent. After this whole thing, a dialogue happened between the times and the organization, there were promises to be better, and change was at least promised at that point. But it was fascinating that something so violent happened and the public never got to see it. They got to read about it, and the story that was written was very, very detailed about the events of the day, i will give them that. It was true to the visuals, but why not the pictures . Do you suspect they did not want to read inscribed some sort of idea around urban decay and violence and that sort of thing . Actually, you could have run the first picture. Sometimes, Media Outlets were sensitive about criticism. There was an interesting debate to talk about this. There is always a protest in front of the New York Times or in front of the post, or any news organization. Does the times today run out there and cover it because they are protesting they dont like what the times said about israel and the middle east . No. Is that the same thing that happened back then. But the turn of events made it striking. I think today if they lit trucks on fire, we would go out there. I hope so. Who was the photographer . This, i believe, was artie brouwer. So, we are looking at lena horne in her apartment. For those of us who were writers, this was a really interesting project to work on, because normally at a newspaper, the photos come after. You know, we go out, we report, we say ok, we need this person photographed or this covered, this image or whatever. Sometimes it is a working collaboration with reporter at a photographer at the same time, but often the photographer comes after we have done some leg work. This photograph was the main event. This was the point of departure. We had these images and had to look at them and say, what story is there here. This was an article that ran about lena horne and her new variety show that was coming up. So it was an interview with her, and the photo that ran was a little headshot photo of her. Her face looking straight on. There is this wonderful photo, what is the story to tell here . In the article, she mentions it was around christmas time, and she was talking about how hard it was to find an apartment. It was hard for lena horne to find an apartment . I want to report on that. No, i do. I did. It was the 1950s, 1960s, and lean award, one of the most celebrated actresses and singers in the country, was a black woman who was having a hard time finding an apartment in new york city. How she found it was a great story. It started with harry belafonte, who could also not find an apartment in new york city, even know he had broken every record, even though he was the first black artist to break one million albums. He was so fed up he sent his white publicist to sign the paperwork, and when he arrived, the building manager was really mad. He told them, you guys have got to leave. So harry got really mad and he bought the building. And he invited his friends in, lena ended up with the apartment. [laughter] rachel that is what a lot of these stories were like. It is the image, but the history told us something about rhea rachel, what was your inclination to do a deeper dive . Rachel we wanted to tell the story behind the photo. We were trying to tell the story of the moment in the photo. In this photo, she looks at ease. She does not look like she is performing in any way. She looks at home, and running this photo with the print, you think it would have been the natural choice. But they said they went with the headshot because they did not have enough space. Darcy this is a contact sheet that i found. James baldwin was on our list. We ran frame number 19, the third column down, they ran it as the headshot. When i found this object, i saw it not as a singular photograph, i saw it almost as a movie. I brought this with me, and immediately the idea was, we are going to depict this whole thing. If you look, it is just amazing. You can imagine the photographer, click, click. It is like a mini motion picture. The many moods of baldwin. It is beautiful. Rachel it shows his animated passion and personality through this whole thing. Darcy i wanted to give readers of the series the opportunity to see the photos the way the photo editor saw them. Why did they choose frame 19 . I wouldve gone for the one down in the bottom, where he has the cigarette in his mouth. It is so expressive. They went with the one smiling, the second column, that is the one they ran. Rachel no, it is the third one, first row. [laughter] darcy right, first row. His eyes are shut, to me, it said the photographer had three minutes with him and was determined to capture him. I think he captured him better in this contact sheet more than any singular frame. And so in doing the research about which story to tell, i started reading. His face captured me and i started doing research. I realized that he had grown up with this complicated relationship with his own face, he grew up being told he was ugly. Rachel he really internalized that and struggled with it for a lot of his life. It is so hard for me, when you see James Baldwin that is the last thing you think of. And it spoke to me about africanamericans and how we internalize some of these ideas about how we look. Standards of beauty, which he wrote about in many of his essays and grappled with. Here you see all of the beautiful expressions in his face and life. Darcy the next series i wanted to show you was by our