PIRKLE JONES
Seven Decades Photographed A film by Jane Levy Reed
Pirkle Jones' work helped define the San Francisco Bay Area’s dual photographic traditions of elegant landscape imagery and biting social documentation. Although Jones is widely acknowledged in both pursuits, his message, whether delivered in a quiet, underrated way or in a bold statement, is political.
The film reveals some 150 of Jones’s finely crafted black-and-white photographs. Interweaving archival footage with recent interviews, the thirty-minute documentary allows the photographer to tell his story, beginning with his childhood in Ohio and his first encounter with San Francisco in transit to World War II’s Pacific Theater. In 1947, the GI Bill allowed him to return to San Francisco to pursue his passion for photography at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he studied with Ansel Adams and Minor White, and where he taught until 1994. Jones continued photographing until the age of 91 and passed away in 2009.
In 1956, Jones and Berkeley photographer Dorothea Lange were commissioned by Life magazine to document the last year of the Berryessa Valley, northeast of San Francisco, which was to be flooded by a new dam constructed to quench the thirst of California’s growing population. Although the Death of a Valley project was not published at the time, its completion confirmed Jones’s understanding that the simple act of taking a photograph is political; his images, carefully composed from corner to corner, have a somber tone that acknowledges the import of the facts they depict. That they consistently involve the viewer in the social circumstances of their making underlines the strength of Jones’s vision.
The approach Jones established with Lange continued through two collaborative projects he undertook with his wife, Ruth-Marion Baruch. The first, Walnut Grove: Portrait of a Town(completed in 1964), documented a small agricultural community in the Sacramento River Delta and its inhabitants. The second resulted in the exhibition A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers, presented at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco in 1968. In the film, Jones talks about the tenseness he felt in the crowds he and Ruth-Marion photographed at Black Panther political rallies, the apprehension they felt about taking the pictures, and the decision to continue. The photographer’s comments are supplemented with an interview with Kathleen Neal Cleaver, then the director of communications for the Black Panther Party and married to Eldridge Cleaver, who talks about how the Panthers recognized that these solemn yet dignified pictures were made by photographers who had a sense of caring and pathos about what they were seeing. After following Jones through a series of personal projects, including two striking images of the same oak tree on a hillside in Marin County—composed identically yet taken twenty-five years apart—the film ends with a series of landscape photographs he made on Mt. Tamalpais. These images are much quieter than his earlier work, yet they still contain the elegiac moment that is embedded in almost all of his photographs.
He was a silent witness to the world around him.
Black Panthers at Free Huey Rally, Bobby Hutton Memorial Park, Oakland, September 22, 1968; Sunset District and Pacific Ocean, San Francisco, 1951; Bracero's outside Lee's Market, from Walnut Grove: Portrait of A Town, 1961
©2011-2012 JLRfilm