Studio Session: From the Pictorial to the Political
January 2008
Only once in the 76 years since he first picked up a Brownie box camera as a teenager in Ohio has Pirkle Jones withdrawn his finger from the shutter, reluctantly letting go a photo he desired. "In the ’70s, I saw a fortune teller at a flea market," he recalls. "She said that she’d put a curse on me for the rest of my life if I took her picture. So I didn’t."By then, Jones, who is now 93, was accustomed to difficult subjects. He’d photographed Southern California ranchers evicted from their homesteads and the Black Panthers under siege. These revealing images owed their technical prowess to his training under Ansel Adams, yet the psychological acuity of his pictures was self-taught, emerging from his compassion for those in front of his lens.
Jones’s integrity is palpable, as is his earnestness. He has the round face and flat accent of a Midwestern farmer. Dressed in a plaid shirt, shorts and knee-high socks, he pads around his Northern California house leaning lightly on a walker, reminiscing about the camera clubs that first showed his finely toned pictorialist compositions in the ’30s, describing how the honorable mentions he amassed bolstered his confidence as a hobbyist. By 1941, when he enlisted in the Army, his photographs had been published and exhibited around the world. "In the back of my mind, I thought I might like to continue in photography after the war," he says, easing into a chair.
The opportunity came in the form of the G.I. Bill and a new department at the California School of Fine Arts, run by a man whose name he’d seen more than once in pictorialist salons. Ansel Adams founded the college’s first photography program in 1946, with assistance from fellow luminaries Imogen Cunningham, Minor White and Dorothea Lange. Instead of returning to his prewar job at a shoe factory in Lima, Ohio, Jones began taking classes in San Francisco. "It was like starting all over again," he says. "I had never handled a view camera, and Ansel was a disciplinarian. Once we were complaining about not having enough time to finish an assignment. He asked how many minutes it took us to shave in the morning."
When he wasn’t goading his students, Adams would take his class to Carmel, where they’d visit Edward Weston, another major inspiration for Jones. "I was impressed by Weston’s environment, the simplicity of his life, quite the opposite of Ansel’s," Jones recalls. Ruth-Marion Baruch, a young student writing her dissertation on Weston (and taking classes with Adams), also impressed Jones, enough that they were married in 1949. "I was attracted to her because she owned half a dozen of Edward’s pictures, and, you know, one thing led to another," he says, momentarily losing his loquaciousness, if not his humor.
Their wedding was in Adams’s Yosemite home. By then, Jones was Adams’s assistant, traveling with him on assignments and printing his negatives. Jones also had his own commercial work, including a job documenting the construction of the Paul Masson winery in Saratoga, California. As the project evolved, the owners of Masson considered a full-scale exhibition. Adams joined Jones as a collaborator, and their combined vision of a vineyard rising up on the California landscape traveled, with acclaim, to the Smithsonian. "People like wine," he says.
A more meaningful project for the young photographer showed the California dream from a rather different perspective, documenting the consequences of relentlessly expansive cultivation: In 1956, Jones and Dorothea Lange traveled to the Berryessa, Valley one year before the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation flooded the farmland to make a massive reservoir. Lange had secured an assignment for Life magazine, and initially asked Adams to work with her. Unhappy with the results of their previous collaboration in Utah, Adams demurred, recommending Jones, whose enthusiasm for the project has not diminished in five decades. "We were working against time," he says, his large eyes widening. "It was a one-shot deal, showing the change, and what it did to people." For 12 months they shot without a preconceived plan, witnessing a graveyard being overturned, houses burning, people leaving. Then the valley was drowned, and Life turned their essay down. "Those magazines, quite often they’d use one story in 10," Jones says, grateful now to have control over the photographs, which he believes have grown in impact. "They become a reference for historians and for people in general."Still, Pirkle Jones is unabashedly political, and has sought to have an impact in his own time, never more overtly than in his Black Panthers series of 1968. As before, he wasn’t the one to initiate it. This time his wife, with whom he’d collaborated previously on a portrait of a dying California town, befriended Kathleen Cleaver through their mutual involvement in the Peace and Freedom Party. "Ruth was going to Oakland to photograph a Panthers meeting," he recalls. "She wanted me to drive her. I asked if I could take my camera." Soon they were both deeply involved, not only photographing for a promised exhibition at San Francisco’s de Young Museum but also providing stacks of prints for the Panthers’ newspaper and political posters. "We will admit that we had positive feelings about the Panthers," Jones says. "That happens in photography. You take a stand." The position they took was controversial, unpopular with many people they knew. "Ansel didn’t like the idea. At one time he called Ruth and said, ‘You’d better not be with the Panthers; you’re going to be raped,’" Jones says. Moreover, cancellation of the show was threatened by museum trustees anxious about public reaction. Nobody, including Jones, expected it would draw 100,000 enthusiastic visitors.
The photography that Jones has done in the following quarter-century—before a stroke in the late ’90s left him without the strength to work independently—does not obviously connect to this politically charged series, for which he’s still most famous. "I think people are at a loss to identify what I do," he admits. "Many photographers are working toward a style. But there are so many things that interest me."
For several years, he photographed the notorious Gate 5 community in Sausalito, where a gathering of self-proclaimed drop-outs lived on houseboats, a group with whom Jones became increasingly involved in the early ’70s. "I was probably on the edge of staying there," he says in retrospect, "but I figured there was no future." Instead Jones spent his final productive years exploring the natural world surrounding his simple glass-and-redwood home, a dwelling hidden away in dense protected forest. While this late work appears to be a return to his pictorialist roots, he doesn’t view it that way. "I didn’t just want to do a pretty picture," he says. "I was trying to find my own place in nature. I was looking for myself."
Taken with a head emptied of pre-conceived ideas, almost in a trance, these mossy and marshy self-portraits reflect a photographic eye observant of broad patterns and specific details, of land and life. "I’ve always thought of my career as a bridge between the classic photography of Ansel Adams and the documentary work of Dorothea Lange," he says. Naturally, a bridge can be crossed both ways. In his house overlooking a trickling river, receiving visitors from around the world, Jones keeps both paths open to new generations of adventurous photographers.
Jonathon Keats is the art critic for San Francisco magazine.
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