Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People. Screened at FADA FILM.

Renee Cox, Yo mama's Pieta, 1996 photograph. courtesy the artist.

FADA Film screens Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People (formerly entitled "Reflections in Black") 

Image above, Artist Photographer Rene Cox - www.reneecox.org.

Date:     Thursday 26 March.

Time:     18:30 - 19:00.

Venue:   FADA Aphitheatre

Still from the documentary, Through a lens darkly.

Film Information

Through A Lens Darkly is a two-hour film that will explore the role of photography, since its rudimentary beginnings in the 1840s, in shaping the identity, aspirations, and social emergence of African Americans from slavery to the present.The dramatic arch is developed as a visual narrative that flows through the past 160 years to reveal black photography as an instrument for social change, an African American point-of-view on American history, and a particularized aesthetic vision .

Still from the documentary, Though a lens darkly.

Through A Lens Darkly is inspired by Dr. Deborah Willis's ground breaking book Reflections in Black.

Film Summary

Inspired by Deborah Willis’s book, Reflections in Black, THROUGH A LENS DARKLY (Willis is also a co-producer) casts a broad net that begins with filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris’s family album. It considers the difference between black photographers who use the camera to define themselves, their people, and their culture and some white photographers who, historically, have demeaned African-Americans through racist imagery. The film embraces both historical material (African-Americans who were slaves, who fought in the Civil War, were victims of lynchings, or were pivotal in the Civil Rights Movement) and contemporary images made by such luminaries as Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, and Carrie Mae Weems. The film is a cornucopia of Americana that reveals deeply disturbing truths about the history of race relations while expressing joyous, life-affirming sentiments about the ability of artists and amateurs alike to assert their identity through the photographic lens.

Thomas Allen Director of Through a lens Darkly receiving his award.

Director and Awards Information

Since Thomas Allen Harris’ January 2014 Sundance premiere of “Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People”, the film has been selected in over 30 Film Festivals and screened in over 40 theater venues, museums, film societies and universities, worldwide.

Thomas Allen Harris is honored to have received the NAACP Image Award for “Outstanding Documentary (Theatrical)” for “Through A Lens Darkly”!

We are also proud to announce the film’s selection by the or American Library Association (ALA) for their 2015 list of Notable Videos for Adults!

Finally, “Through A Lens Darkly” premiered on PBS national broadcast on February 16 on Independent Lens! 

Production

(Documentary) A First Run Features release of a Though a Lens Darkly and ITVS production in association with NBPC. Produced by Thomas Allen Harris, Deborah Willis, Ann Bennett, Don Perry. Executive producers, John Singleton, Kimberly Steward, Sally Jo Fifer, Jacquie Jones.

A narrative that traces from the 19th century to the 21st how African-Americans presented themselves in their own photos. 

Directed by Thomas Allen Harris. Written by Harris, Don Perry, Paul Carter Harrison, inspired by the book “Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present” by Deborah Willis. Camera (color/B&W, HD), Martina Radwan; editors, K.A. Millie, Matthew Cohn; music, Vernon Reid, Miles Jay; sound, J.T. Takagi, Juan Rodriguez; supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer/sound designer, Kent Brown.

With Deborah Willis, Lyle Ashton Harris, Carrie Mae Weems, Thomas Allen Harris, Hank Willis Thomas, Robin Kelly, Renee Cox.

Syracuse artist Carrie Mae Weems. SYRACUSE homepage, 2015.

The Artist Carrie Mae Weems, featured in the film (image above) had this to say about the documentary. 

Photographers, art historians and filmmakers will be the benefactors of the history exposed in "Through a Lens Darkly." "So it lays the groundwork, I think, for important stories and narratives that are to come. And that's kind of significant,” cited by Melinda Johnson, syracuse homepage, 2015.

REVIEWS

Mr. Harris’s film is a family memoir, a tribute to unsung artists and a lyrical, at times, heartbroken, meditation on imagery and identity. The film is always absorbing to watch, but only once it’s over do you begin to grasp the extent of its ambitions, and just how much it has done within a packed, compact hour and half… Mr. Harris marshals an impressive collection of scholars, artists and photojournalists to help us understand what we see… He is a wise and passionate guide to an inexhaustibly fascinating subject. Review by A.O. Scott, The New York Times - to read the full review.

A sweeping Gonzalez, The New York Times online

“An exhilarating approach to the history of representation. Presents a plethora of material triggering a re-evaluation of the visual history of the United States, as well as what we thought we understood about race, gender and sexuality. The connections (the filmmaker) draws are rigorous, intellectually challenging, and astonishingly moving.” Review by Bérénice Reynaud, Festival Reports 

The director Thomas Allen Harris at the Berlin Film Festival,
Cited FILM FILE February 2014.

Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People  A review by Dennis Harvey

This polished documentary chronicles the 'hidden images' captured by black photographers over 170 years.

A timely reminder of how images of African-Americans have been stereotyped and demonized by popular media, “Through a Lens Darkly” recounts the lengthy history of that misrepresentation while also celebrating the contrasting, oft-overlooked work of black photographers. Inspired by scholar/museum curator Deborah Willis’ 2002 tome “Reflections in Black,” a definitive study of those artists, ’ Thomas Allen Harris polished documentary feature makes its theatrical bow at New York’s Film Forum on Aug. 27. While bigscreen impact will be minor, classroom and educational broadcast life will be long.

As first-person narrator, veteran photographer/filmmaker Harris initially appears to be imposing a gratuitous autobiographical element on a much larger story, stressing the “hurt and shame of absence” brought on by his father’s early abandonment as a microcosm of blacks’ marginalization from mainstream American history. But he soon turns over the mic to many other relevant voices and ballasts his own, as we realize his family (at least on his mother’s side) had devoted to chronicling itself via photographs going back many generations. Preserved in family albums, these images of upwardly mobile dignity were  —as Willis found in her career-long, broader research — an antithesis to popular “darkie” stereotypes.

The latter are vividly recalled in montages of offensive advertisements, films, staged “humorous” shots, et al., which depicted blacks as buffoons, criminals and/or savages. A particularly appalling section flashes back to the lengthy vogue for grisly lynching, in which charred, mutilated and hung corpses are shown, usually surrounded by gloating white vigilantes and spectators. Incredibly, these constituted a cottage industry for some years, being sold and treated like novelty postcards.

But the primary focus here is on the contrasting legacy of black photographers, which Harris and Willis trace back as far as a Cincinnati daguerrotype maker of the 1840s, whose customers included well-to-do black families and white abolitionists. Those who followed usually served the black community exclusively, capturing formal portraits of middle-class respectability and accomplishment that were a far cry from the more popular “race” imagery ofthe day. Activist leaders like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois (who curated an exhibit of photographed African-American life at a Parisian World’s Fair) stressed the importance of a dignified personal presentation, even if that meant copying the demeanor and dress of the white bourgeoisie.

There are brief portraits here of several star shutterbugs, from Harlem Renaissance chronicler James Van Der Zee to Gordon Parks (whose work for Life and Vogue magazines was a major glass-ceiling-breaker) and Roy DeCarava. The chronological narrative doesn’t extend much past the civil rights era; instead, the pic weaves in commentary throughout from modern artists in various media (including Carrie Mae Weems and Renee Cox) whose work often appropriates and reinterprets the inflammatory African-American depictions of the mainstream yore. The point, as ever, is for to “the Negro … to find some image of himself or herself that is not demeaning,” as James Baldwin put it a half-century ago.

Though a tad uneven, as a whole the documentary cannily juggles an overview of African-American history in general with the specifics of its photographic representation and talents. Harris sometimes echoes the work of his late mentor Marlon Riggs (“Tongues Untied”) in poetic editorial rhythms, while elsewhere hewing to a more straightforward PBS-style approach.

Images featured on the blog post is courtesy of 1World1Family - Join the Family!,  a national project to connect communities and history through our family photographic archives.