Reading Pictures

“Stare. It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eaves-drop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”

—Walker Evans, ca. 1960

Looking is hard work. For many of us, sight is the most obvious tool we use to experience our world; it feels easy, automatic, almost like breathing. But to look—to take time, to probe, to take seriously the ways in which images shape our worldview—is a different matter.

As children, we are taught to read words when we are only a few years old. And yet, modern technologies make it so that we are increasingly inundated by pictures more than text, be it on our screens, in print media, as family photographs, or as advertisements. Moving through the world, it is tempting to merely glance at the pictures we encounter, letting them coalesce into a sort of landscape or wave that washes over us and passes us by. But pictures are made by people, and so often convey the ideals, biases, and political views of their makers. However subconsciously, the images that we see every day combine to shape our own biases and political views. “What you see often becomes a part of your memory,” explains Ana-Christina Ramón, the assistant director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, “and thus a part of your life experience.”

When we look closely and think about what we see, it allows us to be less immediately manipulated by the visual rhetoric of the media that we consume. But as with any good book, reading images closely can bring us an immense sense of pleasure and empathy. Imagine standing in front of your favorite painting, and taking the time to think about what emotions or forms its brush strokes evoke. Try to imagine what the artist was thinking and feeling when she put the brush to canvas, and where she was standing; think about what the painting conveys about the era or place in which it was made. With these thoughts, we do not lose sight of the work’s initial beauty. Rather, we can take in this beauty, or pain, or anger and confusion, while also asking ourselves what it is that allows the art to make us feel so strongly. We can come to the work with a sense of humility, but also thoughtfully.

I’m going to walk you through some questions I ask myself when I first look at a photograph, painting, or illustration, in the hopes that you will continue to look closely at the pictures that you encounter—be it in the museum, or on your phone’s screen. For example: 

[Buddhist temple, Terminal Way, Terminal Island, Los Angeles, 1932-33]; by Anton Wagner, CHS, PC 017

First, take a minute or two to really look closely at every part of the photograph. What do you see? I find it helpful to speak out loud, or at least to organize my thoughts into coherent sentences so that I don’t miss anything; language helps me to process what I’m seeing. No observation is too small or too obvious. In this photograph, I see four little girls standing on a dirt road. The girls stand in front of two buildings, one built in a midcentury American ranch style, and the other built in an Asian architectural style and surrounded by a fence with an elaborate entryway. On the left hand side of the image, I see a large white water tower on big metal stilts. On the right, a tree leans into the frame. The trees, combined with the fluttering of the girls’ hair and coats, suggest that it was windy out that day. There are statues in the garden behind the fence, and telephone poles in the distance. In fact, one telephone pole leads my eye to another building that I didn’t initially see.

What is the image made of? This work is obviously a photograph; knowing what I know about photography, I know that it is a black and white gelatin silver print. This information can help me to determine when the image was made: gelatin silver prints were most commonly made between 1900-2000, which is a fairly broad range, though we have other context clues to help us determine the date, such as clothing and architecture styles. If I can hold the image, I like to think about who else might have held it, and why, and how it might have circulated or travelled. This photograph could have been a family photograph, or a journalist’s image, or a photograph made by a documentarian. Maybe it was stored in an album, or printed in the newspaper.

If I’m looking at a photograph, I ask myself where the photographer was standing when they took the picture, and why. In this case, the answer is not particularly complicated: the photographer is standing in the road, and photographs the children from an angle. But this simple observation can actually tell something about the photographer’s intentions. Why didn’t they take the photograph head on, and from a closer vantage? What does the angle afford us that a more direct composition would lose? And what do we lose from this perspective?

However simple, the last question can tell me so much about this picture and the person who made it. I can guess that because the photograph is not a close up view of these children’s faces, it was composed specifically to show them in the context of their surroundings. Rather than frame the image so that we can only see the Asian-style building, however, the photographer chose to juxtapose it against the adjacent ranch-style house and water tower, both of which suggest to me that the photograph was taken in the United States. This isn’t a close up portrait of four children; it’s a photograph of four children shown living in a diverse neighborhood, likely in the United States. Their clothing and the architecture surrounding them suggest that this photograph was made before or during World War II. They look like they are of Japanese descent, which makes me wonder if they were impacted by Executive Order 9066. I think about the immigrant experience in the United States, now and throughout this country’s history; I think about my grandfather who was detained by the United States government during World War II because he was an Italian immigrant, and how he never told his children, or spoke Italian in their presence.

You can see here how an unassuming image without any text or caption can still say so much.

I’ll show my hand, which is that we are fortunate to have some information about this photograph. The photograph is titled [Buddhist temple, Terminal Way, Terminal Island, Los Angeles, 1932-33], and was taken by the German photographer Anton Wagner. As an art historian, I’m lucky when I have this much information to go off of: knowing the photographer allows me to probe deeper into his background and intentions, and the title can tell me so much, not least the fact that the building shown is a Buddhist temple, and that the photograph was taken ca. 1932-33 on Terminal Island—a Japanese American fishing community that, as it happens, was the first to be evacuated following Executive Order 9066. But I believe that pictures can tell us so much more than any caption can.

My last piece of advice is to try to look with a close but curious eye. Pictures do not exist solely as a record of the past, or as a container of information and data. A picture is not a question to be answered; we do not look so that we can be “right.” We look because photographs and works of art have things to tell us about what it felt like to live in an earlier time, and about how we relate to people with whom we have seemingly little in common—be it these four little girls, or a painter, or a sculptor living in Athens in 500 BCE. They allow us to admit just how much we don’t know, and to feel vulnerable when they elicit emotion. I believe that looking closely at pictures make us more human, in increasingly technological times.

--

Written by Natalie Pellolio, Assistant Curator at California Historical Society

Pioneering Black Urbanites in San Francisco and Los Angeles

In the 1850s the new medium of photography, along with written and oral transmissions sent all over the United States, began to shape impressions of the new state of California and its two most prominent and rapidly growing cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles. As this new visual, oral, and textual image making was occurring, African Americans such as Mifflin W. Gibbs and Robert Owens were negotiating their rights as citizens to shape the region’s development as they pursued greater opportunities for economic advancement, social freedom, equity, and self-reinvention in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively.

Like many white Americans, Gibbs and Owens were lured to the state for its opportunities and “the good life” imagery produced by writers, painters, and photographers, and used by various boosters promoting migration to the state. The stories and imagery of Gibbs, Owens and other African Americans who participated in various phases of the western migration and settlement continue to remain largely absent from the dominant mythologies and history surrounding the western migration, notwithstanding investigations of the black West published during the last 50 years.

Although slavery was not allowed, the 1850 California constitution limited voting and the right to testify in court to whites, excluding African Americans, Native Americans, and Asians despite the fact that —San Francisco, the gateway to California—was one of the most racially and ethnically diversity cities in the world. By 1860, 75% of the black population in the North American West would reside in California, mostly in the northern part of the state. By 1900, this distribution would change and Los Angeles would become home to the largest black population center in the North American West. Despite their nominal freedom in California and racially discriminatory legislation they confronted, African Americans found refuge in western urban life which was abundantly more congenial than the places they left behind.

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (1823-1915) 

Mifflin Wistar Gibbs (1823-1915). A black entrepreneur and civic activist in California and the North American West.

Born to a free black family in Philadelphia, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs’ life experience in his formative years, carpentry training, a literary society education he gained with the successful businessmen, leaders, and elites of the black Philadelphia community appear to have provide him with a good foundation for his life. After developing as a self-employed carpenter and contractor, voting rights activist, and member of the anti-slavery movement which included public speaking engagements with William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass, in 1849, Gibbs realized he was at a crossroads in his young adult life. In 1850 he sailed to San Francisco from New York to join the gold seekers in northern California. Gibbs joined many other black men who immigrated to California from New York and Massachusetts that year, all of whom would become involved with resolving black issues across the state. In the antebellum period these men and others—including Robert Owens and his family—comprised the first voluntary African American migrants to the West. These black Americans migrating to California from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1940s would have been courageous, ambitious, resourceful, and adventurous.

After arriving in San Francisco, Gibbs worked as a bootblack. Though trained as a carpenter, he could not find work because white employees on these jobs refused to work with him. He eventually partnered with Peter Lester, an expert bootmaker and fellow Philadelphian who Gibbs had known from abolitionist movement work, in a successful retail and wholesale business called Pioneer Boot and Shoe Emporium at 638 Clay Street. Servicing patrons from Oregon into Mexico’s Lower California, the successful venture sold fine boots and shoes imported from Philadelphia, London and Paris.

Book cover of Shadow and Light: An Autobiography by Mifflin Wistar Gibbs. He was a black entrepreneur and civic activist in California and the North American West

By 1856, Gibbs co-founded the Mirror of the Times, the first black-owned newspaper in California and west of St. Louis. As a leading member of San Francisco’s black community, he became an influential voice in the fight for African American freedom and full civil rights. Gibbs and Lester found good financial opportunities in San Francisco, he recounts in his autobiography, Shadow & Light (1902), but they continued to contend with ostracization, assaults where they had no redress, disenfranchisement and were denied the right to vote, sit on a jury or testify in a court of law. In the 1850s, he became a leader of the statewide California Colored Conventions, the first organized, civil rights protest and petition campaigns in the West with the goal to overturn the discriminatory laws that had been passed by the California legislature since 1849. Although not successful, regionally and nationally, Gibbs and his fellow travelers helped raise the social political consciousness about black and other nonwhite groups’ struggles for equality, civil rights, and the benefit of just government. The discriminatory laws and the increasing hostility towards black Californians during this era pushed Gibbs to join a mass migration of African Americans from San Francisco to Victoria, British Columbia in 1858. Once there, they developed businesses and supplied labor during the Cariboo Fields gold rush near the Fraser River. Significant resolution of the discrimination issues occurred in the 1860s due to California and federal legislation, and African Americans’ emancipation at the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Cover of the Proceedings of the First State Convention of the Colored Citizens of the State of California held in Sacramento, CA November 20-22, 1855. At the first statewide Colored Conventions in Sacramento in 1855 and 1856 (followed by San Francisco in 1857), in addition to other objectives, black Californians pushed for reform in the court testimony laws for nonwhites. Education and a black press were also discussed intensely at the Convention in 1856. In the first two Conventions, Thomas Rix (or Thomas J. Ricks) was appointed to collect signatures in Los Angeles County.

Robert Owens (abt. 1806-1865)

As Gibbs was settling in and exiting San Francisco, Robert Owens and his family were thriving in Los Angeles. Born enslaved in Texas, Robert Owens earned money to purchase his freedom along with that of his wife Winnie, and their three children: Sara Jane, Martha, and Charles P. They migrated to Los Angeles and became residents in 1852-1853. Initially in Los Angeles, Owens worked odd jobs, and Winnie as a laundress. Eventually he won government contacts with the local U.S. Military post to supply cut wood, mules, and cattle that provided resources for him to open a livery stable and cattle sales venture that employed ten vaqueros (cowboys). Owens sold his products to the public on San Pedro Street, near what is today is known as the Little Tokyo neighborhood. He also invested in real estate throughout Southern California.

The Robert and Winnie Owens home became an early gathering place for religious, social, and business activities of the African American community in Los Angeles. Robert and Charles Owens, the Rowan family of San Bernardino, and white allies facilitated the important emancipation struggle of Bridget “Biddy” Mason (1818-1891) and her family. Fourteen people were freed from enslavement by a January 1856 court case overseen by Judge Benjamin Hayes in Los Angeles, unlike many other enslaved people who attempted to attain freedom through the courts and lost.

Robert Curry Owens with his wife Ann, and daughters Gladys and Manila L. in a 1905 in the Colored American magazine. Robert C. Owens was the child of Charles P. Owens and Ellen Mason Owens (later Huddleston after she remarried following Charles P.’s death in 1882). The Owens-Mason clan was one of the wealthiest and most influential African American families in Los Angeles from the 1850s to 1920s

Charles Owens (d. 1882) and Ellen Mason (b. 1838), the eldest children in their respective families, married shortly after Ellen was freed in August 1856. Their union bore two children, Robert Curry (b. 1858) and Henry L. (b. 1860). Charles saw to it that his wife Ellen and their sons received formal education in the public schools of California with the highly regarded African American leader and educator Jeremiah B. Sanderson in Oakland and Stockton. Charles worked with his father and carried on the family business ventures after Robert Owens died in 1865 at the age of 59. It was noted at the time of the elder Robert Owens’ death that he was respected by all sectors of the multiethnic and mixed race city, and considered the wealthiest African American in Los Angeles. Upon Charles’ death, his wife Ellen and son Robert Curry Owens carried on the family business in conjunction with her mother and his grandmother, Bridget “Biddy” Mason. The family would continue to reap financial gains in the Los Angeles real estate booms, and became one of the wealthiest and most prominent African American families in California and the West into the 1920s, with Robert C. Owens being described as the most influential black man in California and the West. By the early twentieth century, stories of the Owens-Mason clan’s business success and philanthropy had a favorable impact on attracting African American migrants seeking better lives from across the U.S. Despite racism and discriminatory obstacles from 1850 to the twenty-first century, successive members of the Owens-Mason clan have survived, thrived, and shaped Los Angeles, California, and the West to this day.

An early photograph of Los Angeles: Six men stand outside of the Magnolia Saloon at New High Street and Marchessault Street, Sonora Town, 1885-1887

The stories of Mifflin W. Gibbs and Robert Owens and his clan expand the narrative of California’s early statehood to include the diversity of people who contributed to its development and to American society. Their stories should become part of the collective memory of the nation.

Bibliography
Beasley, Delilah. The Negro Trail Blazers of California. Fairfield, CA: James Stevenson Publisher, Reprinted 2004.

Bond, J. Max .“The Negro In Los Angeles,. Ph.D. diss University of Southern California, 1936.

Campbell, Marne L. Making Black Los Angeles: Class, Gender, and Community, 1850-1917. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Daniels, Douglas Henry, with forward by Nathan Irvin Huggins. Pioneer Urbanites, A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

De Graaf, Lawrence B., Kevin Mulroy and Quintard Taylor, ed. Los Angeles/Seattle: Autry Museum of Western Heritage/University of Washington Press, 2001.

Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar, with an Introduction by Booker T. Washington and an Introduction to the Bison Books Edition by Tom W. Dillard. Shadow & Light, An Autobiography. 1902 edition inscribed by the author; Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books Edition, 1995.

Lapp, Rudolph M. Blacks in Gold Rush California. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977.

Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom, The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Taylor, Quintard. In Search of the Racial Frontier, African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998.

--

Written by Alison Rose Jefferson, MHC, Phd