Bob Adelman (and other Civil Rights photographers)

Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s played a pivotal role in promoting change and acceptance of change through the United States.  These photographers were responsible for creating the visual material that would enlist supporters of the civil rights movement.  "Observers in the 1960s and historians in the decades since have consistently credited news photographs of attack dogs and water hoses in Birmingham with wielding a unique power over white America. The images are lauded for generating white liberal sympathy in the north for the plight of black protestors in the south, for hardening northern resolve against the excesses of the racist Jim Crow system and providing President Kennedy and Congress the political cover to push long-stalled civil rights legislation." (Martin, 2010)

So many of these photographs worked to increase awareness of the mistreatment, segregation, racism, and inequalities of African Americans in the 1960s.  Some of these photos generated financial support for the movement, as well as legal and press support. 

In addition to playing such a large role in the movement while it was happening, civil rights photography continues to be the primary source for current communal memory of the civil rights movement.  "Today's memory of civil rights movement culture - probably more so than the cultural memory of any social movement before - is largely based on mediated images: photographs, television, and documentary film footage." (Miller, p.107)

Bob Adelman was a prominent civil rights photographer, responsible for taking many of the most memorable and iconic images from the movement.  Adelman collaborated with the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to create and distribute powerful images that promoted the civil rights movement and fight for equality.  This collaboration targeted the hearts and sympathies of white America.  "In effect, within a political landscape that received its dynamite from the power of the mediated image, "taking action" meant delivering "ready-mades" of history to a public starving to be fed with sensation and in which political stances were severely influenced by visual and televised documents." (Miller, p.108)

Photographers of the civil rights movement, similar to war photographers, acted as the primary mediators for transmitting images to the general public.  However, while these images did generate sympathy and support from white Americans, this support was easily given at a distance from the white Americans in the North when viewing images of the protests and rallies in the South.  Once the demonstrations moved up to the North, white Americans who had felt sympathy and rage at the brutal treatment of blacks in the South, were forced to face their own institutionalized and deep seated personal racism.  

"Photographs read in isolation illustrated racism as an interpersonal problem – evil white officials and mobs inflicting injury on innocent blacks – and this obscured the structural inequalities that benefited whites in the south and north. And in picturing "racists" as the most violent southern thugs, the photographs let northern whites imagine their own politics as progressive, or at least humane, never challenging them to examine their systems of belief. The absence of any meaningful social or historical context allowed whites to "feel" for blacks, untroubled by their own stake in a racially oppressive system. The images could then generate sympathetic reactions and incremental reforms for blacks without disturbing the underlying racial values that allowed social inequalities and even violence to continue." (Berger, pg.14)

Bob Adelman and other photographers of the civil rights movement were essential in the success of the fight for equality and human rights.  They documented an historic time in the United States and their iconic photographs created a strong momentum toward acceptance of equality and the civil rights movement.

Resources:

Martin A. Berger, "Fixing Images: Civil Rights Photography and the Struggle Over Representation," RIHA Journal 0010 http://www.riha- journal.org/articles/2010/berger-fixing-images 

http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4126/bronx-museum-revisits-the-civil-rights-movement#.UWdIxM127DU

Zoe Trodd. "Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (review)." Journal for the Study of Radicalism 6.2 (2012): 149-151. Project MUSE. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Miller, Patrick B., Therese Steffen, and Elisabeth Wünsche. The civil rights movement revisited: critical perspectives on the struggle for racial equality in the United States. Münster: Lit ;, 2001.

http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=2K1HZOCFJEOUT