The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum John Shearer exhibition brochure

Shearer

John Shearer: America (Continued)

June 27, 2010 – January 2, 2011

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Aldrich exhibitions director Richard Klein conducted the following interview with the artist on May 21, 2010. Richard Klein: Let’s go back to the beginning; what first got you interested in photography? John Shearer: My dad was a good friend of Gordon Parks. One day Parks drives up to my parent’s house in a Jaguar—I was twelve or thirteen years old—and I wanted to know who this guy was. Dad says, “He’s a photographer,” and I immediately wanted to meet him. I was already taking pictures at the time, and I set up an appointment to show him my photos. He tore them all up, except for one! My main thing that Parks passed on to me was the importance of not only looking at photographs, but also reading about photography. The reading had the added benefit of leading me to also become a writer. RK: Were you interested in documentary photography from the start of your career? JS: I gravitated immediately to the documentary tradition, as expressed by the work of artists such as Cartier-Bresson and Eugene Smith. I was always interested in people, and of course the beginning of my career coincided with the high point of the civil rights movement. My mother was an incredibly important influence on the direction my photography was to take. She was a criminal lawyer—the young-est person to ever graduate from St. John’s Law School—and she later became the Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Social Services for Westchester County. She was a real crusader, very outspoken on issues of human rights. RK: You were incredibly young—seventeen—when you were hired as a staff photographer for LOOK magazine. Tell me about that time. JS: It was well into the 1960s, and the cauldron of America was really bubbling over. The press had great concern about sending white photographers into black neighborhoods, so I became a solution to that problem! It worked the other way too: if the editors wanted to put a confrontational spin on a story that dealt with

John Shearer: America (Continued)

racial issues, they would send a black photographer into a situation where there were angry or concerned white people in order to provoke a stronger reaction. RK: This exhibition consists of twenty-eight recent photographs (mostly taken in the last seven years), bracketed by two large mural-sized images. Tell me about these two photographs. JS: They act as bookends to the other photographs. The title of the exhibition is America (Continued) and I wanted the show to express both the continuity of my career and the continuing struggle for social justice in this country. The primary theme expressed in the recent work in this show is immigration, which seems to have become—at least in the eyes of the media—the primary social justice issue in the United States today; but certainly the same issues that fueled human rights activism forty years ago are still with us. The large photo immediately on the right as you enter the gallery is a new montage I made of images from the civil rights era from earlier in my career. Entitled American Struggle (1965–2010), it includes images from the King funeral, George Jackson’s funeral, the Black Panthers that were connected to the Algiers Motel incident during the Detroit riots in 1967, and the famous Altamont Speedway concert in northern California in 1969. RK: Who is the man looking through the small window of the second large photograph? JS: It is an image of Horace Wilcox, a black man who spent five years in prison in Prichard, Alabama, for being unjustly accused of rape. Everything that hap-pened to him for five years happened through that window. Because of the scale of this photograph in the show—it’s close to life size—it reads not so much as a window you’re looking into, but rather an actual window in the wall that Wilcox is looking through into the gallery and at you—the viewer. RK: Tell me about the recent photographs in the exhibition. JS: The central image in the show for me is the young man with the stop sign above his head. It was taken in South Norwalk (Connecticut) at “the Nest,” a

location where day laborers gather looking for work. I think it summarizes the contradictory situation that people with-out papers find themselves in—living here as functioning, productive members of society, yet being held at arm’s length. The man in the photograph is Guatemalan, and like many of the other day laborers I’ve photographed I found him to be incredibly alive but extremely afraid. RK: In what other communities were these photographs taken? JS: Mostly Westchester County in New York and neigh-boring Fairfield County in Connecticut. I didn’t have to go far for some of the images—the fellow on the roof with the nail gun is putting a new roof on my house! Once again, he’s Guatemalan, and he’s been in this country illegally for twen-ty years, working for a local contractor and sending much of his pay back to his family. He has no insurance, and he’s never been back home. He’s never been able to get traction for citizenship, but he helps other immigrants in the same situation by informally—but with great regularity—teaching them English. RK: Tell me about the portrait of the woman wearing the green beret.

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JS: It was taken in Yonkers during the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. She was born in Ireland and life for her had been hard—she’d recently been struggling with employment and insurance issues. Westchester County is an amazingly diverse place. You have the wealthy suburban towns, and then you have tough, inner-city neighborhoods in places like Yonkers, Port Chester, and Mt. Vernon that have lit-erally dozens of different ethnic and racial communities living in close proximity. These cities don’t have the resources they need for education and basic services. RK: You seem to make a point of connecting with your subjects on the personal level that is remarkable, particularly because you usually only are with them for a very short period of time. JS: I’ve always described what I do as “picture stories.” That is, capturing an image of an individual that somehow tells a complete story about them. I often get to know people intimately and then never see them again. I’ll tell you a story: I went with my wife to see the film The Bridges of Madison County when it came out and I ended up weeping through the entire film. I totally related to the charac-ter played by Clint Eastwood—a documentary photographer who has a brief, intense affair with a woman he never meets again while on assignment. The story of connecting and then moving on is something that has been endlessly repeated in my career. RK: In looking at this country through the lens of a camera for almost fifty years, what has changed? JS: The United States is currently involved in two wars, yet many seem oblivious to it. The difference between now and the 1960s is the draft. I believe that the draft more than any other factor contributed to the social unrest and political changes during the Vietnam period. The draft forced people to make a choice—both black and white people—and to ask some hard questions about what you believed, and what your priorities were. When the draft ended it started the long period of complacency that resulted in the situation we find ourselves in today. With the election of Obama we have “our man” in the White House, but I think this fact is just a milepost on a long journey. Despite all the problems we have I’m actually very hopeful. I look at my children and their friends, and these kids don’t think about race and discrimination the way we did—they are much more open

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and accepting to differences. RK: You are now playing with adding and subtracting color to your photographs. Tell me about this. JS: Of course when I started most photojournalism was black and white. I first really worked with color in 1970 and ’71 when I was on assignment doing a piece about street gangs in the South Bronx. Color was such a huge part of this culture I felt like I needed to use it. The result was what I call “monochromatic color,” very subtle and subdued. In the early 1970s the fastest color film was ASA 160, which presented many limitations on where and what a photographer could shoot. My decision to now judi-ciously use color is in part to resolve this history of black and white versus color. The new digital technology gives one the tools to alter color in every conceivable way, and it makes you realize what a mutable thing color is. RK: Is there any connection between your belief in this mutability of col-or and race itself? Race seems to be an extremely mutable thing. JS: Hmmm … that’s interesting. I never thought about it that way, but I think you’re right on a certain level. My main interest in adding and sub-tracting color is for emotive reasons, to help move the feelings inherent in an image forward somehow. RK: Most of these images are governed by feeling—they have a certain emotional idealism. JS: When all is said and done, that’s what life is all about, isn’t it?

John Shearer was born in New York City in 1947 and attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and the School of Visual Arts. In addition to being a renowned photographer, Shearer is also a noted director, children’s book author, lecturer, and professor. Initially a staff photogra-pher for LOOK magazine from 1966–1969, he became the second African-American staff photog-rapher for LIFE magazine in 1968, subsequently providing major documentation of both the Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier “Fight of the Century,” and the Attica Prison riot. Shearer has won 175 national photography awards, and his work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, IBM Galleries, and Eastman Kodak. He was a founder of the Photography and Design Program at Columbia University’s School of Journalism and a senior lecturer from 1972–1986.

Works in the ExhibitionAll dimensions h x w in inches

American Struggle, 1965–2010Ink jet print on low-tack adhesive vinyl mounted on wall96 x 106 1/4

Prichard, Alabama, 1972Ink jet print on low-tack adhesive vinyl mounted on wall96 x 129

America (Continued) Series, 1972–2010Archival digital prints on rag paper28 photographs from the ongoing series:12 images 21 x 14 each16 images 14 x 21 each

All works courtesy of the artist

The Museum is grateful to Connecticut Photographics, Danbury, CT, for supporting the production

of the large-scale digital prints included in this exhibition.

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