Pirkle Jones’ photography focused on setting the scene while documenting the Black Panther movement during the summer of 1968. (Photo: Norton Museum of Art)
It’s a black-and-white thing.
Black Panthers. White photographers. Black-and-white photos. White curators.
The Norton Museum of Art’s new exhibit, “The Summer of ’68: Photographing the Black Panthers,” which opened Thursday, is as much a social project as an education.
What visitors will see is the culmination of a seven-week education for the museum’s annual summer interns — four young, white college women, who were tasked with organizing the exhibit and admitted feeling the pressure of presenting the work in its proper context.
And the exhibit is also an education for the Norton’s visitors, who will see the Black Panthers movement as a study in documentary photography and art through the eyes of two gifted art photographers, the husband-and-wife duo of Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch — both white, both of whom had lived through racial injustices in their own lives.
Ruth-Marion Baruch captured intimate portraits of the Black Panther members. (Courtesy Norton Museum of Art)
“These 22 photographs tell such an incredibly rich and detailed story,” said intern Claire Hurley, a rising junior at the University of Virginia. “We wanted them to be presented in such a way to tell that narrative.”
Jones grew up in Shreveport, La., and remembers his Atticus Finch-like father (the one from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” not “Go Set a Watchman”) recalling black men being lynched in the South. Baruch, a Berlin-born Jew, saw Nazism first hand as her family fled to New York in the 1920s.
And then the two of them studied under a genius of the literal black-and-white: landscape photographer Ansel Adams.
Together, they create their own landscape of the Black Panther movement.
FOR THE FULL STORY, READ SATURDAY’S PALM BEACH POST
IF YOU GO
“The Summer of ‘68: Photographing the Black Panthers”
Where: Norton Museum of Art, 1451 S. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach
When: The exhibit runs through Nov. 29.
More information: Call 561-832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.
