On October 25, 2018, on the occasion of the exhibition Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film In Chicago, 1950–1980, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted a public program titled “Photography and the Black Arts Movement.” The two-part event began with a conversation among artists Darryl Cowherd, Roy Lewis, Ozier Muhammad, and James Stricklin, moderated by Michal Raz-Russo, then the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was followed by a discussion about the lasting impact of the artists’ work by historian and author Romi N. Crawford; media executive and former editor of Ebony and Jet magazines Kyra Kyles; journalist and author Natalie Y. Moore; and artists Maria Gaspar and Tonika Johnson. Crawford, Johnson, and Moore have contributed essays expanding on their remarks to this digital catalogue.

The following is a transcript of the first conversation from that program. It has been edited for length and clarity and supplemented with additional content from conversations Raz-Russo conducted with Darryl Cowherd on December 13, 2016; Ozier Muhammad on March 14, 2017; and James Stricklin on March 20, 2017. This digital catalogue also includes a video recording of this conversation.

Michal Raz-Russo: When I spoke with Mikki Ferrill, who unfortunately couldn’t be here, she emphasized that seeing the work of an older generation of photographers who were working in her neighborhood is what got her interested in photography—the images of individuals like Ted Williams that weren’t necessarily circulated in newspapers and magazines but represented her community. She said that in her own work she was always drawn to the familiar and it took her years to figure out how to get comfortable photographing the unfamiliar. So, to start, I’d like to hear from the four of you about what drew you to photography and, specifically, to photographing your own community.

Darryl Cowherd: I’ve been thinking about my answer to this question because for me it’s a little complicated. I was twenty-one years old in 1961 when I took my first professional photograph. A convergence of things drew me into photography. I was at Roosevelt University in Chicago, not really enrolled in classes, so I was searching for something. I was in the throes of teaching myself calligraphy. And then I met Robert Earl Wilson, who became my friend and mentor and the person responsible for drawing me into photography. He went on to become the second Black photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago [in 1962]. This was when Hugh Edwards was the curator of photography.

Raz-Russo: And the first was Gordon Parks [in 1953].

Cowherd: That’s right. And once those things converged, I just fell hard in love with the camera. My mother and father were political. Not activists, but they were political. So my approach to photography initially, and what drew me to it, was its potential as a tool to express what was going on in my community in terms of politics and so on.

Raz-Russo: At that early point in your career as a photographer, you met other photographers such as Roy Lewis and Jim Stricklin, and you all created an informal group that thought through ideas and projects together. Roy, for example, mentioned meeting at fellow photographers’ houses, such as Bobby Sengstacke’s, and hosting visits from out-of-town photographers like Roy DeCarava. Tell us a little more about what it was like to be a part of that group, Roy.

Roy Lewis: The Chicago “school” developed out of the brothers who came before us. We called ourselves—I mean, I called myself—a street photographer, because I considered my studio out in the street. I still really do.

At the time, in the early 1960s, I worked at Johnson Publishing Company. I was never on staff, I was always freelance. But being in that environment, where you were actually seeing the work go from the darkroom to the cover of Jet or Ebony, to see that whole process that not a lot of people got to see, was important. The editors would give you an assignment, and they would make sure that you knew it was important. That inspired me to document what was going on in our community at the time, and we were all moving along those parallel lines.

It’s important to mention the love part of it. I think you just see the love for their community in the work. And, in turn, people felt they were seeing themselves in the photographs.

Raz-Russo: Jim, you were also drawn to photography through this network, but it led you to a different path.

James Stricklin: My introduction to the arts was primarily in high school. I had an art teacher who introduced me to the South Side Community Art Center [SSCAC], and that teacher was Margaret Burroughs. I was sort of a wild kid in high school, and Margaret Burroughs took a liking to me and I took a liking to her. When I went to the SSCAC I was taken by all that was going on, and I kept going. During one of my visits, in walked God—Gordon Parks walked through the door. And I thought to myself, I just met someone that’s doing the thing that I want to do for the rest of my life. And that’s how I got started looking through the eyepiece.

Some time later, a friend of mine gave me a little Kodak motion picture camera on a bet. I began making films of my wife, Joyce, while we were in Michigan, and fell in love with motion pictures. One Thanksgiving Day I was sitting on the couch and a show came on called Harvest of Shame, and I thought, I can do that, and I decided to pursue cinematography. But the [cinematographers’] union in Chicago was just impenetrable, and there was no way for me to get into the union.^[1]

My mentor in motion pictures was a guy named Gordon Weisenborn, a filmmaker who invited me to the studio, but I could not put my eye to the eyepiece or operate the camera because I was not in the union. So instead he gave me 16mm film and told me to go on location. The first assignment I got was in Cleveland, in an area called Hough.^[2] Gordon [Weisenborn] took that footage to the editor, and the rest is history.

Raz-Russo: Ozier, you also received your first photographic equipment from a photographer who became a mentor.

Ozier Muhammad: Yes, I got my first camera through a fellow named Bill Wallace, but we knew him by his chosen name, Onikwa [Mugwana]. I met Bobby Sengstacke through him, and he introduced me to Roy DeCarava. Bobby got us all together in his apartment, and he helped me get started. When I was in community college, I was floundering around trying to find myself and trying to figure out whether I could pursue photography. Bobby gave me the confidence that I could do it, and I owe a great deal to him. My cousin Hasan Sharif also helped make sure that I met other photographers, and got the right education, by encouraging me to attend Columbia College. 

It was a fervent time in politics, the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum, and once I had enough confidence to deal with the fundamentals of photography, I felt a sense of purposefulness. I was also a member of the Nation of Islam, so I got to know Gordon Parks because he was spending a lot of time in the Nation.

Raz-Russo: You mentioned that you saw his 1963 photo-essay about the Nation of Islam in Life magazine, and that was a huge influence.

Muhammad: Exactly. I saw Gordon working in our community, taking pictures of my family members, and when I saw the photographs themselves I thought, oh my god, this is just exquisite, a noble undertaking. I’d like to share something I came across in an obituary for a Dr. Hayden White that I think speaks volumes to what we do. He said “In history we don’t just remember the dead, we do their remembering for them. And that’s an awesome responsibility, but a necessary one.” To me that speaks volumes about what it means to choose photography and, for me, photojournalism: If I could somehow master the medium enough, perhaps I could effect some good outcome in the struggles that minorities have been making in this country for decades or centuries.

Raz-Russo: It seems that what all of you were responding to through your work was the ways in which Black America was represented and, further, how Chicago’s South Side was represented. A point that Darryl and Roy brought up when we walked through the exhibition was that so many of the photographs made by this network of photographers are portraits—not street scenes—but rather portraits of a community.

Lewis: I’m interested in how portraiture was used historically—for aristocrats who had artists come in and do their portrait. I’m interested in that history’s relationship to the camera. And so through our portraits of people and families in the street, we tell stories about what’s going on with the person, with the environment they’re in, where they are.

Raz-Russo: And it’s your community—the familiar, as Mikki said.

Lewis: Yes, and it’s interesting to see how others relate to it because if they’re really good portraits, then they say so much about who the person is, where they might be going, who they might become.

Raz-Russo: Those ideas were also central to The Wall of Respect, which Roy and Darryl helped create. The Wall was in many ways a reaction to the ways in which Black communities and culture were represented in mass media.^[3] Roy, you later created the West Wall: Proud of Being Black, an outdoor photographic installation dedicated to Chicago’s West Side, and Jim, your photographs were part of another kind of collective artwork—the book With Grief Acquainted, a visual poem about the South Side that included text by Stanford Winfield Williamson and featured photographs by you, Jerry Cogbill, and Don Sparks.^[4]

Stricklin: I grew up a devotee of Life and Look magazines, and I looked forward to buying them every week, but I never saw me in the magazine. And so I decided I was going to go out and show what’s going on, on the South Side. It wasn’t a literal thing, it was more of a spiritual thing—I didn’t cover events, I didn’t do formal portraits, I did people on the street.

Jerry Cogbill was my friend and colleague, and we shared a darkroom for years. He devoted his photographic career to Maxwell Street and worked there almost every week. We each went out and made one hundred photographs to provide to the publisher for With Grief Acquainted.

I moved on from there to cinematography to try and give these stories more of a voice, and to work collaboratively. It was very difficult for me to make that transition because while photographers work independently, cinematographers work with a crew. I began to put these ideas together about how to tell stories through cinematography, and I got on that street.

Raz-Russo: Similarly, Darryl and Roy, you were also a part of a group that documented the day-to-day events that took place at The Wall of Respect.

Cowherd: It was a singular effort, but it was a collective attitude because at the embryonic stages of the planning of The Wall of Respect we didn’t get together and say, we’re going to document everything that goes on. We just did it. And looking at those photographs, I’m not sure whether it’s Roy’s, or Bobby Sengstacke’s, or Onikwa Bill Wallace’s photographs. It’s not like we copied each other. We just all had the same vision of what we wanted to portray and how we wanted to portray it.

There are two things about The Wall of Respect for me: One is that it was one of the most completely documented projects that I know, from start to finish, which is remarkable because the documentation was informal and not part of the plan. Secondly, and equally important as far as I’m concerned, is that it was the most collaborative effort where there was absolutely no rancor, no egos, and we all worked together. Of course there were some disagreements that got nipped in the bud, but up until this day I have never been part of a group project that was that collaborative.

Raz-Russo: That was very different from working on assignment, which you were also doing at the time for local newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and magazines produced by Johnson Publications. Ozier, can you speak to that shift, and how working in your own community shaped your approach to working as a photojournalist nationally and internationally?

Muhammad: At first when I started covering the news it was for Johnson Publications, which was a great entrée for me to go work for a publication that covered the African American community nationally. Its existence was very necessary because mainstream media really wasn’t paying much attention to going ons and achievements in the African American community. What I learned from photographers like Bobby Sengstacke when he worked at the Chicago Defender and Gordon Parks working for Life was how to feel comfortable among strangers, particularly those in your community, but also how to make them feel comfortable with you.

I used to lament the fact that I was born too late because I started working at the tail end of the Civil Rights Movement. But then working for Johnson Publications I got opportunities to cover firsts—first African American mayors of cities and so on. I covered FESTAC ’77 in Nigeria, and the Sixth Pan-African Congress, which took place in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in 1974. I traveled there with Lerone Bennett, who was a senior editor at Ebony then. It was exciting to transition from covering my neighborhood and my Muslim community to covering the African diaspora on a macro level.

Raz-Russo: And using that experience to guide you forward. Which brings us to the question of legacy, and how you see your work fitting in within a broader history of photography in Chicago.

Stricklin: The legacy is that young people have to just pick up the camera and start shooting in their neighborhood and shooting things around them, and get a range of voices to represent communities. We should acknowledge that there were no women photographers that were part of our group—Mikki was the only woman.

Muhammad: These images provide a record that still rings true. It’s important to be able to look back on this era and not just have the words but also have the images.

Cowherd: My brothers have pretty much covered it, but I really only have to say that I am in no way giving up my mantle, and I am extremely proud of the work that we have done. I would be very remiss if I did not mention Bob Crawford, Onikwa Bill Wallace, and Billy Abernathy [Fundi], whom I call my photographic siblings. They were awesomely gifted people but unlike us, they did not have their moment in the sun. They are all dead. We are the survivors here. They needed to be able to smell the roses, but they didn’t get that opportunity. So—

Lewis: Here we are.

Cowherd: Thank you. Exactly.

Lewis: I have some information for the new photographers, the people with all the cameras, the million-dollar cameras in their phones. Please, please clean your lens. Wipe your lens. The lenses are supposed to be clean. You’ll get a better shot if you clean the lens. Just wipe the lens off—not with your finger—with a piece of cloth.

Raz-Russo: We end with some good practical advice from a master.

Lewis: You’ll get better pictures. Better pictures.