In December 1972 B. J. Mason, a movie reviewer for Ebony magazine, published an article entitled “The New Films: Culture or Con Game?” that considered the increasing number of films featuring Black casts made by major Hollywood studios beginning in 1970. Mason questioned whether this trend constituted a positive development for Black filmmakers and actors or if these films were simply a cynical attempt to exploit stereotypes that mark the history of Black representation in film.^[1] Mason’s observations anticipate the wave of so-called blaxploitation films that capitalized on public interest in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements by featuring Black casts, albeit playing sensationalized characters.^[2] Between 1972 and 1976 approximately 16 percent of major motion pictures made in the United States fell into this category, the only time in history when the percentage of Black films exceeded the percentage of African Americans in the US population (12 to 13 percent at the time).^[3] Significantly, this was a period marked by economic recession, when Hollywood studios felt pressure to earn high returns on films and produced many low-budget projects crafted to draw big audiences.1

The rise of Black films is not so far removed as it might seem from the concerns of photographers working around that time in Chicago. Darryl Cowherd, James E. Hinton, Roy Lewis, and James Stricklin came of age and began their careers in the 1960s by engaging with photography in Chicago. Later, however, they all turned to television and film, working as trailblazing cinematographers and camera operators. Tracing the professional trajectories and personal projects of each of these artists suggests that some of the shared characteristics and aims of their photographic work defined their output in television and film. Elements of their ethos—their investment in portraiture and in capturing their neighborhoods as they saw them, without sensationalizing or embellishing—come through in their moving images, the history of which has yet to be fully written.^[4]2

Gordon Parks is essential to this history, as he was at the forefront of the film movement, serving as a role model to these artists. In 1969 Parks became the first African American director of a major studio feature with The Learning Tree. The movie, which was produced and distributed by Warner Brothers, traces the upbringing of an African American boy in Kansas through vignettes of his life. It is loosely based on Parks’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name.^[5] Before he made the film, Parks was already a source of inspiration for many Black photographers in Chicago due to his various connections to the city. He first came to Chicago between 1940 and 1942, when he set up a portrait studio and worked out of the South Side Community Art Center. In 1953—the same year he had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago—Parks completed an assignment for Life magazine about the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church on the Near West Side. Following these early engagements with the city, Parks returned in 1963 for one more assignment for Life, on the Nation of Islam. While the next generation of photographers—those featured in this publication—largely knew Parks only through his work, several have noted that his success served as a guiding light. For instance, Stricklin recalls meeting Parks during one of the elder artist’s visits to the South Side Community Art Center, where Stricklin studied while he was still in high school.^[6] The mentorship and influence of earlier artists—working in film as well as photography—profoundly affected this younger generation of photographers. In the essay that follows, I consider moving images themselves as another essential outlet for several artists belonging to the Chicago School.3

Although he moved to New York in 1965, Hinton went to high school in Chicago and began making photographs there, occasionally working alongside fellow photographers Cowherd and Stricklin.^[7] After leaving Chicago Hinton formed a production company and filmed dozens of documentaries, many of which have been restored and digitized in the last few years.4

Hinton is perhaps known best for his contributions to Ganja and Hess (1973), a vampire film directed by Bill Gunn, a Black playwright and director whose work was dismissed by mainstream, predominantly white critics in the United States during his lifetime. The movie’s path, as well as its critical reception, reflect the racism prevalent in the film industry, as well as some of the problems with the economics that fueled the rise of blaxploitation films in the 1970s. European critics embraced the director’s original, full-length cut of the film, and it was chosen to represent the United States at the 1973 Cannes International Film Festival. The version ultimately released in the United States, however, did not reflect Gunn’s vision: The production company edited the movie down to seventy-eight minutes that tread the same ground as Blacula (1972), an earlier, top-grossing horror film with a Black cast.5

Gunn had intended the film to be a “nuanced and experimental formulation of a black aesthetic.”^[8] Hinton, as director of photography, was essential to realizing this vision. His work in this capacity constituted a major milestone: as Hinton notes, he was the “first Black director of photography in the history of [modern] North American filmmaking.”^[9] Previously, other Black people had served as camera operators and cinematographers, but none had been officially designated “director of photography” and gotten to lead the larger cinematography team. Gunn gave Hinton full license to visually shape the film, and historian Chuck Jackson has noted that “the intimate and strange feel of the film hinges on Hinton’s unique vision.”^[10] 6

Like Hinton, Lewis also moved from photography to film, beginning with the short documentaries he created in the late 1960s. Lewis asserted the connection between his photography and film work, noting that moving images are composed of “stills in motion.”^[11] Some of his earliest films incorporate still photography, such as Ridin and Stridin, Reachin and Teachin: A Short Film of a Day in the Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (1969). In 1968, as a faculty member at Northeastern Illinois University (NIU), Lewis met poet Gwendolyn Brooks and singer-songwriter Terry Callier, who were also teaching there at the time. Those encounters resulted in Lewis’s documentary short that included an interview with Brooks along with footage of her reading “The Wall,” a poem written for the dedication of The Wall of Respect, an outdoor mural created in 1967 by the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture. The documentary also incorporates a recording of a live performance of Callier’s “Occasional Rain” that Lewis captured during a concert at NIU.^[12]7

The film begins with a photomontage composed of stills of Brooks, Callier (see fig. 1), and their friends and colleagues, along with portraits of children who gaze at the camera with wide eyes. Lewis gives life to these images by moving his camera across them in a way that recalls lingering on pictures in a photo album.^[13] The film then transitions to moving images of Brooks commuting from the South Side to NIU, near the city’s northern border. We see her leave her home, run an errand, and then catch a bus to the Cottage Grove ‘L’ station (see fig. 2). Her day at the university is represented by another collection of still photographs, and then we follow her making this same commute in the other direction to head home. From there, the film transitions back to still photographs that Lewis made at The Wall of Respect. The film focuses not only on Brooks but also on her environment, looking closely at both public transit infrastructure and her fellow city dwellers who move through the urban landscape each day (see fig. 3). Lewis’s focus on the quotidian, which also informed the keen insights of Brooks’s poetry, reflects the larger ethos of the Chicago photographers as well as their interest in documenting Black spaces in the city.  8

Figs. 1–3

Lewis continued to work with moving images through the 1970s, traveling to Zaire to film the famed 1974 Rumble in the Jungle between boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.^[14] He also shot footage that would become a part of Save the Children (1972), a documentary about the concerts at the 1972 PUSH Expo, a conference hosted by Chicago-based social justice organization Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity). The lineup included some of the most popular Black musicians of the era, including Roberta Flack, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Bill Withers. In addition to printing the run of show, the Chicago Daily Defender also ran an article about the best ways to photograph the event, reflecting the popularity of photography in Chicago at this time.^[15]9

Although Save the Children was directed by Philadelphia-born filmmaker Stan Lathan, some structural elements reflect photographic work by the Chicago School as well as Ridin and Stridin. Rather than simply presenting performances from the concert, the film occasionally cuts to Chicago street scenes (see fig. 4a–b), with the music continuing to play as a soundtrack. In his review of the film, Chicago critic Gene Siskel noted that it is “more than a visual LP of golden oldies and recent hits…. Director Stan Lathan uses the music to accompany photo essays on the scene in the Amphitheater and the Chicago cityscape.”^[16] One cannot help but wonder if the city’s robust photography scene influenced Lathan’s vision. 10

Fig. 4a–b

In addition to being a hub of photographic activity, Chicago also played an important role in the emergence of broadcasting, beginning with radio and later television. Oprah Winfrey created Harpo Studios at 1025 West Randolph Street in 1990, but the hundred-thousand-square-foot building had been used previously for commercial film and television production, starting with the Fred A. Niles Studio in the 1950s and continuing through 1982.^[17] It was through the Niles Studio that Jim Stricklin met Gordon Weisenborn, a director who began making films for the National Film Board of Canada while teaching at Columbia College in the 1960s. Stricklin crossed paths with Weisenborn shortly after he began taking photographs as a student at DuSable High School; he went on to study at the Institute of Design. His photographs, along with those of Jerry Cogbill and Don Sparks, were included in the 1964 book With Grief Acquainted, which featured photographs alongside texts written in a Black vernacular by Stanford Winfield Williamson. The book received positive reviews in numerous outlets, including Ebony and Negro Digest, for its honest and open depictions of the lives of Black people in Chicago. 11

Ultimately Stricklin had to leave Chicago to begin a career in television, as his efforts in the city had been stymied by the racism of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) union. He first shot moving images in Hough, a Cleveland neighborhood racked by riots in the 1960s. Stricklin then went to Canada, where he worked with the CBC on shows including This Hour Has Seven Days, which aired from 1964 to 1966 and offered in-depth coverage of the previous week’s pop culture and political news. The program prided itself on having “reporter–cameraman teams [that] pounce on significant events whenever they occur, looking not only at the news but at the reasons behind it.”^[18] The show was notable for its inclusion of international news culled from a range of sources, and it is likely that Stricklin’s 1964 footage of Chicago street gangs circulated on this program.^[19]12

Stricklin was interested in “documenting what he saw,” with a focus on his neighborhood: “the South Side from 31st Street to 67th maybe. And then Dearborn to the lake.”^[20] His untitled photograph from the 1960s (fig. 5) speaks to this. In it, a group of children smile at the camera, watched over by a woman in profile, who looks toward the sun. In the background, more children are perched on the window ledge of a house, while a man clad in leather looks off to the side from the porch. The image is certainly composed, but it also has the relaxed quality of a sunny afternoon and a tenderness that may be explained by the fact that the woman depicted is Stricklin’s wife, Marita Joyce. The casual and open expressions of the children suggest their familiarity or comfort with the person behind the camera. A variant of this image appears in With Grief Acquainted, showing the children even closer to the camera and Marita Joyce facing the lens with a smile (fig. 6).13

In 1967 Stricklin met Lester Crystal, then the producer of The Huntley–Brinkley Report, an NBC evening news show. Following their meeting Stricklin was hired as a camera operator and photographer for WMAQ, Chicago’s local NBC station. Upon his return to Chicago, and with NBC’s support, he became the first Black camera operator to join IATSE, and later helped to dismantle another barrier by sponsoring the first woman to join.^[21] His work at WMAQ was recognized with an Emmy Award in 1971, but unfortunately little to none of it can be found today. Given the sheer volume of local and national news broadcasts, and the routine practice of reusing the videotape on which they were recorded, archives have not prioritized their preservation.^[22] Locating Stricklin’s footage among the limited amount that has been saved is made more difficult by the fact that some archives only index the subject or reporter, not the camera operator. 14

Like his high school pal Stricklin, Cowherd pursued a career in broadcast media. (Along with Hinton, they bonded as teenagers over a shared interest in cameras.^[23]) Cowherd noted that photography was “hot” at the moment but not a viable way to make a living, which prompted him to look for jobs in photojournalism and communications.^[24] His career ultimately led him to WJLA-TV, ABC’s Washington, DC, affiliate, where he discovered his passion for broadcast news. Cowherd’s photographs are often closely observed portraits, perhaps suggesting an affinity between his art and the storytelling format of television news. He made a portrait of a man in profile in Jackson Park in 1965 (fig. 7), a contentious year for that space, as protesters fought to prevent the city from encroaching on the land to widen Lake Shore Drive. Other iconic portraits include his photograph of Baraka (fig. 8), reproduced on The Wall of Respect, as well as images of people at the site of the mural itself. In addition to portraits, Cowherd also created photographs that reveal the ways racism and the Civil Rights Movement manifested in city life. Stop White Police From Killing Us—St. Louis, MO (fig. 9) shows the titular slogan stenciled onto a brick wall, with a Black man seated on a bench nearby. He turns away from the wall, his head resting in his palm and a cigarette dangling from his other hand. This combination of close observation and attention to the ways bigotry and intolerance impinged on Black life in the 1960s suggests that television reporting might have been a natural fit for Cowherd’s eye. In fact Cowherd himself felt that, even though it was not obvious to others, his experience with photography enhanced his work writing and producing television news.^[25]
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Figs. 7–9

This essay has unearthed just a few of the intersections between photography and film and television production among Black artists working in Chicago in the 1960s. The reasons these photographers turned to moving images varied; some were experimenting with the boundaries of their craft, others were seeking a stable living related to their artistic interests. Even from this brief survey, it is apparent that their shared sensibility—their interest in close observation of the lives of Black people and Black urban space—lent itself to working with moving images in addition to photography. Further, their work in television and film was motivated by the same goal that spurred the Chicago School photographers: to capture Black life with the complexity and nuance often lacking in mainstream representations.
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