Through a Lens Darkly Black Photographers Summary

 

    In Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, filmmaker Thomas Harris opens with a personal narrative about his father, who is shown in old photographs as a lovely guy with a very sad, preoccupied aspect. We don’t learn much about his father but we travel back through the generations looking at formal and candid photographs which were taken by Harris’s grandfather. Through a Lens Darkly alternates between the Harris brothers' artistic life and conversations with photographers and professors, while exhibiting the work. The film looks at the photographic record that black Americans have produced of their personal lives, as well as how they have been portrayed by the greater society. The major focus of this exhibition, however, is on the contrasting legacy of black photographers, which Harris and Willis trace back to a Cincinnati daguerreotype manufacturer in the 1840s, whose clients included well-to-do black families and white abolitionists.Those who came after mostly served the black community, portraying formal portrayals of middle-class respectability and achievement that were a long cry from the more popular "race" iconography of the day. Activist leaders such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois, who coordinated an exhibit of documented African-American life at a Paris World's Fair, emphasized the significance of a dignified personal appearance, even if it meant mimicking the behavior and clothes of the white bourgeoisie. The history of "Through a Lens Darkly" is intriguing and illuminating, touching on the representation of enslaved people in Louis Agassiz's searing photographs, as well as the manner in which Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass used their own photos to support their political goals. The video has the most significant impact when Harris describes how he battled to reconcile the guilt and negativity of those distortions with his grandfather's powerful, joyous, loving record, which was rarely seen without a camera. That conflict, according to Harris, is a collective one, similar to "a war of photographs within the American family book."