Tuesday, April 23, 2013

John Karales's Photos of the Civil Rights Era - NYTimes.com

John Karales's Photos of the Civil Rights Era - NYTimes.com: This photograph, (Slide 6) which first appeared in a 1963 photo essay in Look magazine, is emotionally intimate and psychologically insightful, like many of the images in “Controversy and Hope: The Civil Rights Photographs of James Karales” (University of South Carolina Press).

The book, by Julian Cox, provides a singular opportunity to re-evaluate the innovative work of Mr. Karales, who died in 2002, at age 71.As Dr. King’s aide and confidante Andrew Young notes in the book’s foreword, Mr. Karales’s photographs were distinguished by their ability to reveal the “complexity of emotions intertwined with the hopes and hardships of the struggle.” Their personal, contemplative approach was not always in step with a mainstream press enthralled by the high drama of historic speeches, conflagrations and demonstrations. This approach may also have been the reason Dr. King, who was fiercely protective of his family, granted the photographer unprecedented access to them.