August 24–31, 2000
art
Black, White and Blues
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Up close and personal: One of Dunas' intimate portraits, Buddy Guy (George Guy), Lettsworth, Louisiana. |
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State of the Blues: The Living Legacy of the Delta
The African American Museum of Philadelphia, 7th & Arch Sts, through Sept. 3, 215-574-0380
The subject of blues singers and the sources of their music and lyrics have been natural fodder for photographers as far back as the 1930s. In my mind no other genre of music gets closer to the bone of life and hard times, which makes for very compelling imagery.
The Farm Security Act photographers of the Depression produced thousands of photographs from around the rural south. Russell Lee and Marion Post Wolcott, specifically, shot a number of images of singers and dancers from the Mississippi delta area, as with all their work emphasizing the closeness to the land and poverty.
Indeed, Wolcott’s famous image of a delighted man and woman entitled Negroes Jitterbugging in a Juke Joint, Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939 would serve as a worthy visual epigram to Jeff Dunas’ current exhibit of photographs at the African American Museum of Philadelphia.
Except for the band’s electric instruments and the tennis shoes and jeans on the dancers, Dunas’ Bobo Juke Joint, Robert ‘Bilbo’ Walker/Sam Carr, Bobo, Mississippi (c.1990s) suggests little has changed when it comes to the essence of delta blues music. It still makes the heart and feet transcend whatever blue funk life’s heartache may put people in.
"State of the Blues" includes 91 studio portraits of blues artists and 32 documentary images taken during an eight-week trip along the so-called "Blues Highway" through parts of Mississippi, Arkansas, northern Louisiana and eastern Texas. Much of the work was shot along Highway 49, which goes from Biloxi north to Jackson, and Highway 61, which follows the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge north through Mississippi to Memphis. The framed 18-inch-by-22-inch images are all beautifully composed and printed with a rich sepia-tone; a half dozen of the images have been printed very large and mounted on foamcore.
Dunas, a commercial photographer from Los Angeles whose work ranges from corporate and advertising imagery to nudes, hit on this project some years ago out of a love of the music and a fortuitous opportunity.
A white kid raised during the ’60s on Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, John Mayall and others, it eventually dawned on him "that all the music I listened to was linked by a common thread: the blues. I thought Clapton wrote ‘Crossroads.’ How was I to know that most of my favorite music was in fact not written by Jagger and Richards but by Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Big Joe Turner and Willie Dixon?"
In 1993, he went to the opening night of a new blues club near his L.A. studio called House of Blues. It became for him the "opportunity of a lifetime." With the help of the owner, Nigel Shanley, he set up a "studio" in a room just off stage and was given access to any performer booked at the club. Shanley would show the performer Dunas’ work and ask if he or she would be willing to pose just before going on stage. Dunas did most of the shots in five to ten minutes and accumulated the work over four years. He says he is still adding to the collection.
The documentary images are wisely displayed in the first gallery on the second floor of the museum; since the studio format of the portraits necessarily allows no context, the documentary images serve as an appropriate introduction to the portraits.
"My intent was to marry the faces and the places," says Dunas.
Much of the documentary work is derivative of the Farm Security Act work of Walker Evans and others who often focused their cameras on the common architecture of the South. From his eight-week trip, Dunas brought back some wonderful medium format shots of abandoned cotton gins, dilapidated houses and a number of funky roadside juke joints. He includes a classic shot of blues legend Robert Johnson’s gravestone and the wreckage of a house simply entitled Muddy’s Cabin, Stovall Plantation, Stovall, Mississippi.
Dunas also found some locals willing to have him photograph them while they drank, danced and romanced in and around the raw and down-to-earth juke joints. While there are only three or four of these images in the exhibit, these glimpses of working people fueled by alcohol and blues music suggest a much larger world in which blues music plays a critical role in getting beyond the troubles of the day and making it through the night.
The studio portraits range from partial body shots that reveal some body language to those that feature only the face completely filling the frame. In their own way each portrait reveals something about the sitter. And since all portraits are actually records of a relationship, they also reveal something of the photographer, which in this case is a guy who seems to truly love and honor his subjects.
Still, there is something missing here. While technically excellent and rewarding as an homage to the many great blues musicians photographed and the legacy of their music, the work makes you want something more. While Dunas does certainly "marry the faces and the places," it is not the closest of marriages and it feels like, as is the case with the work itself, husband and wife are living in separate rooms.
What seems to be missing is "soul," or more to the point, the eye and heart of an initiate or native of the world glimpsed. Dunas’ insight, as heartfelt as it may be, is that of a devotee of the music, not that of someone familiar with the world from whence the blues was born. It’s hard — some would say impossible — for a middle-class white guy to get under the skin of black people who were raised under oppression and poverty in the delta regions.
Nevertheless, there is still something afoot here that transcends the missing piece and makes it all work — the universal appeal of blues music. When it comes to catalysts for black-white racial understanding, the blues has to be one of our nation’s greatest assets. And anyone — white or black — interested in the blues should enjoy this work.
