Visual journal

de Deborah Willis, Jane Lusaka

Visual Journal celebrates the work of five African American photographers who documented segregated black communities in Washington, D.C., rural Virginia, and New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. These photographers - Robert H. McNeill, Gordon Parks, Robert S. Scurlock, Morgan and Marvin Smith - produced extraordinary images that recover today the fullness of African American life in the years when it remained little noticed by the larger society. The work presented in Visual Journal, executed between 1929 and 1949, captures the rhythms of daily commerce and societybaptisms, picnics, business meetings, cotillions, and sports events. Ranging from dynamic shots of street scenes to stylized studio portraiture, the photographs portray how the Depression, the New Deal, Jim Crow laws, the Great Migration, and the Second World War affected black families and community relationships. As if they were contemporary griots retelling their communities' stories, these photographers recorded African Americans engaging in acts of devotion and conflict, rejoicing in efforts to "uplift the race," and maintaining dignity in a so-called separate but equal society. Visual Journal not only pays tribute to the photographers' versatility and talent but also offers valuable insight into the creative community life that flourished despite the strictures of segregation.