Positive Images

NORTHRIDGE —  Harry Adams didn’t call himself a photojournalist--had never even thought of the word until someone mentioned it to him.

His photographs, which chronicle African American life in Los Angeles over 30 years, represent journalism in its humblest form: community news.

Here are long-forgotten receptions, banquets and balls. There are group shots, women posing at garden parties, trophies being held aloft. They are like Adams himself--workmanlike and of-the-moment. They are the kind of photos that earned him the moniker “one-shot Harry”--though in life, even his wife called him “Adams.”

On Saturday, 11 years after he died of a heart attack while on assignment, this workaday journalist was hailed for his rare contribution, not just to journalism but to history.

The occasion was a presentation of his photos to a group of Adams’ friends and subjects who gathered at Cal State Northridge to begin the huge task of identifying the people in them.

The pictures were recently bequeathed to the university by Adams’ widow, Lorraine. There are so many, hundreds of thousands, that she has not had time to sort them.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Adams worked for black publications in Los Angeles, showing up for work, clicking the shutter, and earning his pay, day after day, year after year.

He approached photography as a trade, not an art, and his pictures are neither dramatic nor provocative.

These are not the startling images of African Americans that defined his era. No Black Panthers or civil rights marchers being attacked by German shepherds.

Yet, they reflect a part of history ignored by a mainstream press that was indifferent to the ordinary affairs of black Americans.

During an era often recalled for assassinations, civil-rights battles and riots, Harry Adams shot church socials, fancy weddings and little girls in ballet class. He shot African Americans going about life as usual--at leisure, not at war.

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“This is people at their best,” said CSUN journalism professor Kent Kirkton, curator of the collection and director of the school’s Center for Photojournalism and Visual History. “Well-dressed people. People engaged socially and politically . . . the black bourgeoisie.”

There are famous faces in the mix. But they are pictured, not as the prophets, martyrs and icons they became, but as they were then: people who stirred local news events whenever they came to town.

There is Malcolm X, a face in the crowd in the back of a room at a court hearing in Los Angeles. Martin Luther King Jr. on his way to a church speech, flanked by local notables. James Baldwin grinning uncomfortably for the camera at a book signing, surrounded by pretty women. Adams’ pictures catch them passing though community news pages on their way to history.

The Sentinel in those years was a crusading voice for integration. Its battling tone was set by publisher Leon H. Washington Jr., who took the paper’s “don’t buy where you can’t work” campaign to the streets after founding the paper in the 1930s. He was arrested while picketing stores for not hiring African Americans.

In later years, writers such as Brad Pye Jr., who attended Saturday’s gathering, carried on the tradition of advocacy.

Although Adams was present during many of the efforts to integrate sports and housing, he was not especially political, said Lorraine Adams. Gruff, kind and “a good provider” is how she described him. As for the civil rights struggles of the day, “If you discussed something like that, he would just say, ‘I covered that,’ ” she said.

During one chance to cover history--the Watts riots--Adams was called at 3:30 a.m. by a San Diego paper that had no black photographers and wanted him to cover it, she said.

Adams headed out but returned 15 minutes later. “He said, ‘Those crazy sons of b------, they tore my camera up!’ ” and went back to bed, she said.

Adams was more at home with society page assignments. But there, too, his goal was just to get the shot in the paper.

“To Harry it was more of a craft than an art form,” said Roland Charles, a photojournalist and acquaintance of Adams who attended Saturday’s gathering.

Though technically proficient, on assignment “he very rarely took more than one or two shots,” said Charles.

“He would show up with his press camera, take 10 of the most important people in the black community, line them up, flash once, and say, ‘OK, I’m outta here.’ ”

Born in Arkansas in 1918 and raised in Santa Ana, Adams, like many African American men of his time, was instilled with the idea that “we had to be twice as good as white people to succeed,” said Pye. He was a man of many careers, first an MP in the military, then a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, and later a barber and photographer.

He owned a barber shop business next to the Sentinel and continued to work there even when he became a staff photographer.

At Saturday’s gathering, several dozen of Adams’ contemporaries were present, including Sentinel staffers and prominent longtime residents, such as retired Superior Court Judge Dion Morrow. They pored over the photos with much enthusiasm and exclamations, and jotted down hundreds of names to help the university officials begin to catalog the photos.

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CSUN hopes to organize a selection of photos for a museum exhibit next year.

The mass of snapshots of fraternal and sorority gatherings, beauty contests and charity dinners of the city’s upper-class black community might seem trivial to some, but they represent “the attempt of black community to take care of its own,” said James Cleaver, a former editor of the Sentinel, who came to identify pictures Saturday.

“The character of the community at that time was based on the determination to find a better life, and to overcome inherent racism of society,” he said.

Such organizations gave recognition to leading black citizens that would have never been given their due by the city’s white majority, he said.

Adams himself had longed for the recognition he is only now receiving, his widow said.

“Little did he realize his legacy would live,” Charles said.