The four foundations that spent $30 million this week on the massive Ebony/Jet photo archive accomplished far more than buying 400 million pictures.
They saved a huge treasure trove of black American culture and history, as told by black photographers, for millions of black readers who made sure not to let their subscriptions lapse and kept back copies of the magazines on coffee tables and nightstands.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and the Getty Research Institute now have the task of preserving that history and ensuring that it stays in the public domain.
Preserving it matters, a lot. And the prestigious institutions chosen for the job are a perfect fit.
Because those 400 million photos must survive for posterity. They represent a chunk of American history that mainstream media and popular culture, dominated by whites, largely overlooked.
The white-dominated major media didn’t see that history, though it was unfolding all around them. And there were few black photographers and writers working with or alongside them to point out what they failed to see.
But Ebony and Jet’s black photojournalists saw it, up close and personal. They took photo after photo, for more than 70 years, of everyday moments in black life.
Photos that show black life in all its ordinariness, magnificence .
Like Billie Holiday smiling backstage at a Chicago nightclub with her husband. Musician Jimi Hendrix, picking his guitar with his teeth or posing on a London street. Singer Natalie Cole, daughter of Nat King Cole, with a huge, beautiful Afro, sitting cross-legged in a chair and thumbing through a book.
Venus and Serena Williams as young girls, on a tennis court in Compton, California with their father.
And doctors, lawyers, homecoming queens, scientists, civil rights activists — the famous and not-so-famous who achieved professional success despite racism and inspired readers to do the same.
“Inspirational, aspirational, informational,” was what John H. Johnson, the founder of Johnson Publishing, wanted the photos to be, as Margena Christian told us. She is a former Ebony senior editor and author of “Empire: The House that John H. Johnson Built.”
Above all, Johnson insisted that the photos show black life in all its complexity.
“That was during a time when people didn’t think black people did ordinary things, lived ordinary lives,” she said.
Showing the full range of African American life sometimes meant showing photos of death, even if some around Johnson complained.
“Johnson wanted to show that,” Christian said of a controversial photo that showed Otis Redding’s body, strapped to an airplane seat, being pulled from the Wisconsin lake where he died in a plane crash in 1967. “It was the same thing when he wanted to show the image of Emmett Till. He said, ‘This is the reality of our lives.’ ”
The same standard — show the range of black life — applied when Ebony published a story and photos of Georgia Black, a former escaped slave who had spent years living as a woman but had been born a man named George Cante.
The story was first published in 1951, long before anyone talk openly or above a whisper about transgender people.
Ebony, which continues to publish under new ownership, and Jet, which has now folded, blazed a trail for black America, in words and pictures. The stories found in the 400 million photos matter for all Americans.
“The narrative that is held in that archive is central to the narrative of America in the second half of the 20th Century,” the president of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, told the New York Times after the archive’s sale on Thursday.
The story of black America is America’s story.
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