Warning: one of the images in this article contains swear words.
In autumn 1969, the Magnum photographer Charles Harbutt unveiled a ground-breaking multimedia project. Conceived the year before – the year of Martin Luther King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations, the deepening chaos of the Vietnam War, and bloody civil rights protests and citywide riots – his aim was to hold a mirror up to the US and force its citizens to confront some ugly home truths. It consisted of a photography exhibition at the Riverside Museum in New York, with an accompanying book. The title pulled no punches: it was called America in Crisis.
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Working in collaboration with Magnum’s New York bureau chief Lee Jones, Harbutt had scoured the agency’s archives for recent photographs that could speak to his theme. Reportage from Vietnam by Don McCullin and Philip Jones Griffiths sat alongside photojournalism by Harbutt and others of protests against the war. In a section entitled The Deep Roots of Poverty, Constantine Manos’s unflinching depictions of the lives of African-American sharecroppers contrasted surreally with pictures of advertising shoots and strip clubs in more prosperous parts of the country. The portrait was of a nation apparently tearing itself apart, if not eating itself alive.
Given the turbulent events of the past few years, from Covid-19 to the riot at the US Capitol, perhaps it’s no surprise that London’s Saatchi Gallery has decided to stage an updated version of America in Crisis. The new exhibition brings a selection of images from the 1969 exhibition into dialogue with ones by 40 American photographers working now – a time shadowed by protests against police violence and racial injustice, anguished debates about democracy and representation, economic and social tumult and the worsening effects of the climate crisis. The photographers and cast of characters may be different, the show implies, but in some senses, the US is always on the brink.
To mark its opening, co-curators Sophie Wright and Gregory Harris of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art walked BBC Culture through a selection of images from the exhibition.
Pink Sidewalk, Florida, 2017, from the series FloodZone (Credit: Anastasia Samoylova)
Pink Sidewalk, Florida, 2017
The roots of the environmentalist movement in the US reach back to the 1960s, when pollution and post-war development became a major subject of debate. While the theme only made a fleeting presence in the original America in Crisis, chiefly in Bruce Davidson’s images of contaminated watercourses and cities choked by suburban sprawl, for obvious reasons in the 2022 version it’s impossible to escape.
This picture of Miami by the Russian-American artist Anastasia Samoylova is from a 2017 project called FloodZone, which charts the effects of rising sea levels on her adopted state of Florida. The photograph shows the aftereffects of Hurricane Irma that September, one of the most destructive storms ever to hit the state. By the standards of disaster photography, it looks weirdly peaceful. Four slender palm trees lean against the white walls of sleek, high-end condo buildings, almost as if they’re resting. Other than a scattering of leaf litter on the pastel-coloured sidewalk, barely any other signs of damage are visible.
But the implication is clear: given that much of Miami is only a few metres above sea level and exposed to hurricanes of ever-increasing velocity, it’s about as securely rooted as those decorative palm trees. “It’s a really strong metaphorical image for what is happening to America,” says Wright.
#FXCK 4 July rally for change from injustice and police brutality toward women and LGBTQ+, Atlanta, Georgia, 2020 (Credit: Sheila Pree Bright)
#FXCK 4 July rally, Atlanta, Georgia, 2020
Though the protests of summer 2020 generated plentiful images of confrontation, this photograph by the African-American artist Sheila Pree Bright finds something different and more positive. Taken on an Independence Day rally in Atlanta calling for an end to police violence against women and gay, bisexual and trans people, it depicts a moment of solidarity: one protestor stands with his back to the camera, right hand held aloft, with a small crowd gathered in front performing the same gesture.
Harris is struck by the way this black-and-white picture, taken from a project called #1960Now, consciously echoes imagery of the civil rights marches, which were documented for the original America in Crisis project by Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon. “There’s this real sense of civility and dignity in the picture, this celebration of peaceful non-violence, which was such a key part of the civil rights movement,” he says.
A placard held in the background reads “July 4th is NOT Independence for ALL”, but the lead protestor’s T-shirt seems more optimistic about America’s historic promise of tolerance and liberty for everyone: “We’ve Always Mattered”, it reads.
A woman in a kitchen, Rome, Mississippi, 2017 (Credit: Matt Black/Magnum Photos)
A woman in a kitchen, Rome, Mississippi, 2017
The history of US documentary photography is stalked by images captured during the 1930s by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others, documenting the ravages of the Great Depression as it swept from the Dust Bowl of the prairie states, leaving a tide of human misery in its wake.
At first glance, this black-and-white picture looks like it dates from that era. We’re in a dwelling that seems to be not much more than a wooden shack, with bare floorboards and a damp-spotted ceiling. Blackened cast-iron pots hang on the wall above a jumble of filthy pans, and there’s the tiniest of bedrooms just behind. An elderly woman stands in the doorway; this is presumably her home. Only one thing reveals that this isn’t in fact 1937, but 2017, the year of Donald Trump’s inauguration: the fact that she’s wearing leopard-print leggings and a T-shirt. The T-shirt bears the legend “Rome” – in fact the name of this tiny, poor Deep South community, though it’s hard not to think of almighty empires in decline.
As depictions of rural poverty go, this image is grimly universal, says Wright. “It speaks across time. We used to think that history was about progress, but we don’t seem to learn from the mistakes.”
Smithville, Tennessee, 2015 (Credit: Stacy Kranitz)
Smithville, Tennessee, 2015
Born in Kentucky, Stacy Kranitz lives in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Tennessee and has built up a body of work depicting life in the former coal-mining region, often a byword for “rural American poverty”, explains Gregory Harris.
Yet this photograph seems to come from another world entirely. The white teenage girl depicted – probably a homecoming or beauty queen – looks like a Disney princess with her tall tiara and blue velvet cloak, perching on top of a red convertible with a beautifully coiffed woman, perhaps her mother, at the wheel. “There’s something sweet and aspirational about the picture,” observes Gregory Harris. “But something more unsettling too.”
A fight at a pro-President Donald Trump rally and march at the Martin Luther King Jr Civic Center park, 4 March, 2017 in Berkeley, California (Credit: Leah Millis)
A fight at a pro-President Donald Trump rally, Berkeley, California, 2017
US streets and squares have often looked like battlegrounds in the last few years – most notoriously in January 2021, when an armed mob attempted to storm the Capitol. This image dates from an earlier confrontation, but one that feels wearily familiar: Trump supporters and opponents engaged in a violent punch-up in the centre of Berkeley, California. For additional historical irony, it took place in a park named for Martin Luther King.
DC-based Leah Millis shoots for Thomson Reuters, and this image is first and foremost great photojournalism, says Gregory Harris, with a strong narrative and a powerful sense of being in the thick of the action. “She’s right in the middle of it; and look at how cleverly she’s framed the shot, with Trump supporters on the right battling with the people on the left.”
What makes it even more is the epic quality Millis captures: these people genuinely seem to believe they’re in a life-and-death struggle, particularly the leather-jacketed Trump supporter going into battle with his walking stick. It looks almost like an 18th-Century history painting. “And look at the number of cameras in the scene,” Harris adds. “So much of it is about the spectacle of the event.”
Flight, 2019 (Credit: Zora J Murff/Courtesy of Webber Gallery)
Flight, 2019
Zora Murff’s recent series At No Point in Between mingles archive and found imagery with photographs this Arkansas-based artist has taken himself, but the theme is consistent: the anguished and sometimes violent relationship between people of colour and people in authority.
Flight is a screengrab from a video of the shooting of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. The footage, captured by an eyewitness, shows Scott running away from officer Michael Slager after being stopped for a broken brake light. When Scott tried to flee, Slager shot him repeatedly in the back. Slager was later sentenced for second-degree murder – one in a long line of such cases to generate national outrage.
Beyond the horror of the image itself, named “Flight”, Harris is struck by how mobile phone, bodycam and dashcam images have become part of the debate over US policing – not merely enabling injustices to come to light (as in George Floyd’s case, when the video became courtroom evidence), but providing a kind of iconography for contemporary American violence. “Even though they change, photographs are still incredibly powerful,” Harris suggests. “They create narratives.”
Lee Square, Richmond, Virginia, 2020 (Credit: Kris Graves)
Lee Square, Richmond, Virginia, 2020
The murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 ignited a protest movement that raged that summer, transforming many US cities into battlegrounds between Black Lives Matter activists demanding change and the very police forces accused of perpetuating violence against people of colour. In some places, particularly in the South, the conflict acquired even deeper historical resonance when it ran into long-running debates over the fate of Civil War-era memorials, many of which honour Confederate soldiers who fought to defend slavery.
This photograph by the New York photographer Kris Graves is part of a series taken that year simply called American Monuments. Sophie Wright explains that it portrays the base of a huge neoclassical statue of Confederate commander General Robert E Lee. The largest such memorial in the South, it was occupied by Black Lives Matter activists and covered with colourful graffiti, ranging from exuberant messages (“WE WILL WIN”) to ones seething with sorrow and anger. “It’s an act of protest, but speaks to these much bigger themes of politics and power,” says Wright.
The statue itself was finally taken down in September 2020 and will be installed in the city’s Black History Museum; the fate of the granite plinth remains uncertain.
Bungalow Family with Last Ash Tree, Midway, Chicago, USA, 2018 (Credit: Paul D’Amato)
Bungalow Family with Last Ash Tree, Midway, Chicago, USA, 2018 (Credit: Paul D’Amato)
The 1969 America in Crisis book opened with a section called The American Dream, devoted to photographs of the US as it has traditionally portrayed itself: a land of plenty and opportunity, of cowboys and cookouts and white picket fences. As the book went on to show, it was an ideal that often failed to match reality.
Nonetheless, Paul D’Amato’s photograph, captured in the hugely diverse Chicago suburb of Midway, shows hints of that promise. A Latino family sit beneath a tree on the manicured front lawn of their home; a man throws a toddler into the air; an older girl stands next to her mother. The sky is clear, the evening light inviting and warm. Though they don’t seem to be rich, they’re clearly doing well, part of America’s expanding Hispanic middle class. “The American Dream is not how it looked in the 1960s, especially as portrayed in the popular media,” says Harris. “This is another way of showing what it looks like now.”
The only note of disquiet is the expression on the face of the man at the centre of the image, who’s looking warily into D’Amato’s lens. Is he hostile because we’re intruding on this bucolic family scene, or anxious that it might somehow all disappear? Is he living the Dream, in other words, or still struggling to attain it? “There are so many different narratives going on,” says Harris. “It’s kind of up to us which we choose.”
America in Crisis is at the Saatchi Gallery, London, until 3 April 2022.
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