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| Pirkle Jones: California Photographs, 1935-1982
     
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Hardcover
144 pages
Aperture
Published 2001
From Library Journal
In anticipation of its 50th anniversary, Aperture has published a book about the life work of an artist who was an integral part of the California photographic community, which in turn gave rise to Aperture itself. Jones collaborated with the great names including Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and his wife, Ruth-Marion Baruch and his style fuses documentary photography with poetic emotion. Jones was successful in an array of mediums, including commercial, documentary, and art photography. This lavish book of full-page black-and-white photos from his best exhibitions accompanies a current exhibition that opened at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in December 2001. Included are pictures of the flooding of the Berryessa Valley, the Black Panther Party in California, the Gate 5 hippie community, and a flea market in Marin. Wride, the curator of the current exhibition, contributes a 24-page biographical profile and discussion of Jones's creative influences. Highly recommended for academic and photography libraries, public libraries with large photography collections, and libraries collecting on the social or cultural history of California. Sylvia Andrews, Indiana State Lib., Indianapolis
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Pirkle Jones's achievements include the Photographic Excellence Award from the National Urban League and the Award of Honor from the San Francisco Arts Commission. He has exhibited widely in galleries and museums.
Book Description
For almost sixty years Pirkle Jones has chronicled the people, politics, and landscape of Northern California-a "promised land" which has long held sway in the American cultural imagination. Within the confines of that locale, he has unearthed a universe of beauty and meaning, photographing everything from flea-market finds to some of the most important American social movements of the second half of the twentieth century. Operating primarily within a social-documentary framework, Jones has made images characterized by sensitivity and acute observation.
With uncanny prescience, a sense of urgency, and a sympathetic eye, Jones often plays the dual roles of artist and witness, combining portraiture, landscapes, and architectural photographs to create thorough documents of social structure and upheaval. Among the photo-essays included in Pirkle Jones: California Photographs are a compassionate and controversial piece on the Black Panther Party in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jones's portraits of the Sausalito houseboat community known as Gate 5, and a notable 1956 photo-essay done in collaboration with Dorothea Lange photographing the destruction and dislocation of the Berryessa Valley before it was flooded on completion of the Monticello Dam. Produced as a single issue of Aperture magazine in 1960 under the name "Death of a Valley", this essay remains a powerful testament to the price of progress.
The book also includes Jones's work from the last few decades, in which he shifted his focus to an extended series of elegant, contemplative landscapes. A biographical essay by curator Tim B. Wride frames Jones and his work within the context of photographic history, the people he collaborated with-including Ansel Adams as well as Lange-and the great scope of Californian life. |
Pirkle Jones: California Photographs, 1935-1982
Pirkle Jones (Photographer) |  |
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Black Panthers
Pirkle Jones (Photographer); Ruth-Marion Baruch (Photographer); & Kathleen Neal Cleaver (Introduction) |  |
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