Woods Hole Film Festival 2009

Pirkle Jones’s seven decades of involvement in photography have helped define the San Francisco Bay Area’s dual photographic traditions of elegant landscape imagery and biting social documentation. Jane Reed has created a rare and exciting film about photographer Pirkle Jones. Good filmmaking is good story telling and Jones says it best in his own words at 95. Through his photographs and interviews spanning seven decades Pirkle tells the tale of his life and the evolution of his photographing. From his collaboration with artist such as Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange to his iconic images of the Black Panther Party, Jones draws us into a world of rich black and white images reminding us that for him taking a photograph was always a political act.The film follows the photographer through a series of photographic projects. In 1956, Jones and Oakland photographer Dorothea Lange were commissioned by Life magazine to document the last year of the Berryessa Valley, northeast of San Francisco, which was to be flooded by a new dam constructed to quench the thirst of California’s growing population. Although the “Death of a Valley” project was not published at the time, its completion confirmed Jones’s understanding that the simple act of taking a photograph is political; his images, carefully composed from corner to corner, have a somber tone that acknowledges the import of the facts they depict. That they consistently involve the viewer in the social circumstances of their making underlines the strength of Jones’s vision.The approach Jones established with Lange continued through two collaborative projects he undertook with his wife, Ruth-Marion Baruch. “Walnut Grove: Portrait of a Town” (completed in 1964), documented a small agricultural community in the Sacramento River Delta and its inhabitants. The second resulted in a photo essay on the Black Panther Party in 1968. In the film, Jones talks about the tenseness he felt in the crowds he and Ruth-Marion photographed at Black Panther political rallies the apprehension they felt about taking the pictures, and the decision to continue. Ms. Cleaver reminds us that the Black Panther Party was an advocate for social justice programs. Our slogan was “power to the people”, “serve the people” Pirkle knew how to get this threw in his photographs they showed the humane side of the movement. After following Jones through a series of personal projects, including two striking images of the same oak tree on a hillside in Marin County—composed identically yet taken twenty-five years apart depicting the parched hillside—the film ends with a kaleidoscope of photographs spanning seven decades. “Pirkle Jones: Seven Decades Photographed” adds a new dimension to the public’s appreciation of these engaging images by providing the context of the photographer’s commentary and reminiscences about his life in photography.Director and producer Jane Levy Reed is active internationally as a filmmaker, curator, critic, and historian of photography. Her first film was released in 1978. She most recently directed and produced the acclaimed 2006 film “My Eyes Were Fresh: The Life and Photographs of John Gutmann.”