Documenting decades of area protest
Exhibit of photos captures air from antiwar 1960s to Women’s March
The Summer of Love was not all love. Nobody loved the draft, and while national news photographers were looking for hippies with flowers their hair on Haight Street, Berkeley documentarian Nacio Jan Brown was shooting a protest against the Vietnam War at the Oakland Induction Center.
That image is the starting point for “Resistors: 50 Years of Social Movement Photography in the Bay Area,” an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center, the Arts and Craftsstyle building in Live Oak Park that happens to also be marking its 50th anniversary.
The exhibit of 63 images covers just about every protest, from antiwar rallies at San Francisco State through the Black Panthers, People’s Park in Berkeley, the United Farmworkers March, Greenpeace, AIDS activism, Chinatown rent strikes, Black Lives Matter and through to the Women’s March last winter.
For every gathering of resistance, there seemed to be at least one photographer, and the 33 photographers in the show amount to “the ones who we could find their negatives or their digital files, ” says Ken Light, professor of photojournalism at UC Berkeley, who curated the show along with his wife, Melanie Light, a photography appraiser and archivist.
They sat down in their Orinda home and rattled off the names of photographers they knew who had done important documentary work at protests. That was the easy part. The hard part was making sure they hadn’t missed any important acts of group resistance. For that they canvassed social historians.
“Someone would say, ‘Oh, the Peace Navy. That was really important,’ ” says Light. “Then it was a matter of figuring out who photographed it.”
That turned out to be Janet Delaney, a South of Market street photographer, who was on a boat in the flotilla that attempted in 1986 to blockade the entrance to San Francisco Bay, to keep the battleship Missouri from being homeported here.
When word got around about the project, photographers started sending the Lights digital files, hundreds of them. The Lights turned a home office into a “Resistors Room,” and papered the walls with thumbnail prints attached by pushpins.
“We had too many pictures of policemen beating up people and protesters holding signs, which were kind of boring,” Light says. “We had to look for pictures that were both representative of the event and also made a powerful statement about social change.”
After several months in the Resistors Room, the images were selected. Editing was rigid. Delaney had rolls and rolls of film of the Peace Navy, and one image made the show.
The Lights made all 63 prints themselves, sequenced them and designed the installation space. Part of the design is a community bulletin board. Anyone can bring in a print, pin it up and be part of “Resistors.”
Resistors: 50 Years of Social Movement Photography in the Bay Area: Panel discussion at 6 p.m. July 20. Free; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. Through Aug. 21 Berkeley Art Center, 1275 Walnut St., Berkeley. (510) 6446893. www.berkeleyartcenter.org