Hartmann’s images of the resistance
The German-born photographer Ilka Hartmann first made a name for herself by taking pictures of her friends and neighbors in Bolinas, a place that has never liked to be photographed.
Hartmann settled there in 1969 when it seemed remote and inaccessible. Fifty-nine of her black-and-white Bolinas photos appear in “The Town That Fought to Save Itself,” a 200-page, coffee-table-size book for which China expert and Bolinas’ resident, Orville Schell, wrote the text.
Nowhere in the book, which was published by Pantheon in 1976, does the name Bolinas appear. Hartmann and Schell didn’t want more tourists to invade their town and disturb the peace and quiet. So, they called Bolinas “Briones.” It had plenty of problems without the tourists, including a 1971 oil spill off the coast that was, in Schell’s words, “a disaster, especially for the animals who made the ocean their home.” That spill prompted the book.
In the prologue, Schell explained that there was “nothing extraordinary” about “Briones,” but that the people who lived there did “extraordinary” things, simply because they “lived together with one another” in a real community.
Now 41 years after the publication of “The Town That Fought to Save Itself,” Hartmann is known nationally and internationally not for her Bolinas photos, but rather for the pictures she has taken over the course of five decades of American Indians, gay activists, Black Panthers, California farmworkers and protesters in the antinuclear movement, too. Throughout, the San Francisco Bay Area has been at the heart of her photos.
The New Museum in Los Gatos is featuring her work in an exhibition titled “Faces of Resistance: Through the Lens of Ilka Hartmann.” The subtitle for the exhibition, “After the Lovin,’ ” is meant to suggest that the 1967 Summer of Love wasn’t the end of something, but rather the beginning of a cycle of protests against war, inequality, injustice and discrimination. Hartmann was there for nearly all of it.
The exhibition opened July 27 and it runs through July 15, 2018.
One dramatic photo from Hartmann’s book is included in the exhibition. It depicts a young woman in a field, her back to the camera, as she cuts thistles with a scythe. She isn’t identified in the book, but she appears as “Leah” in the exhibition. Almost everyone identified in “The Town That Fought to Save Itself ” appears by first name only. Hartmann and Schell were protective not only of the town, but also of every individual and themselves, too (the flyleaf says that they lived “in northern California”).
The photos in the exhibition are often of famous people, including Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton; Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu; United Farm Workers Union cofounders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta; civil rights and civil liberties lawyer William Kunstler; and Fay Stender, a Bay Area feminist attorney. Even when she took photos of leaders, Hartmann aimed to respect their privacy. Her camera was rarely in anyone’s face.
Born in 1942 in Hamburg, Hartmann grew up and came of age when the country was divided between East and West and a wall ran through Berlin. As a young woman, she studied theology and wanted to become a minister in the Lutheran Church. But then she came to New York in 1964, saw a picture in the New York Times of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and moved to California. From then on she attended dozens of demonstrations and rallies, many of them in San Francisco, always with her camera and sometimes with her son, Ole.
“It was a big awakening for me,” she said. “I thought that the best way for me to contribute to the rebellion and the resistance was by taking photos and publishing them. ”
Hartmann taught German at UC Berkeley, studied photography and learned about the work of famed American photographers like Dorothea Lange, who documented the Depression of the 1930s.
On one occasion, she was arrested while taking a photo in San Francisco of a 16-yearold young man who had written on his Army jacket, “Black is Beautiful.” Hartmann got the shot, but immediately afterward, a police officer told her to “move on.” When she didn’t move fast enough for him, he collared her and took her to jail for failing to obey an order. Charges were later dropped and her green card, which had been confiscated, was returned. Those memories are still fresh in her mind.
But even after that one and only arrest, Hartmann continued to go into the streets and take pictures. She also spent two whole days on Alcatraz when a group of American Indians, who called themselves Indians of All Tribes, occupied the island for 19 months to draw attention to their plight. Her photos of that protest have been reproduced in scores of books, articles and encyclopedias, and have made her one of the most famous photographers of 20th century Native Americans. Amy Long, the history curator at the New Museum, discovered Hartmann’s work on her website, ilkahartmann. com. Long knew instantly that she wanted to feature it; the exhibition she has designed allows viewers to focus on individual photos. The Borgenicht Foundation provided financial support.
In addition to the photos on the wall, there’s a dazzling slide show of 75 of Hartmann’s color images of gay liberation demonstrators, from the start to present day.
“There was a flame that linked all the groups and all the movements,” Hartmann said. “Looking at my pictures I feel like I’m back in that time.”
At the New Museum, there’s a wall on which visitors have written their comments about the influences of the civil rights movement on their own lives. And there’s a souvenir postcard of a young black woman in Berkeley with an Afro and the words, “Resist in Peace.”
“My camera and I have stayed with movements for change for a long time,” Hartmann said. “We plan to stay with them a lot more.”