The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Friedlander photos relay historic moments of Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom
NEW HAVEN >> Make that planned visit to see civil rights artifacts at Yale a tandem tour now.
The recently installed Beineke Rare Book Library’s exhibit on the Harlem Renaissance is joined this week by a well-known photographer’s rich photos of an underappreciated day in civil rights history — May 17, 1957 — in an exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery.
It was 60 years ago that thousands of activists and supporters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington wearing their Sunday best on a bright spring day to mark the third year since the Brown v. Board of Education decision and to demonstrate for civil rights.
Photographer Lee Friedlander was “working the edge” of the crowd and the result is the exhibit “Let Us March On: Lee Friedlander and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom” at the Yale gallery on Chapel Street through July 9.
The march was a forerunner of the famous 1963 March on Washington that featured Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In the prayer pilgrimage with King this day in 1957 were Ella Baker, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson and Rosa Parks, and the charismatic King delivered his first national address, titled “Give Us the Ballot.”
Those images are intriguing, of course, but Friedlander also aimed his lens at the thousands of other freedom fighters, regular folks who traveled from cities across the United States to participate.
The exhibit, say YUAG officials in a release, “offers a glimpse into (Friedlander’s) early career and the development of his personal style, highlighting themes that would come to characterize his later work, such as his interest in visual complexity and his focus on figural subjects,” not to mention playful juxtapositions and attention to the “dynamic alignment of forms.”
Friedlander couldn’t get magazines to publish the photos at the time, but after years of showing the series to colleagues, he finally secured support from the Eakins Press Foundation and published a book in 2015.
This exhibit was curated by La Tanya S. Autry, a senior fellow in the art department at Yale. The photos are part of a huge cache of Friedlander’s photos that have been donated to Yale.
Jock Reynolds, YUAG director, states in the release, “Maria and Lee Friedlander’s gift of this singular body of work to Yale is a treasured new addition to the gallery’s photography collection — one already distinguished by a massive holding of Friedlander’s master prints. His long career as an iconic American artist will also be stewarded by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the photographer’s archive will reside in perpetuity.”
The images will later travel to other museums and learning communities across America and then return to Yale, “where they will be the focus of continued study, reflection and inspiration for generations to come,” said Reynolds.