“America in Crisis,” first opened in 1969 at the Riverside Museum in Manhattan. Conceived by Magnum Photos, it was a powerful exhibit intended to document the year’s first US presidential election and assess the state of the nation. Featuring the work of 18 photographers, it was immortalized in a book published the same year and featured a deeply fractured society.
The book’s editors wrote, “Our crisis today is a conflict between the traditional vision of the country – the American Dream – and the difficult, incompatible realities that live with it.” The nation was shaken by the then-recent killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, which took place against a backdrop of deepening racial tensions, economic inequality and growing opposition to the Vietnam War. In the 1968 election, Republican Richard Nixon narrowly ousted Democrat Hubert Humphrey.
Selma March, Alabama, 1965. Curator Sophie Wright said, “This young man’s straight gaze, his defiance and his mastery over that flag are so powerful.” Credit: Bruce Davidson / Magnum Photos
Fifty years later, America is facing a strikingly similar social divide, and a new exhibition with the same name brings together historical photographs from the original 1969 project and more recent works from the past two eras. highlights the similarities between
“We set out to use the same conceptual framework in which the original book was produced,” said curator Sophie Wright, who worked at Magnum Photos for 17 years before leaving in 2020. “Therefore chapter titles, such as ‘The American Dream,’ ‘The Long Roots of Poverty’ and ‘A Streak of Violence’ are also titles of contemporary exhibitions.”
A photo of Elliot Erwitt showing support for Nixon at the 1968 Republican Convention in Miami. “Irwitt has been with a lot of intelligence at many of the presidential inaugurations, and his intelligence is something that I think helps with how we read his images,” Wright said. Credit: © Elliot Erwitt / Magnum Photos
Organized by Saatchi Gallery in London, the exhibition is co-curated by Gregory Harris from Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and LA-based photographer and academic Tara Pixel. It includes 120 shots from 40 American photographers.
“There’s a very broad range. We have a gentleman working as a photojournalist for the local news (in St. Louis), Robert Cohen, via Leah Millis, a senior Reuters photographer. And then We have photographers who are working more on this. Like Zora J. Murph the edge of documentary practice in a more artistic vein, so there are many different strategies and approaches to photography within the contemporary selection,” Wright said. .
A photo of the Capitol attack of January 6, 2021. Credit: balazs gardik
Combining these two eras together also reveals how social issues have been documented differently through the lens of photography over time – and how those issues have been in the 50 years since the book’s release. have developed. The part of the exhibit where those differences are particularly clear is based on a chapter entitled “A Streak of Violence”, which depicts the events following the political assassinations of King and Kennedy in 1969.
Wright said, “It’s a real sucker punch right after ‘The American Dream.’ ” “In the contemporary iteration, it is sad that there is a very widespread issue of guns and gun culture within America. We also see the heavy militarization of the police which has happened especially after 9/11.”
Bungalow family with Last Ash Tree, Midway, Chicago, USA, 2018. “It really speaks to the American dream of homeownership,” Wright said.
Credit: Paul D’Amato
However, another topic that, five decades later, still seems very familiar and familiar, is the fight for equality. The exhibit includes images from the Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, 1965 march—part of a series of demonstrations that led to federal laws guaranteeing voting rights for African Americans, as well as Black Lives Matters in 2020 Protests followed the killing of George Floyd. Wright said, “There’s a lot of clear imagery that speaks volumes from time to time, especially as opposed to. The body language is the same, there are compositions that look very similar throughout.”
Lee Square, Richmond, Virginia, 2020. “It became one of the most important sites for the Black Lives Matter protest, and it was on the cover of National Geographic. It was a very powerful site of protest in 2020,” Wright explained. Credit: Courtesy of Chris Graves/Sasha Wolf Projects
The exhibition also includes an interactive installation. A foot pedal sits at the base of a series of monolith screens, and by pressing it, images from the exhibition are displayed according to keywords such as “flag,” “mob” and “police.” This is in contrast to a similar installation in the original exhibition, which, instead, ties the images together at random.
“It speaks to the way in which we are fed images now: the Internet puts us in silos and we are presented with what we like. It’s to encourage people to think about what they’re seeing, And how they read those pictures. Photography is an incredibly slippery medium,” Wright explained.
“But I think the power of singular images, in spite of the noise we are all facing, is still there to the fullest — as an antidote to that noise.”
Top image: US Capitol in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021.
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