Visual Arts

    In those days before 24/7 connectivity, Burk Uzzle had not heard the news. His wife greeted the photographer’s airplane flight with the latest: Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed in Memphis, Tenn. In addition to the sad news, she handed Uzzle two other things: an airplane ticket to Memphis and a bag of film.

    Rushing through Washington National Airport, Uzzle made the connection and was off to Memphis to photograph the historic aftermath of the civil rights pioneer’s assassination. Uzzle, whose first magazine assignment of his career had been to photograph King years earlier in Atlanta for a Jet magazine article, followed King’s casket from Memphis to Atlanta to record in light and shadow the throngs who came to Ebenezer Baptist Church for the funeral and burial.

    Uzzle has selected 20 of the hundreds of black-and-white photographs he took in Memphis and Atlanta for an exhibit at the Arts Council of Wilson. The exhibit opens Jan. 18, 2010, on the Martin Luther King Holiday but will be available for viewing the first week of January. The exhibit closes Feb. 6, and the exhibit moves to the American Tobacco Museum in Durham.
Uzzle, who now lives in Wilson, had never before printed the images as a set. Most of the pictures have never before been seen by the public.

    The exhibit came about from a casual conversation between Uzzle, one of the most highly regarded photographers of the latter half of the 20th century, and Cynthia Whalen, gallery director of the Arts Council of Wilson. Six months ago, he mentioned to Whalen that he had never printed the assassination photos, and together they decided to make those 40-year-old photos an exhibit marking the King Holiday.

    The photographs capture all the emotions of April 1968 — grief, mourning, anger, compassion, division, unity, indifference, fear. Newsweek used one of Uzzle’s photos, showing an anonymous woman reaching into the open casket to touch King’s face, as its cover. That photo was taken early in the morning at a Memphis funeral home before King’s body was flown to Atlanta. “I knew people who knew King,” Uzzle recalled recently as he looked over the pictures in his home darkroom, “and they got me into the place where they were keeping his body very early the morning before they took him to Atlanta — 5 a.m. I was able to photograph a few friends coming by to view the body.” The Newsweek cover was one of those photos. “Another one is framed and in my living room,” Uzzle said.

    Earlier in his career, Uzzle had been under contract to Life magazine, but in 1968, he was working independently, marketing his photos through Magnum, a photographers’ cooperative. “When Newsweek heard that I was down there and shooting, they wanted to see the film,” he said, and chose one of his color shots for its cover.

    But most of the pictures Uzzle shot over those five days have never been exhibited. They include images of heavily armed officers guarding the Lorraine Motel balcony where King was shot, crowds lining Atlanta streets for the funeral procession, and celebrities and politicians who flocked to the funeral.

    Flipping through the 16-by-20-inch photos he had just completed selecting and printing, Uzzle tells the stories he sees in the photographs. “This is the balcony where he was shot,” Uzzle says, pointing to the armed men guarding the balcony, “and I turned around, and there were these people.” He points to a second photo of black faces staring up at the balcony. “The thing about these pictures is what you see in the faces. You see the shock and disbelief. … The shock of it all; that’s the way it felt.”

    Two other photos hold a similarly stark contrast. They were shot along the route of the funeral procession. One picture shows a crowd of black mourners deep in grief and despair. The other shows white men in business suits and sport coats watching curiously or indifferently. “Here’s the whole story of segregation,” Uzzle says, holding the two photos side-by-side. “The reason I think it’s the story of segregation is what you see in the faces. … You could stand and look at these two pictures forever — what a document about society at that time.”

    Many of the faces that populate these pictures are anonymous bystanders, the ordinary people whom King represented. Others are widely known — Ralph David Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, and the Kennedy brothers, Bobby and Ted.

    The photograph of Bobby Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from New York and a candidate for president, shows him close-up, dominating the frame. His wife, Ethel, is looking over his shoulder with her white-gloved right hand on her husband’s chest. Two months later, Kennedy would be slain by an assassin. The image haunts Uzzle. “I’m convinced if you look at his face, you see he’s about to die,” said Uzzle, who would also photograph Kennedy’s funeral.

    The photograph of Ted Kennedy in the exhibit is a montage of images created when the film tore from the camera sprocket, creating overlapping multiple exposures. “I was shooting so fast that the Leica ripped the film,” he said. Uzzle printed the multiple exposures as one long image showing Kennedy being swarmed by the crowd. “It’s amazing, the young, handsome Ted Kennedy at the Martin Luther King funeral,” Uzzle said. “People were just dying to touch him. … This to me is a very important picture, and it’s never been printed before.”

    Uzzle shot several hundred pictures those five days in April 41 years ago, armed with two Leicas and a Nikon F, each equipped with a standard 50 mm lens that required that he get close to his subjects. He shot both color and black-and-white film, but the images in the exhibit are black-and-white. He was working independently without any guarantee that his expenses would be covered or that he would be paid for his pictures. He says he never thought about finances or costs as he worked. “Things like that, you’re there because you have to be there,” he said.

    Searching through the contact prints and printing the enlargements has been painful for Uzzle. “It would really affect me because I recognized people there,” he said. “I’d start hearing sounds.” The funeral was much more emotional than the civil rights marches he had covered before. “People were torn up about this. People were breaking down. Photographers were breaking down, including me.”

    Uzzle says he has no message or moral to present in this exhibit. “I just want to share the experience. I want to share some of the feelings of the people back then,” he said.

    Although these prints will hang in an art gallery, as many of his other photographs do, Uzzle refuses to think of them as art, insisting that they are documents of an event and an era. “I don’t advocate any of these as being identified as fine art,” he said. “It’s not about art; it’s about telling what happened.”

    Art was not on his mind as he shot these pictures. “The last thing I’d want to do in a situation like that is to think of art,” he said. “At the moment, all you can think of is get it down, what you see and what people are feeling.”
He even advised Arts Council executive director Barry Page to be careful about how the exhibit is hung. “One of the tricks to hanging this will be to do it so it’s not too inflammatory but it makes the point,” Uzzle told him, “and it’s psychologically powerful, so we’re going to have to work together on that.”

    A college professor who teaches photography and has seen many of the images calls this exhibit “a major piece of history.” Gerard Lange, assistant professor of art at Barton College and director of exhibitions at the Barton Galleries, says he would recommend the exhibit to his students. ”First, this is incredible photojournalism, and Burk was able to be in a place and capture an event,” he said. “Second, look at vantage point that Burk takes. There is an intimacy. There is an attachment. The viewer can form an attachment with the people in the pictures. In all these images, the people are very close. … Look for scenes in which Burk really activates the picture that puts you there in a way that rallies you behind the picture, either grieving or picking up that torch.”

WRAL Photo Gallery - Martin Luther King, Jr. Photography Exhibit - Burk Uzzle
http://www.wral.com/news/local/image_gallery/6805641/

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