Moments in Future History:
Images from mid-60's Alabama

Andre Bazin has taught us that photographs "mummify" spatial relationships in an instant of time, immortalizing reality. He left out the fact that this function does not include the freezing of the meaning of the image for future generations. Yet in the popular view, the family photo is created solely to be viewed at a moment in the future. When flre threatens, the first things to be saved are the photos, synonymous with actual children, aunts, uncles, marriages, graduations, the past accurately preserved in all ways. But experience has shown, at least in my case, that the photographic artist's motive at the instant of making an image rarely includes thoughts of the future.

Mostly by chance the images exhibited here were taken at a particularly turbulent moment in our history. Their significance to me was bound up in the details of my everyday life. The fear, exhilaration, danger and joy of the civil rights struggle may have swirled around them, but their future significance was of little consequence and was completely hidden from view through a very dark glass.

Now. looking back to those moments, the actual reasons I had for tripping the shutter are largely lost.  Names are forever forgotten. Dates are confused. Ironically, only the significance of geographic locations remains intact. Now at this exhibition the pictures, in a sense, have a life of their own, independent of either the photographer or the actual frozen objects and events. Further, beyond these pictures, today's audience has its own memories of this time from a huge store of popular images and words that it brings to the gallery. My intent may be lost along with the memory of the events. But when any picture is studied and then put down it immediately returns to the continuum of history but with new meaning. Hopefully I have created images for the future, and, as each viewer experiences them, they will pass into his or her perfect memory with a meaning that is significant, even if that meaning was derived from a source completely different from the one I responded to at the occasion of their creation. Can these pictures answer the different questions that we pose to them through today's lens?

Last, just to have this process actually play itself out is a satisfying honor tor an artist. To create images that become moments in future history is great, good fortune. It forges bonds nearly as profound as those of everyday life.