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Photographer from Superior captured era for future historians - I didn’t know
it until last week, but Esther Bubley and I collaborated on a public
television documentary. The subject was segregated bus travel in the South. I
handled the filming and editing while she agreed to hop a Greyhound to take
still photography of life under Jim Crow.
Duluth News Tribune (MN) -
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Author: Robin Washington,
Duluth News Tribune
I didn’t know it until last week, but Esther Bubley
and I collaborated on a public television documentary. The subject was
segregated bus travel in the South. I handled the filming and editing while
she agreed to hop a Greyhound to take still photography of life under Jim
Crow.
Well, not quite; she shot her photos in 1943. I didn’t make the film until 50
years later. But her images so precisely illustrate the story that you’d
swear she grabbed an assignment sheet and used a time machine to fulfill it.
“I can see how it would seem that way, especially with her work on bus travel,”
Jean Bubley said of her aunt, who grew up in Superior and
attended Superior State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin-
Superior).
Inspired by the great photographers of the Depression, Esther Bubley
saw little chance for a similar career in the Twin Ports. She eventually made
it to Washington and lucked into a job at the
Office of War Information as a roaming photographer documenting life on the
homefront.
“It was her first real job. And the reason she rode the bus was she didn’t
have a car,” said Jean Bubley , who inherited and curated
the work of her aunt, who died in 1998.
Her images are at once stirring and ordinary, and often incongruous; crowds,
some interracial, underneath “white” and“colored” waiting room signs.
Passengers so tightly packed together you can feel their sweat. Black riders
trying to keep their dignity in the last seat of the bus.
Bubley would go on to travel the world in a stellar
career for Life and Look magazines and other major publications. But her work
as a government photographer is preserved at the Library of Congress.
It’s also copyright free, which I and every historical documentarian knows.
In 1994, I sequestered myself in its Washington archives to search the images
of the Office of War Information and its predecessor, the Farm Security
Administration. My specific subject was the first Freedom Ride, in 1947 — a
trip by eight white and eight black men riding buses and trains together to
challenge Southern segregation, years before the Civil Rights Movement. I had
found the survivors of the ride but needed everyday
images of the Jim Crow South. The archive proved to be a treasure trove.
Julia Cheng, now my wife, also spent a day there reshooting broadcast-quality
copies of the photos. We got to know them intimately in the editing and
dozens of screenings and nationwide broadcasts of the show, “You Don’t Have
to Ride Jim Crow!”If she says, “The farther south you go, the crazier they
get!” I know exactly what image goes with the words.
The government project included two of the greatest photographers of all
time: Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks. I knew that. But I knew nothing about Bubley
, let alone her Northland roots, until the Duluth Art Institute opened her
retrospective. And not until last Wednesday did I learn that I had used more
than a dozen of her images — more than of any other photographer. It wasn’t
completely accidental: I was looking for photos from the ’40s, of bus travel
and segregation, and hers was the more prolific collection of each.
I’m hardly alone. There are also a few in “Freedom Riders,” a documentary
about the more famous rides in 1961 that airs at 8 p.m. Monday on WDSE-PBS 8.
So what would Bubley say?
“When she was alive, she was always very pleased with the recognition,” said
her niece, a Brooklynite in town last week for the exhibit’s opening
reception. “I’m sure her work was used more than she knew, and now with
everything online, it’s more apparent.”
Adds her cousin, Allan Apter of Duluth: “I guess she was being Minnesota
Nice, not a person out there blowing her own horn. She just did her work and
let it speak for itself.”
More than half a century later, it speaks as powerfully as ever.
Robin Washington is editor of the News Tribune and producer of the
documentary, “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!”
(www.robinwashington.com/jimcrow) He may be reached at
rwashington@duluthnews.com.
Caption: Passengers stand in
aisles on a Memphis, Tenn., to Chattanooga, Tenn., Greyhound bus in 1943. The
photo was used in the documentary “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!” (Photo
by Esther Bubley ) Passengers stand in aisles on a Memphis,
Tenn., to Chattanooga, Tenn., Greyhound bus in 1943. The photo was used in
the documentary “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!” (Photo by Esther Bubley
) Passengers stand in aisles on a Memphis, Tenn., to Chattanooga, Tenn.,
Greyhound bus in 1943. The photo was used in the documentary “You Don’t Have
to Ride Jim Crow!” (Photo by Esther Bubley ) Passengers stand
in aisles on a Memphis, Tenn., to Chattanooga, Tenn., Greyhound bus in 1943.
The photo was used in the documentary “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!”
(Photo by Esther Bubley )
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