Appeal To This Age:
Photography of the Civil Rights Era.

The Civil Rights Movement was won not only on the streets of cities like Birmingham, Little Rock and Montgomery and in the chambers of Congress but on the front pages of newspapers across the nation. Powerful photographs documenting the moral energy and courage of the movement and the brutality of Southern white police won co nverts to the cause and helped spur momentous legislation, ultimately affecting the outcome of the struggle.

The seventy black and white photographs in "Appeal To This Age" cover the time span 1954, the year of the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott, to 1968, the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Giving insight into the most important social upheaval of the post-War era, the photographs in "Appeal To This Age" have become visual icons as powerful as any created in modern photography, says curator Steven Kasher. "We have no photographs of the American Revolution, but we have these photographs of the second American revolution," Kasher wites in his catalogu e of the exhibit.

Photographers represented include photojournalists from the mainstream press, freelancers drawn to the conflict, and movement photographers. Among them are Charles Moore, whose graphic 1963 shots of demonstrators in Birming ham being blasted by fire hoses and attacked by police dogs garnered eleven pages in Life Magazine; Gordon Parks, whose eerie image of a black man emerging from a manhole illustrated a Life piece on the writings of Ralph Ellison; and such impor tant 20th century photographers as Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Frank.

Often working at personal risk of beatings and jail, these photographers captured images of life in the segregated South, sit-ins, freed om marches, bus boycotts and police brutality that resounded across the nation and around the world. Civil rights leaders often skillfully employed the media to win support fo their cause. The exhibit also explores the use of photography by movement organizations in creating their own portrayal of the struggle.

"For anyone who lived though the 1960s, photographs of the civil rights stuggle will always stir up deep feelings," wrote Vicki Goldberg for The New York Times in her review of the open ing of the exhibit. "That struggle disrupted and changed a nation; those pictures helped sway the public mind." Appeal To This Age offers a powerful emotional experience as well as a history lesson.

This exhibit was organized by Steven Kasher and originated at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, and is circulated by the Howard Greenberg Gallery.