San Francisco United Film Festival 2009

Produced and directed by Jane Levy Reed, “Pirkle Jones: Seven Decades Photographed” profiles an artist who has helped define the San Francisco Bay Area’s dual photographic traditions of elegant landscapes and biting social documentation. Incorporating some 150 of Jones’s black-and-white photographs and interweaving archival footage and recent interviews, the film allows the photographer to tell us his story, highlighting his collaborations with major figures such as Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and his wife, Ruth-Marion Baruch. For Jones, taking a photograph is always a political act. That philosophy underlies his contributions to the 1956 “Death of a Valley” project, for which he and Lange recorded the last year of the Berryessa Valley prior to its being flooded by a new dam constructed to quench the thirst of California’s growing population. It is just as clear in “A Photographic Essay on the Black Panthers,” the groundbreaking project he and Baruch undertook in the late 1960s. Kathleen Cleaver says in the film “I was the communications secretary of the Black Panther Party. I brought them to Eldridge and he said, ‘Oh. His pictures are different. His pictures don't look like the other pictures we see in the press.’ They were actually very caring and very humane.”