Eye of the Storm
by Devin Johnson
As of October 15, 2024, the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida was reopened for only a day (with free admission) due to the crippling effects that Hurricanes Helene and Milton left on the surrounding region. Twisted, fallen tree limbs and scattered plant matter blocked off large portions of the campus; split branches damaged the roof of the closed Circus Museum, and the Ca’ d’Zan manor was flooded in the basement by Helene before Milton lifted two offshore boats from the water and threw them onto the harbor when I visited the facility. And yet, the museum was largely spared in comparison to other parts of Florida. Numerous homes in vulnerable areas were filled with anywhere from two to four feet of rainwater, towering piles of debris still line the streets and roads, electricity was cut off to millions of households, and mass evacuations drained the state of gas until it was unavailable for hundreds of miles when the countless Floridians who exited the state were forced to return. Those who ultimately had to stay and endure Helene’s or Milton’s wrath were largely the people without an escape route, a source of financial backing, or any kind of alternate plan or means of starting over; their belongings to be carried away as the storms returned to the open gulf.
When Hurricane Katrina swept through Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi, among other neighboring states in 2005, the area left the most devastated during and after the storm belonged to the largely black population of New Orleans. Up to eighty percent of the city, once a truly unique cultural center and source of pride for the state’s inhabitants, was washed away and flooded for weeks. The impoverished and weakened people already with limited resources and support were left to starve without shelter and fend off the hostile elements once the waters ebbed and receded—a pattern that continued with Helene/Milton and will unfortunately not change any time soon without drastic reform or restructuring. The unrest and distrust towards both sides of the increasingly polarizing political spectrum throughout the 2020’s certainly does not provide aid or solace to the people affected, what with conspiracy theories of the storms being bioengineered and intentionally steered to target poorer regions beginning to become widespread.
Starting late into September shortly before the storms formed and spending the majority of October closed, the newest exhibition for the Ringling Museum of Art, Enduring Light, could not have been more important and poignant for such a difficult era of turmoil and change. The show consists solely of the works of two innovative photographers, Roy DeCarava and Danny Lyon, and their statements on the changes within the black communities of the North and South stretches of the U.S., as well as each crisis that assailed and continues to torment young and old, apolitical bystanders and active revolutionaries alike. While it was not specifically the weather at fault for the suffering in the space DeCarava and Lyon inhabited, Helene and Milton are an extension and continuation of factors placed against an already susceptible and struggling community.
Born at the center of the Harlem Renaissance, Roy DeCarava’s artistic training and painterly approach prominently color his Twelve Photogravures series with poise and undeniable proficiency. He consistently casts each of his subjects in a dim glow amidst a backdrop of velvet-like shadows, and yet even with the intense chiaroscuro, it adds to the warmth and intimacy of the subject matter. For Couple Dancing, two embracing bodies are gently locked together as one in an enveloping veil of darkness, their only source of soft light presumably being the flash of the camera or a lone unseen lamp. Like the music caught between the hisses and pops of a vinyl record’s dusty grooves, the faint highlights stand out amidst the shade of a late night. It and Night Feeding, which features only the smiling face and fuzzy silhouette of a mother peering down at the newborn child she is nursing, feel personal without being perverse or encroaching: private but not voyeuristic. The smoky atmosphere of Man in Window and Across the Street, Night excels at conveying the center of fifties Brooklyn: faint lights pouring from apartment windows and bleeding into the surrounding streets.
Four Men makes one of the few direct social or political statements of the Twelve Photogravures by showing the solemn, grave expressions of distraught funeral attendants for the four young victims of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombings. The men stare at the viewer with either silent sorrow or indignant bitterness from the reality that the hateful murder of what could have eventually been their children would go without justice, retribution, or the decency of a peaceful resting place in the seemingly bleak future.
DeCarava is most widely known for his portraits of jazz and bebop musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and his photogravures on display include multiple noteworthy names. Famed jazz pianist Horace Silver is pounding the keys of his piano until they are rendered an indistinct blur. The sheer force and musicality of his frenzied playing as well as the rocking and swaying of the shadowy figures in Dancers can almost be heard through the pictures. Even Billie at Braddock’s, Paul Robeson, and Milt Jackson, which are more static and traditional portraits, are especially effective in how distinguished, noble, and bold they make the subjects appear: artists, revolutionaries, and cultural icons all at once in a period where many great minds were suffocated and great ideas were suppressed because of factors and circumstances beyond their control.
The power of DeCarava’s work comes from his implicit, subtle role in covering the approaching forward progression of the era through his use of influential intellectuals and activists as subject matter right alongside the people making the most of their vulnerable position in an era of limitation and scarcity. To survive in oppression is in itself revolution and indicative of change, and with limited government and financial aid staggering toward black communities while wealthier white districts receive benefits and cleanup work first, it is difficult to reconcile with and begrudgingly accept as small businesses and households are ultimately left to suffer.
Paul Robeson and Billie Holiday share space in the world of people who never experienced their big break or their chance to partially escape hostility or prejudice beyond a few moments of bliss. For example, Lingerie shows a group of children casually hanging from the fire escapes, windowsills, and stairways of a brownstone building, while Fourth of July, Prospect Park gives a glimpse of a family gathered together and celebrating the titular holiday in an open meadow. Carefree, at ease, lost in fleeting moments like many others which would ultimately never exit the red room to be processed or even captured on camera.
The other artist displayed in the Enduring Light exhibit, Danny Lyon, moved from New York to Illinois and started his career as a photographer for the Chicago-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC). He covered the protests and demonstrations of early civil rights activists in the more conservative regions of the Southern U.S., along with the hideous, indescribable violence and animosity that they faced from law enforcement and even their own neighbors. Doubling as political commentary as much as straightforward photography, his Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement series took unflinching snapshots of tumultuous, unpleasant history in the making. His work contains more urgency and ferocity at the eye of the crossfire hurricane compared to DeCarava.
Danny Lyon’s three tributes to the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombings among the series depict a shaken, haunted crowd gathered along the funeral route (the majority of the observers in grimacing horror or saddened heartbreak), SNCC workers outside the funeral in mourning, and a sorrowful Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with bulging eyes nearly starting to water before he was to deliver a eulogy to the four murdered girls. Conversely, four highway patrolmen parked outside of the bombed ruins of the church are seen smirking and sporting their raised weapons.
The First Amendment-guaranteed rights to petition, assemble, and exercise free speech were often responded to with belligerent suppression and a denial of even the most basic or sensible standards for human decency. This is made evident by an image from Leesburg, Georgia, of a group of over a dozen startled, wide-eyed adolescent girls left in a deteriorating stockade for demonstrating in Americus. Others are seen shouting from the back of a police car and clutching their fists around the metal bars on the windows. Reverends Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy are shown being escorted mid-strut to a jailhouse in Albany for the same questionable offense in a different picture, shortly before King wrote his frustrated “Letter from Birmingham Jail” from the inside of a solitary confinement cell.
Lyon’s portrait of high school student Taylor Washington shows him being violently held in a chokehold by law enforcement after arranging a sit-in protest at the Atlanta, Georgia-based Leb’s Delicatessen. As an apathetic crowd looks on in the distance, Washington delivers a strangled scream in the arms of a violent officer, tears traveling down his cheeks. This aggression is further demonstrated in a photograph from Cambridge, Maryland, of Clifford Vaughs, a fellow photographer for the SNCC, quartered and having his clothes torn away, grabbed from each of his limbs, and stretched out off the ground by gas mask-sporting officers. Eddie Brown, another member of the SNCC, is being carried by multiple officers in the midst of an arrest for his activism in Albany; Sheriff Jim Clark is shown detaining two protesters advocating for fair voter registration in Selma; and fellow SNCC activist and Freedom Democratic Party vice president Fannie Lou Hamer is seen shuffling down the street after having been arrested, beaten, and sexually assaulted in Winona, Mississippi, for visiting a diner after a meeting with a voter registration workshop. With police brutality and racial violence leaving people such as Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, and the victims of the Charlottesville riots targeted decades later, even with the progress made to curb this abuse of power, minorities continue to be antagonized.
Segregation was still readily apparent and unavoidable, with Lyon’s photographed evidence including two images of a group of demonstrators being denied entry into a public swimming pool in Cairo, Illinois, under the deceptive pretense of it being a “private pool” reserved exclusively for white members, a “white only waiting room” sign outside of a bus terminal in Jackson, Massachusetts, or an image from Selma, Alabama displaying a “colored entrance” for the City Café. With redlining still being a disappointing trend that forces poorer or predominantly black neighborhoods to stay poor and predominantly black (especially as storms such as Helene and Milton wipe through and further set them back) or be exterminated like Seneca Village to make way for rampant gentrification, discrimination continues to leave an hurtful impact on people decades after Jim Crow laws were overruled and made the issue invisible.
Following the wrath of Helene/Milton, a few residents of the African-American community Newtown insisted that FEMA funds and relief were denied to the town because the federal government directed their resources towards Siesta Key and more well-off counties. Those who already were in jeopardy, who relied upon aid and could barely hold together what they had, lost everything and were left unable to start over. Dr. April Glasco, the director for a local social services program known as the Second Chance Last Opportunity, informed me that the urgent need for food, clothing, and medicine dramatically increased amongst the locals in the aftermath of the hurricanes, although they were already elevated to begin with due to a lack of help elsewhere and the continuing trend of hidden segregation. Even with this recurring threat and frustrating obstacle, a few assorted images continue from and expand upon DeCarava’s theme of suburban life, namely profiles of a family in front of a small cabin along the Mississippi Delta, a few black men conversing on the hood of a parked car, and members of the SNCC praying during a demonstration in Cairo or sitting on the porch of a house overlooking the Georgia countryside.
The historical and cultural landmark which was March on Washington come August of 1963 is given a snapshot in the form of a man snapping his fingers high above his head as another forcefully claps, conveying the enthusiasm, fervor, and sense of triumph shared by the event’s primary activists and attendees. The spirit of the event, the intensified feeling of an uphill battle soon to end can be felt beyond the picture frame. Moments before Dr. King’s monumental “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial brought the moment to a head, a culmination of years of effort and strife which forced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into fruition, one could nearly feel the ground starting to tremble as 250,000 gathered in one place as one entity. The splintered and shattered Earth was seemingly coming together with sheer energy binding its disparate pieces.
Whether it be by living through unthinkable tribulations on sheer optimism alone or fighting the forces of evil to champion righteousness and equality with the risk of death or imprisonment, what the men and women shown in DeCarava’s and Lyon’s works demonstrate most of all is the importance and persistence of the unbreakable human spirit. The loss of belongings to violent storms is only one threat to the livelihood of a people strengthened by their successful fights against slavery, sharecropping, segregation, and cultural eradication. Many may find it futile to combat the odds when they continue to be against one’s favor after hundreds of years, but history was not written with words of indifference and acceptance. The best one can do is ride out the next storm when it eventually makes landfall and try to live for better, clearer skies. When the world seems to be at its most unfair, it produces the fairest of people.
Devin Johnson is an autistic poet, essayist, and visual artist based in Sarasota, FL serving as a fine art and cultural critic for Magazine-1. His approach towards writing is influenced most by his younger brother, spirituality, music, antique and thrift shopping, and art therapy techniques.