Charles Moore Is Dead

Years ago I bought the book Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore. It's an amazing collection of stark, black and white photographs where the photographer was clearly standing right in the middle of the action and seemed to be present at every major event of the Civil Rights era.

In his lifetime, Moore managed that elusive triple crown of creating great art, eloquantly recording the daily lives of others, and helping to radically change the world around him for the better. Charles Moore died today at the age of 79.

Even today, so many decades later, those old photographs haven't lost any of their impact. After flipping through the book for a few minutes, you are so consumed with rage that you immediately run outside onto the street, punch a white person in the face, punch a cop in the face, punch a police dog in the face, punch a fire hose in the face, punch a water fountain in the face, punch a Woolworth's counter in the face, punch a public restroom in the face, and punch a bus in the face.

Then you go home and start training for the 200m sprint so that you can get the gold medal at the next Olympics and give the Black Power salute when they give it to you.

Someone somewhere has probably written a phd thesis on the role of photography in the American civil rights movement. Images had a huge impact on civil rights long before Charles Moore got on the scene. For example, in 1955 the fourteen year old African American kid Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi after supposedly whistling at a white woman. For his crime, Till was beaten to death and shot, and his body was mutilated in ghastly, horrifying ways.

Till's grieving mother blocked the undertaker from fixing up her son's body, demanded a public funeral with an open casket, and permitted Jet magazine and others to widely publish unflinching, close up photographs of his now wholly unrecognizable body.  When asked why, she replied "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby."

The primary suspects in the Till murder were, of course, acquitted by an all-white jury. But those photos had a significant impact on an entire generation of young civil rights activists who went on to organize, march, sit-in, register, freedom ride and legislate.

I think that Charles Moore played a key role in recording the work of this newer generation of activists. And people like Senator Jacob Javits and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr credited his images, published regularly in Life magazine, with "building popular support for the passage of major civil rights laws in the mid-1960s."

It's hard to get a sense of the power of his photographs from websites. You should flip through a copy of the book, or at least watch the documentary about him. You'll likely recognize a lot of his iconic photos. Martin Luther King being arrested in Montgomery, protesters and policemen in Birmingham, James Meredith integrating the University of Mississippi, Bull Connor and his police dogs.

But for some reason, despite all Charles Moore's images of dogs and fire hoses and marches and beatings, I find the snapshots of quiet moments most painful to look at. Especially his shot of Rita Schwerner waiting nervously for news about her missing husband.

The bodies of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were found soon after. They were murdered for their civil rights work promoting voter registration among African Americans in Mississippi. They were all in their early twenties.

As the bodies piled up around him, Charles Moore continued taking photographs. Years later he explained that he had "wanted to show how awful, how vulgar, how terrible this whole thing was." It doesn't surprise me that later in life, after covering the Vietnam war and other danger zones, he shifted gears and focused primarily on nature, fashion and travel photography.