The great photojournalist Dorothea Lange—well known for capturing the hardships of the depression era—once said, “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
This is exactly what Watsonville-based civil rights photographer Bob Fitch has done over his 50 years.
Last fall, the humble and soft-spoken photographer gave his collection— consisting of about 275,000 images and negatives documenting the struggle of civil rights workers during the 1960s and 1970s—to Stanford University under the agreement that it be made digitally available for social justice work and non-commercial use.
“Photographs capture the dance, the engagement, the touch,” said Fitch during a panel on Sept. 30 for the opening of the “Movements for Change: The Bob Fitch Photography Archive at Stanford Libraries” exhibit. The exhibit features about 50 prints of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s civil rights work in the South, Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers Union (UFW) labor organizing, Viet Nam-era draft resisters, and the Black Power movement.
As a teenager growing up in Berkeley, Fitch was influenced by the city’s leftist environment, which included families who were members of the Communist Party USA.
“They were loving, friendly and gave a lot of hugs,” said Fitch.
In the early 1960s, the young Fitch was on a religious path at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley when he picked up James Baldwin’s seminal opus on race relations: “The Fire Next Time.”
Baldwin’s book had such an impact on Fitch that he changed his career direction, deciding to make social change from the field as an activist, rather than from the pulpit. But it wasn’t until he picked up some used camera equipment that he found his true calling as a social justice photographer.
“Photojournalism seduced me,” Fitch wrote in his online bio. “It is a compelling combination of visual aesthetics, potent communication and story telling. In order to tell the story effectively one has to be there—close.”
He got his first photography apprenticeship at San Francisco’s Glide Foundation. In 1965 he traveled to Atlanta where he became a volunteer staff photographer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference led by Martin Luther King Jr. Fitch spent the next two years traveling throughout the South, documenting the day-to-day civil rights work as it happened.
In situations where black photographers faced potential danger, Fitch, as a white man, was able to capture community organizing efforts, police violence, demonstrations, voter registration drives and political campaigns up close. As a result his images were often featured in major African American publications, such as Jet and Ebony.
In 1968, Fitch returned to the Bay Area only to hear that King had been assassinated. King’s family asked Fitch to immediately return to Atlanta to document the funeral. His iconic images of the King family in mourning are well known. While still grieving for the man who had embraced him and whom he considered a mentor, Fitch made an important decision to take a more systematic approach toward documenting the civil rights movement.
“During the following days, I soberly reflected on the fact that many of the non-violent peace and social justice campaign leaders I respected were threatened with harm, prison, or death,” Fitch said in the Stanford exhibit catalogue.
Fitch’s list of his heroes grew to include UFW president Chavez, draft resister David Harris, Roman Catholic priests and peace activists Daniel and Philip Berrigan, folk singer Pete Seeger, Berkeley City Councilman Ron Dellums and more.
He covered the UFW from 1968 to 1974, photographing farmworkers in the fields and in their homes. His work documents pickets, marches, funerals, and police brutality. One of his photographs of Chavez was used for a 2003 USPS postage stamp.
Although his photography endeavors were often interrupted by pay-the-rent jobs, his collection truly and fully documents many key moments in the civil rights movement.
Stanford Special Collections has begun the process of digitizing Fitch’s massive collection with the “Bob Fitch photography archive – Cesar Chavez/UFW gallery, 1968-1974,” which consists of 90 images that can be found at http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/zp940yp4275. Eventually 200,000 images will be on the Stanford website.
The exhibit “Movements for Change: The Bob Fitch Photography Archive at Stanford Libraries” runs through Feb. 22, 2015 in the Peterson Gallery and Munger Rotunda of Stanford’s Green Library. To confirm library hours, call 650-723-0931. Visitors without Stanford ID must register with a government-issued photo ID at the entrance to Green Library before entering the building.