Pirkle Jones: A Life of Photography

Pirkle Jones: A Life of Photography

Pirkle Jones (1914–2009), born in Shreveport, Louisiana, started photographing when he was seventeen. Using his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, he exhibited work at camera clubs in the 1930s. During a visit to a Cleveland gallery, Jones saw an exhibition of stunning photographs by Alfred Stieglitz, compelling images that forged his artistic pursuits a decade later. 

In 1946, Jones enrolled in the first photography program dedicated to exploring the medium as a fine art at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Ansel Adams founded and taught in the photography department at the school, and Jones worked as Adams’s assistant and printmaker from 1947 until 1953. Adams introduced Jones to his artistic circle of friends, which included Edward Weston, Minor White, Dorothea Lange, and Ruth-Marion Baruch, a fellow photography student and poet, who became a lifelong collaborator and his wife for forty-nine years.

Jones captured an array of subjects as varied as California landscapes, the Black Panthers, migrant farm workers, and a counter-cultural houseboat community in Sausalito, California.  In 1956, a highlight in Jones’s career was his collaboration with Dorothea Lange. They photographed Berryessa Valley, a California farming community in Napa County that was flooded with the completion of the Monticello Dam a year later, forcing the residents to relocate. Jones rendered photographs with intense personal empathy that reflected a mixture of nostalgia and dread, as small-town life and family memories and property made way for progress. “The Berryessa project was one of the most meaningful photographic experiences of my professional life,” recalled Jones in 1994.

Jones combined technical mastery and visual sharpness with a strong social purpose. From his point of view, "There's no such thing as objectivity.” He believed that taking pictures was a political act.

[inset top image]
Audience, Free Huey Rally, at De Fremery Park, Oakland, CA
from A Photo Essay on The Black
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[inset bottom image]
Easter Sunday Van Ness, San Francisco
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