PHOTOGRAPHER GETS HIS SHOT California was not immune to racist attitudes and unwritten Jim Crow laws, which enforced segregation during the 1950s. AfricanAmerican residents watched freeways built to bypass their neighborhoods rather than accommodate them. African-Americans often rented properties from white slumlords that were neglected and isolated from the rest of the city. A counterculture emerged from these conditions. Photographer Henry Walton preserved the character and integrity of this culture in black and white stills. He used a Hasselblad camera, an objective eye and a lens that managed to focus on how to include rather than isolate a community and its significance. 6 Spring 2015 – collegian times
PHOTO BY LUCA LOFFREDO Henry Walton stopped attending classes at Los Angeles City College after a photography instructor criticized him for using a black woman as the subject for a portrait assignment. Fifty years later and through a series of serendipitous encounters, Walton received an honorary degree last year. Walton’s graduation ceremony in June 2014 coincided with the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
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enry Walton aspired to be a photographer when he enrolled at Los Angeles City College in 1958. However, his time at the college was shortlived. He stopped attending classes after a photography instructor criticized one of his first assignments – a portrait of a black coed. The instructor deemed Walton’s subject “unacceptable” for black and white film. It was the instructor’s dismissal of his work, CLINTON Walton says, that discouraged CAMERON him from continuing collegelevel studies in photography. “Looking back on it now,” Walton says. “I realize I went into a state of depression. I didn’t recognize it as that at the time … I just stopped coming to school.”
An Eye for South Los Angeles Walton delved into the world of amateur photography in the 50 years after he dropped out of City College. His camera captured many historic moments of the civil rights movement in Los Angeles. He took rare photographs of the aftermath of the Los Angeles Police Department’s raid on the Black Panther headquarters in 1969. He drove an ambulance, which allowed him access to the scene at 4115 S. Central Ave. His photos of the Black Panther headquarters and surrounding area depict bullet-ridden windows, the message “Arm Yourselves” spray-painted next to a first story window of an apartment building and “Sons of Watts” stenciled onto an oil barrel in an alley nearby. “I also belonged to a group called the ‘Photographic Medium,’” Walton told the audience gathered at an exhibit called “My Old Familiar Places,” at the L.A. City College Da Vinci Gallery last