Pirkle Jones 1914–2009

[article reprinted in full from the Marin Independent Journal. Thanks to MFC in Silver Lake for forwarding the sadnews.]

Black Panthers’ photographer Pirkle Jones dies at 95
By Paul Liberatore
Posted: 03/19/2009 03:50:11 PM PDT

Celebrated Marin photographer Pirkle Jones, a colleague of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange whose photographs of the Black Panthers caused a furor when they were exhibited at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 1968, died March 15 at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael. He was 95.

Mr. Jones, who chronicled the people, politics and landscapes of Northern California for more than 60 years, died two days after breaking a hip in a fall at his Mill Valley home.

For 40 years, he and his wife lived in an architecturally stunning redwood-and-glass house that Mr. Jones had built on the edge of Mount Tamalpais State Park in the 1960s.

He said the Panther exhibit, which was almost canceled due to unfavorable publicity but ended being seen by more than 100,000 people, was among the most important events of his life, and was all the more significant because it was undertaken in collaboration with his wife, poet and photographer Ruth-Marion Baruch, who died in 1997.

For 28 years, Mr. Jones, who was once Ansel Adams’ assistant and was renowned for his exquisite black-and-white prints, taught photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, retiring in 1997.

As recently as this past December, he gave a guest lecture at the University of California at Santa Cruz. And earlier this year, he had his final show, “Looking for Mushrooms: Beat Poets, Hippies, Funk, Minimal Art, San Francisco 1955-68,” at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.

In 1956, Mr. Jones collaborated with Dorothea Lange, the great Depression-era photographer, on a photographic essay, “Death of a Valley,” which documented the final year of the Berryessa Valley before it was flooded for the Monticello Dam.

Turning his camera on another disappearing community, he documented Sausalito’s houseboat counterculture in the late ’60s and early ’70s in a series called “Gate 5.”

“Pirkle Jones’ photographs are just like John Steinbeck’s writing; they both capture the struggles of California’s coming of age and its emblem of freedom,” said the noted photographer Bruce Weber.

Born in 1914 into a large Shreveport, La., family, he said he got his unusual name from one Dr. Pirkle, the physician who delivered him.

“My parents ran out of names,” he said in a 2006 Independent Journal interview. “Too many kids in the family.”

Mr. Jones began taking pictures with a Kodak Brownie he bought when he was 17. After serving in the army during World War II, he enrolled in the new photography department’s first class at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute) headed by Ansel Adams.

He met his wife there, a fellow student. They were married in 1949 at Adams’ home in Yosemite Valley.

In recent years, Mr. Jones was honored with retrospectives at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Marin Community Foundation, among other institutions. In 2003, the city of Mill Valley honored him with its Milley Award for achievement in the arts.

After the death of his wife, he established an archive and endowment in the Special Collections of the UC Santa Cruz Library. His longtime associate, Jennifer McFarland, heads the Pirkle Jones Foundation.

“He honored the working man,” said McFarland, a friend of 40 years. “The grape pickers, the migrant farm workers, the cattle herders. His subject matter ranged from the beauty of the California landscape to the politics of the Black Panthers.”

Mr. Jones once said that he wasn’t concerned about making a reputation through style alone. “If your are true to yourself,” he said, “you’ll be original.”

Mr. Pirkle leaves no direct survivors. A memorial celebration of his life is being planned.

[photo from google search for ‘Pirkle Jones.’ Caption: “A Black Panther demonstration on July 30, 1968, at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland during Huey P. Newton’s trial. Pirkle Jones/Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive”]