Eyes Of A Community - photographer's exhibition "To Tell a Story … Through Griot Eyes", Brooklyn, New York

American Visions, June, 1999 by Bernice Elizabeth Green

The photographers represented in the exhibition "To Tell a Story ... Through Griot Eyes" are community journalists Their work is as provocative and stunning as any found in the pages of mainstream publications, but their focus is on subjects and scenes rarely covered by that media.

Ranging in age from 19-year-old college student Eurilla Cave to 79-year-old college professor William Henry Mackey Jr., these photographers are at different stages of their careers. Mackey, Earlie Hudnall Jr. and Marilyn Nance, for example, are well-known; others are up-and-coming, for example, Cave (the daughter of the late photographer Robert Cave), Guy-Serge Emmanuel, Terrence Jennings, Barry Mason, Nilaja Stengel and Juliana Thomas. Samey Williams, who began his career in the 1940s, is an unheralded pioneer.

"They represent the best of our photojournalists, emerging and known," says Danny Simmons, the owner of Corridor Gallery, where the exhibition is on display. "They are our griot watchmen and watchwomen for this fading millennium and visionaries for the new millennium. Their photographs tell visual stories of a shared history, collective human experience and a spirit that lives. As the griot's spoken words remind us of our legacy, photographers' pictures return us to open windows where we can connect with the process of our journey, seeing how we are arriving at where we are."

The stories' settings include El Salvador, Texas, the Deep South, the streets of New York. The subjects are universal yet at the same time unique to a people and a culture. They include a homeless man surrounded by a bag of garbage, absorbed in writing; a kick boxer defying gravity; a youth emerging triumphant from a hole of despair (actually, a rooftop opening); an old man in a Western hat, bowing to inevitability. Each subject appears eager to tell his or her story.

"To Tell a Story ... Through Griot Eyes" opens June 13 at Simmons' Corridor Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. It remains on view, by appointment, through July 25. For more information, call (718) 638-8416.