New York Review of Books Review

"black history" - the phrase is fabulously grave. To see it printed on the page is to be seized, once more, by colossal suffering and grimacing resilience, the crisis and drama of centuries and millions. Photographs flash to mind: the March on Washington; fists raised in Oakland; Frederick Douglass's kingly frown; a smiling Ray Charles; and that striking set of pictures, shot by Carl Van Vechten, of Zora Neale Hurston wrapped in extravagant furs. She beams in one photograph - and scowls in another. "I love myself when I am laughing," Hurston declared to Van Vechten. "And then again when I am looking mean and impressive." So loving yourself means relishing your many postures, your canny shifts in attitude and look. It's perhaps this feeling that prompted "Unseen: Unpublished Black History From The New York Times Photo Archives." The book, comprising images taken for this newspaper but which never appeared in it, manages to be both pious and oblique. A touching triumphalism glitters throughout: Here is a grinning Paul Robeson, a laughing Dionne Warwick, a regal Sidney Poitier, and a determined little girl at an integrated elementary school in Princeton, N.J. Standing at the chalkboard in a white, buttoned-up blouse, she, too, is ennobled as an icon of back history. So the notion of significance, the power and prestige of a particular image, is treated to an intriguing revision. Here are photographs that were just good enough to be preserved in "musty envelopes and crowded bins," but deemed unworthy of publication - until the passage of time polished them into gleaming, marvelous artifacts for our retrospective delectation. So we sigh and smile at what could have been iconic: Gwendolyn Brooks sitting primly at Yale, Aretha Franklin glowing in the light of her dressing room. And we wonder - and guess - why they were, until now, obscure. The Times writer Rachel L. Swarns has supplied an introduction to the book, which she edited with Darcy Eveleigh, Dana Canedy and Damien Cave. "Were the photographs - or the people in them - not deemed newsworthy enough?" Swarns asks. "Did they not arrive in time for publication? Were they pushed aside by words at an institution long known as the Gray Lady, or by the biases of editors, whether intentional or unintentional?" These are, of course, the right questions. And they offer a glancing analysis of the power relations that howl through this pretty volume. For all the glory and redemption promised by the photographs themselves, the hero of this epic is The Times. It revels in its brilliant capacity to publicize and transfix - so even this book, which serves as a kind of heroic restitution, can't help reminding us that the heroism springs from privilege. The newspaper graciously provides us with the very images it had so imperiously overlooked, as the whole endeavor calmly reasserts the grip of the media on the public imagination. That grip can asphyxiate. To survey some of the forthrightly "political" pictures here is to reckon with the fact that by declining to publish them, the paper's editors refused a chance to shape, and not simply record, political discourse. The book acknowledges this with an air of dutiful solemnity. In 1971, members of the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization, or Negro, staged a protest outside The Times's headquarters to demonstrate their outrage at the paper's reluctance to report their activities. The Times covered the story, but didn't run the pictures that now grace the book's first section: Negro's president, Thomas W. Matthew, stands atop a parked car and bellows exhortations to the gathered crowd; on the next page, a protester writhes on the ground. A policeman stands above him, hand raised furiously and clutching a baton. And behold, a few pages later, "what may well be the only Times photograph" of the civil rights activist Medgår Evers. The image, from 1963, has a beatific elegance. Evers is formal and dignified, lit exquisitely from behind as he delivers a speech at a rally. He was murdered two months later. Two years after that, Malcolm X's enemies firebombed his house in East Elmhurst, Queens. Nobody was hurt - he escaped with his wife and four daughters - but the photograph included in "Unseen" telegraphs a delirious horror that nods, darkly, to his subsequent assassination. The room is empty but for a few scorched remnants; it gapes and screams like a mouth. Most of these photographs announce their blackness - and their claim to a hallowed, threatened, vital, debated, unfurling black history - by showing black faces. Faces wrenched in agony or brightened by joy or locked in an expression of virtuous, unflappable conviction. Not so with the shot of Malcolm's blasted house: the feeling, the narrative, and the riveting significance emerge from the picture's blankness and emptiness, its avowal of all that is shattered and abandoned - and obscure. TOBI HASLETT has written for n+1 and The New Yorker, among other publications.