Rachel L. Swarns and Darcy Eveleigh

Editors: Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives
Headshots of two women.
Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive. <music up> Rachel Swarns: You know, one of the great things about this project and this book was that it inspired a whole flurry of other projects at The New York Times. Folks realized that the archives, there’s amazing stuff down there. And it, I think, helped inspire reflection about what else has been missing? Jo Reed: That’s Rachel L. Swarns—she’s one of the editors of the book, Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts—I’m Josephine Reed. Although The New York Times had until very recently thought of itself as a newspaper driven by text rather than images (unlike the tabloids say), it also had a staff of top photographers who would go out and document stories, taking pictures of the famous and sometimes the not-so-famous to augment a print article. Needless to say, the vast majority of these photos never saw the light of day—they were consigned to the archives also known as the morgue. Editors would make decisions about what photos to run based on many factors: deadlines, layouts, changing story lines that could make a picture irrelevant, stories were sacrificed for ad revenue, and sometimes, there was an ingrained bias that marginalized the stories of African Americans. Unseen is a deep dive into those archives. Based on a month-long series that ran in The Times three years ago during Black History Month, Unseen recovers photos of well-known figures and ordinary people and gets at the stories behind the pictures and their consignment to the morgue. Two of the four editors of Unseen are joining me: Rachel Swarns was a correspondent for The New York Times for 22 years and is now a contributing writer for paper and a professor at New York University. And Darcy Eveleigh was first a staff picture editor at The Times for almost 13 years and is now a contributing picture editor to the paper. And as the picture editor, Darcy was involved with the project that became Unseen at its inception. She explains its beginnings. Darcy Eveleigh: This book came about when one of our co-authors and I, Dana Canedy, we sat down and we were deciding on what to do for Black History Month. And Dana proposed the question to me asking if there was something that we could do from The Times’ photo archives, and see if we can come up with some photos, some stories for the paper. Jo Reed: So then how did you even begin this process? Darcy Eveleigh: What happened was that we came up with a list of regular people that most people would know in relation to black history. I started with Martin Luther King. And we went—and I found the most published photograph that we had of Mr. King which was a portrait of him. And looking back at that photograph I pulled the negatives from it thinking that I would see a portrait sitting. And, in fact, that wasn't the case. What I found, instead, was Dr. King had gone to a political event that day and the photographer had stepped up and taken a photograph of him in the middle of the event. And the next day in the newspaper there was a front-page article but no photograph. It turns out that after Dr. King left that event he also attended another political event at a church. He was, upon leaving then, attacked. He was egged by protesters out in front of the church. The photos that came back that day were in fact not of Dr. King at the egging, they were, in fact, they were portraits and at this political event. So the pictures were not appropriate. Jo Reed: I see, it was the wrong picture for the story that ended up running, which was about the egging of Dr. King and there were no photos of that. Darcy Eveleigh: Yes. And once we found that particular image we found that this might work. Let's go back and investigate all of the photos that we ran and see what else we can find in the history. Jo Reed: Rachel, how did you get involved with the project. Rachel Swarns: We started this process. We had some big names. We had Martin Luther King. We had Rosa Parks. We started looking to think about history and African Americans and who else might be in our archives. And one of the really fascinating things was we also started to think about how we, as an institution, covered and didn’t cover the African-American community. And this became clear once we started looking for a broader list of names. We discovered some amazing photos that had never appeared before. And so we started asking ourselves why hadn’t they appeared? We also discovered that many notable people who we thought should have been photographed by our staff photographers, people like W.E.B. Du Bois, Romare Bearden, Richard Wright, just simply had not been photographed by our staffers. And so that led us to think about why that was. And what we had to acknowledge, in some instances, was that the institution which was part of a larger society that marginalized African Americans was also part of that process; and that was something that newspapers and large media organizations don't often do. Of course, it was also complicated because The New York Times wasn't always an institution that made its name publishing beautiful images. Images weren't really that important. It was the words that really mattered. And so there were, also, instances where maybe they just didn’t have space. And so we were kind of wrestling with all those questions. Jo Reed: How many pictures are we talking about that you had to go through? Darcy Eveleigh: Oh, we went through millions and millions of photographs. The Times’ archives are enormous. It consists of multiple collections. There’s a print photographic collection which they believe to be somewhere around six to ten million images, not all staff. I think the latest number was about three million of those print images were staff pictures. There's also a negatives collection. And the negatives were what we used to produce this project. The negatives, they know, they have approximately 260,000 sacks of negatives. That means in each sack that could mean one roll of film or it could mean several hundred rolls of film. So it's hard to say. But I've heard estimates anywhere from 40 million to 60 million or more, up to 100 million, some people say 400 million photographs. They just don't know. But there are numerous, numerous, numerous photos. And the collection generally spans from the early part, the prints from the early part of the last century possibly a few from the late 1800s. And the negative collection is pretty well intact from about the 1950s to the digital age. And there is a good sprinkling of negatives from the 1940s and the early 1950s. Jo Reed: How organized is it? Darcy Eveleigh: It's very organized but it's organized in sort of a way that you have to have some research in order to go find it. It's organized chaos, let's just say. Rachel Swarns: I was going to say, Darcy is being very generous. It was exciting. One of the things that was challenging was that sometimes we wouldn’t find something because there is a system you know, to an organized system and it's not there. And then Darcy was looking someplace else and there it pops up. So it was quite a process. Darcy Eveleigh: We have a very good example of something like that. There’s some photos that we were looking for— Rachel Swarns: —I think Sidney Poitier was one. Darcy Eveleigh: —Sidney Poitier, actually, we couldn’t find him initially. And then we found the photographs by accident looking in another area. That happened quite often. Jo Reed: Well, we talked about some of the reasons why the photos you've chosen hadn't been published. And I would think another reason would be deadlines because it's not like digital photos today. Then they had to be developed and edited and printed while a paper had to go out at a particular time. Darcy Eveleigh: We have a very good example of that. There's some photos in the book of Myrlie Evers and they were at her husband's funeral in Washington, DC. Jo Reed: And very quickly, Medgar Evers was an African-American civil rights activist in Mississippi. He worked for the NAACP, and he was assassinated in front of his home in 1963. Rachel Swarns: That’s right. Darcy Eveleigh: Yes. And the next day in The New York Times—beautiful photographs—but they were wire photos. And, at the same time, our staff photographer, George Tames, was at the funeral. He was right with the family. And he had dozens and dozens and dozens of rolls of some of the most beautiful film I had seen. And we couldn't quite understand why the next day The New York Times ran with the wire images. They weren't better. So we came to a few conclusions. It was possible that the film didn't arrive in New York on time. Or another explanation just might be that George, mostly, worked for the magazine. And was he there photographing this as a feature for The New York Times Magazine and not, in fact, for the newspaper. Rachel Swarns: Another example of how technology has changed things, and this is perhaps the reason that might've affected why some photos didn't appear. For instance, we have an amazing photo of Malcolm X's house in Queens after it was firebombed. It's so dramatic. The photographer got into the house. And we were looking at it and thinking, goodness gracious, how could you have left this out? It's not that The Times didn't know about the firebombing. We wrote about and there was a wire photo that ran of him leaving his car, getting out of his car. But the conclusion we came to was that perhaps in a newspaper those dark tones which look so dramatic today might have just been kind of washed out and really hard to look at and even to see and make sense of when you were dealing with ink. Jo Reed: That makes perfect sense. You know, the pictures seem to fall into maybe three categories. No photos at all were used, although, the story itself ran. And then other photos were used and the story ran. And then no photo and no story. Darcy Eveleigh: Absolutely correct. One of the good examples of some photos ran, I guess, you look at there’s a series of photographs of Harlem taken by Don Hogan Charles who was a staff photographer; in fact, he was the first African-American staff photographer. And he did a beautiful essay of Harlem back in the early 1960s. Well, Don went out for an entire weekend. He came back with more than 100 rolls of film. And the next Monday morning in the paper there were six photographs that appeared in The Times and that was a lot for the day. That was a big photo essay, unlike today, where you can have hundreds and dozens published in the paper. To publish six at that time, I think, was kind of a big deal. Well, Don shot more than 1000 frames and they were beautiful. So the fact that they put six in left almost 1000 to still publish. And so, we look at that—somebody had said to us at one point, “Boy, we could make a whole book just of that weekend.” And it's true. So it's a good example of sometimes there was too many. Rachel Swarns: One of the things we discovered, too, was that there were these amazing photos of ordinary people. Don Hogan Charles, his portraits of folks in Harlem, just peace people living their lives, African Americans living their lives, those were some of the loveliest photos that we have. Jo Reed: I completely agree. Well, I had an enormous about the sympathy for you because I was marking pictures, you know, because I’ll want to talk about a few. And then I'm looking at like the 80 gazillion Post-its I have in the book and it's just like, how did they ever decide what pictures went into this book because I can't even decide which ones to talk about. But Don Hogan Charles—I kept flagging photo after photo of his. His scenes of everyday life, I think, are so beautiful. I would jump all over a book of his. Darcy Eveleigh: Let's hope we could publish one one day. There's enough material. But another example of pictures that say, why weren't they used? There’s a series of images of Reverend Kendall Smith burning a Confederate flag at City Hall in New York. And the stories in the paper talked about how Reverend Smith was relatively upset with a few school-based issues in New York City and he took a Confederate flag down to City Hall, walked to City Hall Park and lit it on fire. Jo Reed: And that was in the late 1960s. Darcy Eveleigh: Yes. And the photographs that we found showed, I don't know, maybe a half a dozen people standing around, some pigeons, two police officers. It was a very, very quiet scene, as you can see in the photographs. The reverend was arrested for inciting riot. Clearly, those photographs don't show any riot taking place. Well, The Times continued to write stories about this incident. And it turns out one of the final stories that they published about it was how he got off on a technicality. We have to wonder had The Times published those images would this case have gone away any earlier, but they never did. And all we can figure as to why was that when I looked at the pages of the metro section where the story ran they were filled with advertising. There was no room for the photos. And the stories ran in single columns down the side of the page. Jo Reed: Yeah. I completely forgot, of course, advertising. Darcy Eveleigh: Advertising took up so much of the visual space in the paper in those days. Jo Reed: How did you get the history behind each photo? Rachel Swarns: To find out the stories behind the photos we also did a lot—a ton—of research. Really looking at the images and trying to see what was happening then and what we could bring to our readers and our viewers about what was happening here and what was the story behind the story. And a good example of that is the lovely photo we have of Lena Horne. Lena Horne, of course, one of the biggest stars of her day appeared in The New York Times because she had a new TV show running. And we ran a tiny little headshot photo of her. And the photo itself turned out to be, one of the photos anyway, turned out to be this beautiful photo of her in her apartment that we had never published. And in digging into that story it turned out that Lena Horne back in the 50s and 60s had trouble finding an apartment because no matter how famous you were if you happened to be African American in New York City getting an apartment was not an easy thing to do. And so we dug into that story and found out that her good friend, Harry Belafonte, also a huge superstar, also could not find an apartment. And he got so frustrated that he ended up buying a building and putting some of his friends inside including Lena Horne. So we used the images as a starting point to bring people in and to tell stories that may have been forgotten or people were unfamiliar with. Jo Reed: Right. To illustrate the times in which the photograph was taken. Rachel Swarns: That's right. And one thing I wanted to mention, too, was that there are a couple of instances where when we looked at the photos that were not published and the ones that were that really raised the question of was racism involved here or bias involved here? And, again, it's always hard to say. None of these editors are around anymore. We can't really ask them. And a good example of that is one of Arthur Ashe. Arthur Ashe, of course, the tennis player, he won a match. He was the underdog, won this match, and the photos that we ran were both of the guy who lost. Jo Reed: And two photos of him. Rachel Swarns: And two photos of him. And now, the photos were kind of dramatic. Jo Reed: Well, one was dramatic, but come on, that photo of Arthur Ashe—it’s an action shot, he’s stretching out to return the ball. It’s gorgeous. Rachel Swarns: Exactly. It has him almost airborne. And it was hard to figure out why, even if you wanted to run the kind of dramatic photo of the white guy in defeat, why you wouldn’t have run the photo of the black guy who won. Jo Reed: You’ve mentioned that this book comes from a month-long blog series, Unpublished Black History. Can you describe what happened in that series? And, also, the kind of feedback that you got and how that feedback might have framed the way you did this book? Rachel Swarns: You know, it was really remarkable. We basically sat down and put together an image or several images for every day of the month of February for Black History Month. Jo Reed: What year was this? Rachel Swarns: 2016—and from the beginning we really wanted it to be a project where readers and viewers engage with us about the images and about the history. And so we started out that way. We had a couple of images where we had questions that we posed to our readers; some of them we knew the answers to, some of them we didn’t. We had a photo of Jackie Robinson who was addressing a class at City College. And there was no real description of what he was doing there. And so we put that out to our viewers to say, "Hey, were you there? Are you in the audience? Tell us about this." The response was really, really remarkable. We had people writing to us, emailing us, calling us. And it, actually, in some ways, shaped the project to a certain degree. One of the photos, a lovely photo, of two children, one black, one white in Princeton, New Jersey in a classroom. We posted that photo. And people asked us, “Wait a second, but who are these kids? What happened to them?” And we were like, yeah, what happened to them? And we asked people, we asked anyone, folks reading this do you know any of these children here? And we were able to find the little girl, now a grown woman, who shared her story. But I also think people really related to the fact that The New York Times was taking this step that, as an institution, we were looking at the past and not only at what we publish, but what we left out and thinking hard about why we might've left those things out. Jo Reed: Why did you decide to move the blog series into a book form? Rachel Swarns: There was no question about it. People were asking us, "How do we get these photos?" <laughs> It was remarkable. Like, “How did we get these photos?” I think within a couple of weeks, right, Darcy? Darcy Eveleigh: Oh, yes. Rachel Swarns: We were like, there's a book here. The demand was enormous. Jo Reed: And you added photos from the blog series but then you added more. Darcy Eveleigh: Yes. We had so many. And we even had to leave some out of the book. But the goal was really to just keep building upon this project. And I think all of us, on the team, while we wanted to keep some elements from the blog series in the book I think we really wanted to see what else we could find. And it became so much richer. The book was so much better than the blog series in the end. Jo Reed: I liked that blog, I followed that blog. Darcy Eveleigh: Thank you. Jo Reed: How did you organize the book? What was the thinking behind it? Darcy Eveleigh: Well, I think one of the things that we really wanted to do, and this happened naturally, as we said, we started off with the famous people. What was happening is we were finding images of ordinary people. And the balance of that became so special and it even became more interesting to us, finding the people that were not famous who got left out and got left out for all sorts of reasons was fascinating. So as we started to lay it all out we, basically, built categories, correct, Rachel? We thought well, we should have some musicians and we should have some actors and we should have politicians and religious leaders and really try to balance it, the walk of life—men, women, everybody that we could think of. But ultimately to make the cut the story had to be fascinating. Rachel Swarns: And we wanted there to be some surprise. We didn't want to have a book where you had sports, movies, church. Jo Reed: I was going to ask you about that. Rachel Swarns: Yeah. We wanted for the book to be a real experience for people and that you turn the pages and you don't know what you’re going to see next. And, of course, there's an index if you want to go back and look for someone, in particular, you can do that. But we liked the almost serendipitous experience that there was in discovering these. We wanted to give our readers and viewers a taste of that. Jo Reed: Each photo is accompanied by a story—could be a commentary, could be a little history—but it’s about that photo. And you have a wide range of people contributing, including some of the subjects themselves. Darcy Eveleigh: Absolutely. We tried to get as many living subjects as possible to talk to us and almost everybody did. And there were some wonderful, wonderful stories that came out of them, so unexpected. I think one was Andrew Young who told a very funny story that we didn’t—we expected something about his mission at the United Nations and he did tell us that but he also told us how he immediately recognized the photograph when he saw it because of the suit that he was wearing. And he told us this wonderful story of the custom-made suit which wasn't written anywhere. So we got new information from people. It was fun. It was wonderful stories, fun writing, and wonderful to talk to these people. Jo Reed: I wonder as you looked through these what surprised you? Darcy Eveleigh: That's a good question. I think the amount. The amount of work that was left behind. The amount of things that were left out. The amount of stories that felt like they were partially told. And maybe they were partially told because they weren't complete at the time. They didn't know the full story. But I think to really give an example there's an image of Medgar Evers, in fact, where Claude Sitton, who was a reporter, was down south covering Medgar Evers at the time. And Claude was using his camera to take reporting notes. And the photos he took of Evers never appeared in the paper. And we found them, and in fact, The Times had never published its own photographs of Evers and we think this might, in fact, be the only photograph that was ever taken of Medgar Evers by a Timesman. And when we look at that now it seems of such importance but at the time before his assassination he wasn't a big name in The New York Times. We had very, very little writing on him. And so I think maybe the surprise for me comes when you’re so surprised that we didn’t publish it but then you realize it wasn't until later on that it became such an important event. Jo Reed: Of course. When news becomes history, you see what remains. What surprised you Rachel? Rachel Swarns: You know, I think, I guess, I was surprised by what wasn't there. I think that as a journalist, mostly we’re thinking about how we can cover things and how we can bring things to life both in print and in photographs. And, for me, as an African-American journalist I think it was a reminder of how the media, of which I am a proud part of, was also involved in a big way in the marginalization and the erasure of people. It was part of an establishment that was marginalizing African Americans in many different ways. Of course, I know that. This made it real in a different way. Jo Reed: You're both journalists. You’re a text journalist and Darcy, you’re a photographic journalist—has it changed the way you think about your own work or the way you approach your work? Darcy Eveleigh: Absolutely, for me. I think it's made me a much, much more careful editor, picture editor. I really think about, especially with big stories, about what sort of impact this is going to have on the future. Nowadays, as a visual journalist we have so many opportunities to run multiple images with a story and I try to, with my edits, more carefully balance my presentation visually. And really to think about the future and how this is going to be perceived, anything I do is going to be perceived in years to come. Jo Reed: And what about you Rachel? Rachel Swarns: One of the great things about this project and this book was that it inspired a whole flurry of other projects at The New York Times. Folks realized that the archives, as Darcy has long known, there’s amazing stuff down there. And it, I think, helped inspire reflection about what else is—has been missing? And, you know, there have been other projects since then using the archives. There's this whole overlooked series about obituaries of folks whose deaths simply weren’t recorded even though they were notable women or notable people of color. That's a wonderful outbirth, I think, of some of the work that we did. Jo Reed: Do you almost see this as Unseen: Volume One and feel like you could go on and do more with this? Or are you willing to pass it on to someone else and move on to something else? Darcy Eveleigh: I hope this is just volume one. I would love to do more of it, yes, absolutely for me. Rachel Swarns: I was just wondering do you really want to go down that rabbit hole with me? I am sort of obsessed with archival work. It's kind of most of what I do now in terms of looking at history and its reverberations in the present. So I could happily spend and am happily spending much of my time diving into history. Darcy found these amazing images and it's a way to connect with history in a very different way and in a way that's really powerful for people. And the process itself was really powerful for me. Jo Reed: And that’s a good place to leave it. Rachel, Darcy, thank you so much. It was a wonderful blog series, and it really is a great book. Darcy Eveleigh: Thank you very much. And thank you for having us. Rachel Swarns: Yeah. Great to be here. Jo Reed: Thank you so much. <music up> Jo Reed: That was Darcy Eveleigh and Rachel Swarns, they are two of the editors of Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Subscribe to Art Works wherever you get your podcast and leave us a rating on Apple—it helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. <music up> ########
Rachel L. Swarns and Darcy Eveleigh are two of the four editors of Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives. In Unseen, the editors took on the monumental task of going through millions of unpublished photos in the archives (or morgue) of The New York Times. They were looking for pictures of African Americans--both the ordinary and the famous. They then tried to get the story behind the photo centering around two major questions: why was the photo taken and why wasn't it used. The process was like unraveling a mystery taking a lot of determination. And the result is pretty extraordinary. Both Rachel and Darcy were longtime staff journalists at and are now contributors to The New York Times--Rachel is a writer and Darcy a photo editor. They talk about the book from these different perspectives and also share how putting this book together influenced their own approach to the work that they do.