The Photographer as Storyteller
At every stage of life and history, people want—no, people need—stories. From cavemen gathered around campfires to TV viewers transfixed by the latest series, stories soothe, instruct, entertain and expand us. They help us make sense of our world and of ourselves. Indeed, storytelling, even more than tool-using or problem-solving, may be what distinguishes humans from animals. Photographers are some of the most powerful storytellers of all, able to convey complex ideas, capture character and evoke emotions and empathy without using a single word.
In this issue, we’re focusing on five photographers and their very different Florida narratives. They range from the intensely personal—a Jacksonville studio photographer whose midcentury portraits of the city’s African American community resonate with courage and pride—to the inventive, a St. Petersburg entrepreneur whose hand-colored photographs helped sell the Florida dream to Northerners. They include social visionaries who recorded inequality and outcasts, and even a Life magazine legend who kicked off his career by running away with that most Florida of all art forms, the circus.
Suffer the Little Children
Lewis Hine’s disturbing photographs helped end child labor in the United States.
A sociologist who turned to photography as a teaching aid, Lewis Hine (1874-1940) became a celebrated documentary photographer, whose images of children working in miserable and often dangerous conditions stirred the conscience of the American public. 
From 1911 to 1916, Hine traveled across the United States taking photographs for the National Child Labor Committee. Most employers, determined to hide the realities of child labor, prohibited photography, and Hine braved threats of beatings and even death from police and factory officials. To elude them, he became a master of disguise, assuming such identities as a fire inspector, Bible salesman or—perhaps most brazen of all—an industrial photographer studying factory machinery. He managed to penetrate textile mills, canneries, farms and factories, capturing thousands of images that he called “photo interpretations” because they resonate with his emotional connection with his young subjects. His passionate, humanistic style would inspire a later generation of documentary photographers. Hine’s photographs of boys working in Tampa’s Ybor City cigar factories are among his most famous. Even now, a century later, they still move us, those children robbed of their childhood, gazing at the camera—and us—with eyes that have seen and know too much for their tender years. Such images helped build support for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which prohibited hiring minors in most industries. At a time when child labor is again in the news and some states are weakening those laws, Hine’s work serves as a powerful reminder—and rebuke.
E.G. Barnhill’s painted glass-plate photographs brought the Florida dream to life.
In the early years of the 20th century, few Americans had visited Florida or even knew much about it. But by the 1920s, tourism was booming, and many visitors had been lured by evocative images of exotic landscapes produced by commercial photographers and sent around the country as postcards. Color photography was not yet available, and since black-and-white images could not capture the glorious hues of tropical Florida, some photographers began hand-tinting and mass-producing their customers’ and their own photographs. About a dozen Florida photographers specialized in these colorful images. Most, including St. Augustine’s prolific William James Harris, employed ethereal colors to create mystical scenes. But around 1915 in St. Petersburg, E. G. Barnhill (1894–1987)—an inventor, artist and lifelong entrepreneur—began applying gold toning and uranium dyes to glass-plate photographs, a process that allowed him to drench his images in vibrant, glowing colors. Both imaginative and realistic, the resulting stunning tropical scenes must have thrilled and seduced Northerners shivering in bleak winter landscapes. As Gary Monroe writes in his 2016 book, E.G. Barnhill: Florida Photographer, Adventurer, Entrepreneur, “His sense of light and palette, the refined nature of the prints, with their inherent tonal gradation and… subtle richness…created pictures that functioned as windows through which to see the real Florida.”
Their Place in the Sun
Known for her Depression-era photos of rural suffering, Marion Post Wolcott also documented the leisure life of wealthy Florida tourists.
In 1939, 29-year-old Marion Post was hired by the Farm Security Association (FSA), which was documenting impoverished rural life in America to build support for New Deal policies and leaders. The only full-time woman on the FSA project, Wolcott had already faced discrimination when she worked at a newspaper, where her male colleagues would urinate in her chemicals and grind out their cigarettes in her developing trays. As an attractive young woman traveling alone for the FSA, she was often met with suspicion and even danger, grilled by small-town sheriffs and fending off men who tried to climb through the transom into her motel rooms. She braved rock-strewn dirt roads and rushing rivers, frequent flat tires, officious social workers and loneliness, along with a host of discomforts, from stifling heat to bedbugs and meals consisting of potatoes and grits. She was also fiercely driven by the head of the FSA project, who did not allow her the same time and space he gave male photographers to develop her stories. But Post, who had an easy charm and friendliness that helped her connect with people of all backgrounds, prevailed. Over the next three years she amassed more than 9,000 images that have become iconic symbols of rural Americans ravaged by the Depression, from a child with legs bowed with rickets to exhausted cotton pickers and African Americans entering segregated theaters and letting off steam in juke joints. 
But another series of photographs from those years is less known. Post, who grew up in affluent circumstances and had a progressive mindset, was keenly aware of the wide gap between the rich and the poor. While she was waiting for the harvest in Belle Glade, she decided to spend time in Miami, and later, in Sarasota, where she documented the leisure life of wealthy tourists. Her “Gold Avenue” images, as she called them, are worlds away from her photographs of nearby migrants toiling in Florida muck, yet they display all the hallmarks of her work: her genius for formal and elegant composition, her mastery of light, and cool objectivity leavened by flashes of wit. In 1941, Post met and married Alexander Wolcott. A few months later, she retired from the FSA to devote herself to being a wife and mother. She never shot commercially again—nor until recently, did her work receive the attention some other FSA photographers did. Yet in just three years—perhaps one of the most productive three years in the history of photography—she produced a brilliant body of work that is a national treasure—and a state treasure, too, including these Gold Avenue images of 1930s privilege and posh living in the Florida sunshine.
Black Pride
E.L. Weems focused on the strength and dignity of his African American subjects.
It’s 1929 in Jacksonville, Florida, and at the corner of West Duval and Broad Street sits a small photography studio. Inside, simple backdrops, a roll of neutral-tone paper and drapes define the space for subjects to stand. These velvety conduits offer the perfect tonal range for black-and-white film, while the studio backdrop of a fictitious bucolic landscape transports the subject and viewer into a state of timelessness. Props are at the ready: a small chair for a child, a piano bench that is just the right size for a young woman to show off the fullness of her elegant skirts. A handmade sign reading Photos By Weems identifies this place as the studio of Ellie Lee Weems (1901-1983), a chronicler and archivist of African American life and culture in Jacksonville for almost half a century Weems photographed thousands of people as well as events and milestones in the Black community during those years. We do not know the people he portrayed, but they feel familiar. Formally posed, they stand erect or sit still and calm as they gaze at the camera. Some smile; others look serious; all radiate with dignity and pride. Here are angels, queens, scouts and soldiers. Their elegant clothing reveals the importance of the occasion. Young girls wear cotton dresses with Peter Pan collars, puffy sleeves and full skirts. Older women wear gloves, corsages, hats, jewelry and high-heeled shoes. The men sport double-breasted blazers; some don wide neckties, two-tone Oxford shoes, boutonnières, or fedoras. Pens, silk squares, and pocket handkerchiefs are tucked into breast pockets. Outside Weems’ studio, Black Jacksonville struggled with cruel and often violent racism, but Weems chose to focus instead on his subjects’ strength and aspirations. Composed and elegant, the people in these photos radiate confidence—in themselves and in their right to be seen and recorded as significant and successful members of society. —Maxine Payne A professor of art at Hendrix College, Maxine Payne curated a recent exhibition of Weems’ work at Institute 193 in Lexington, Kentucky.
On the Edges
From undiscovered folk artists to family vacationers, Gary Monroe explores overlooked corners of Florida. 
After graduating from the University of Colorado/Boulder in 1977 with a master’s degree in fine arts, Gary Monroe returned to his native Miami. Drawn to the eccentric and overlooked, he began photographing the elderly Jews, many survivors of the Holocaust, who were finding respite and renewal in the sunshine and small hotels of South Beach. That began Monroe’s restless pilgrimages into unseen corners of the world, and especially Florida, where he has documented Haitians in detention camps, self-taught artists and even a trailer park for sex offenders. Like a visual anthropologist, he’s also haunted tourist attractions, including Disney World, observing visitors seeking an idealized holiday in paradise. Deeply connected to the nostalgic Florida of his youth and drawn to creative spirits, Monroe has a special genius for uncovering hidden—and often outcast—artists. He was one of the first to bring the African-American artists known as the Highwaymen to public attention and has also catalogued—and collected—folk and what he’s called “renegade” artists all around the state. In addition to memorializing them in photographs, such as those shown on these pages, Monroe, a retired professor of visual arts at Daytona State College, has written 10 books about little-known Florida artists and is working on an 11th. Monroe’s photographs and papers were recently acquired by Emory University, but he continues, he says, to “wander aimlessly” in search of his next subject and image. As he told NPR in a 2012 interview, “I’m not a historian. I’m not an academic. I am only a photographer.” See more photographs at garymonroe.net.