The Whole World Watched: Micke Grove Photo Exhibit Pays Tribute to Documentarians
Brian McCoy, The Record, Saturday August 10, 2002
For Ilka Hartmann, the ‘60s started in Stockton. Later, as her education advanced and her interest in the era’s peace and social justice movements ripened, she found her way to the Bay Area. In the heady, turbulent days that followed, Hartmann - as photographer-cum-participant - protested the Vietnam War and chronicled the American Indians’ occupation of Alcatraz.
“At night, I would demonstrate and photograph and print,” Hartmann said. “It was so intense. I would go to bed at maybe 5 or 6 a.m., and my friends would wake me up at 11 with songs of the Beatles. Then I would make it to the noon rally.”
All that was only possible after the spirit of the age touched Hartmann. And that initial visit occurred not amid the tumult of Berkeley, but as she studied history at University of the Pacific and photography at Delta College.
“This all very much opened my eyes,” Hartmann said. “Democracy is not something you inherit, it’s something you have to work for. I think that is really important to keep remembering.”
Hartmann is among the photographers offering just such a reminder in “The Whole World’s Watching: Peace and Social Justice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s.” Curated by the Berkeley Art Center, the touring exhibit is on display through November 1 at the San Joaquin County Historical Museum in Micke Grove Park.
With more than 80 images drawn from portfolios of 28 photographers, “The Whole World’s Watching” chronicles the Bay Area’s role in the political and social movements that toppled the status quo in the years between John Kennedy’s assassination and Richard Nixon’s resignation. The accompanying text and timelines enable visitors - whether they be era veterans or their grandchildren - to place the respective movements as well as specific events and personalities, in proper context.
And it is the context that often gets lost when Americans recall those times. There is little nuance in our collective take on “the 60s”; as much a brand name as an historical era, we tend to reduce its complexities to one-dimensional images of hippies, protests, Woodstock and the like. “The Whole World’s Watching offers some welcome depth, the opportunity to recall and perhaps embrace the era’s wider goals.
As Berkeley Art Center executive director Robbin Henderson writes in a preface to the exhibit catalogue, “The images and words... suggest links between generations and provide inspiration for the continuation of our common struggle to achieve peace, equality and justice.”
As “The Whole World’s Watching” ably points out, the era’s movements were inevitably linked. It was in the service of black civil rights that young whites like Berkeley Free Speech icon Mario Savio first found their voice. Likewise, the exhibit underlines how the political progress of black Americans inspired and set the strategy for other groups to press for their rights - Latinos, women, homosexuals, American Indians and the handicapped.
That so much history can be conveyed so concisely speaks to the enduring power of photographs. What’s more, “The Whole World’s Watching” has the uncanny ability to render that history nearly as fresh as today’s news.
There is Harold Harawitz’s photo of Savio, slim and impassioned, addressing the Free Speech faithful from atop a police car outside Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. Jump ahead a year ad a half to Ronald J. Riesterer’s shot of an orderly crowd protesting a Johnson Administration official’s speech at the Greek Theatre. Another 18months yields Jeffrey Blankfort’s image of police battling Oakland demonstrators during Stop the Draft Week.
Giants of the ‘60s from both ends of the political spectrum are represented in “The Whole World’s Watching,” including two future presidents.
There’s a smiling, campaigning Nixon surrounded by Secret Service agents as his motorcade proceeds down Grant Avenue in San Francisco. Then California Gov. Ronald Reagan strikes a determined pose before an Oakland podium. Other photos feature Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at Berkeley in 1967, Cesar Chavez leading a strike two years earlier, and Black Panther Huey Newton celebrating his release from prison.
More than famous, however, it is the faces of unheralded Northern Californians that resonate. The young draftees Michelle Vignes captured in 1968 at the Oakland induction center; a student’s apprehension as she watches police beat demonstrators during the Third World Strike at San Francisco State; a lone protester, armed with only a sheath of papers, amid a sea of rifle-bearing National Guardsmen in the struggle over People’s Park.
From Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue come portraits of two men. The first is a mildly dazed hippie and his dog; the second, a proud black father and his daughter.
It was people like this that brought Hartmann to photography.
German by birth, she emigrated to Stockton at 22 to join her mother, also named Ilka, who was teaching history at UOP and researching a book on Stockton pioneer Charles Weber. Hartmann, who had been working toward a Protestant minister, began studying history at UOP.
“When I was 15, I learned about the Holocaust,” Hartmann said. “It upset me very, very much and had a deep effect. And it seemed to me that what hapened to the Indians in the Western world was not unlike what I knew about the Holocaust.”
She was at the same time studying photography at Delta with Edward Schwyn. The course was not entirely technical. “He taught us about the American photographers, like Dorothea Lange and others, for whom it was very important to portray the suffering of people,” Hartmann said.
Hart,ann’s interests intersected in a desire to use photography to chronicle the lives of the downtrodden. She turned her camera first on the streets of south Stockton and then, after enrolling at University of California, to the upheavals in Berkeley.
By 1970, Hartmann had begun focusing on the American Indian. In May of that year, she visited Alcatraz. Hartmann’s photos turned up in the Berkeley Barb, and she returned to the island twice more before the occupation ended in June 1971.
She has devoted the years since to chronicling the American Indian, and her commitment to that cause speaks volumes about the impact the ‘60s had on many of her generation. “The Whole World’s Watching” cannot help but to call to mind that indelible period in American history and its persistent echo.
“Everyone has to have their human rights,” Hartmann said. “If you take the human rights from anyone, it affects the whole country and, in a way, the whole world.”