Cotton Choppers on Sherard Plantation, Sherard, Mississippi, 1992. (Copyright: Ken Light)
Ken Light was a freshman in college when an anti-war protest opened his eyes to his life’s calling. It was the fall of 1969, the height of the Vietnam War, and the New York native was studying at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Students across the country staged demonstrations calling for the end of the war. Light took his camera with him to document the protests on campus, where his fellow students focused their opposition on the United States’ invasion of Cambodia.
“At that moment, I saw that there was a path to do photography for the rest of my life and tell these stories,” Light, now 73, said over a Zoom call from his home in the San Francisco Bay area, where he teaches photojournalism at UC Berkeley. “My social consciousness was born out of observation.” This fall, more than a half century after Light found his calling behind the camera lens, he was honored in his home borough by the Bronx Documentary Center, a non-profit dedicated to featuring the works of renowned photographers and filmmakers, with a showcase entitled “Ken Light: American Stories 1969-1995” that ran from Oct. 10 through Nov. 17. Light’s next expo will be featured in January 2025 at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City called American Jobs 1940-2011.
Light’s photography has been published in 12 books, some of which were featured at the exhibition, focusing on critical social justice topics ranging from the migrant crisis to death row inmates. This work comes at a critical time in our nation’s history as we look back at how far we’ve come, and how much left there still is to do.
Light was born in the Bronx and raised on Long Island. He often accompanied his father to visit his grandfather in East Harlem, where his grandfather worked. “Going into work with my dad in Spanish Harlem, I began to see two different worlds and wondered why there were two different worlds,” Lights remembers. “This helped form my interest in understanding America.”
Michael Kamber, founder and creative director of the Bronx Documentary Center, has known Light for many years and wanted to feature his work because he feels it remains extremely relevant to what’s happening in the United States today. Kamber noted the power of his artistry from a historical perspective. “Much of American history in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s is contained in that work,” Kamber said. “The messages and his work around incarceration, labor and racial justice issues are just as relevant today.” Part of the reason Kamber wanted to feature Light’s photography was to spread awareness of Light’s work, which he thinks hasn’t been appreciated enough on the East Coast. “He’s part of a generation of older photographers that aren’t being recognized as they should be, and I think it’s more important [to do so] now than ever,” Kamber says.
The photographs presented in “American Stories, 1969-1995” sought to demonstrate the complexities of the human experience. They often express people’s ability to find happiness in difficult circumstances. Light’s photos take on a stark power in the contrasts he captures: Young Black men peeking through a gated window in their school, a kind of symbolic scene of the pipeline to prison that many in the community face; the parents’ love for their children who work in the fields alongside them; a man on death row holding up his cub scout photo.
Kamber was especially moved by one image of an older woman and a younger man handcuffed together. Whether they’re mother and son or brother and sister is unclear. “They are looking into the camera and standing in the desert, and at first it looks like a normal photo. Rather touching,” Kamber observers. “And then, if you look more carefully, you see that they are handcuffed together, and obviously under arrest. And then it becomes very disturbing and raises so many questions that I find troubling and thought-provoking.”
The startling effect of the situations and conditions Light depicts comes in part from the viewer’s own complacency or privilege. “That’s also been part of my role, to observe these stories. When people ask how I’m able to access these people, I say it’s because I show up and no one else has shown up. [My subjects are] so happy to have someone tell their story and be interested in their condition,” Light said.
River Baptism in Moon Lake, Mississippi, 1989. (Copyright: Ken Light)
He remembers speaking with one of his guides, E.L. Martin, a preacher he photographed at a river baptism in Mississippi. When Light expressed his surprise at the conditions and treatment of the people in his community, Martin responded that most people had them ingrained since childhood; it was a reality they had to radically accept. “Many of the communities still had plantation shacks remaining from another era and they often did not have electricity and running water.Some homes were totally dependent on old wood burning stoves and residents often could not afford the wood to warm their homes. One community named Sugar Ditch had open sewage running along the back of the cinder block homes. The conditions of many could easily be described as third world” Light recalled.
Light observed that they had nothing to compare their situations to, and they didn’t see a way out of their systemic and historical poverty. “Despite changes in the political system, we have not seen enough opportunity to reach down to the masses enough,” Light says. “This goes for the border issue as well.” In his view, conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border have more or less remained the same since he took photographs of migrants there back in the ‘80s. Images of men hiding in bushes and families hiding in car trunks that appeared in “American Stories” illustrate how little has truly changed.
When Light discusses his work about the men on death row, he points to systemic issues such as lack of education – including the high school dropout rates within impoverished communities – as well as generational trauma and drug and alcohol abuse. He remembers the horrifying story of one inmate named Rocky, who grew up as a poor farm worker in Texas with an alcoholic, abusive father. Rocky was able to escape those hardships to the point that he opened a series of successful furniture stores. But when he came home one day and found his wife cheating on him with his best friend, he snapped, and killed them both.“These situations came about from situations like single-parent households, drug-addicted parents, and poverty,” Light said. “It makes me wonder why our culture doesn’t address these issues at the grassroots level.”
It’s hard to deny the ugly realities of the American story when photographs lay the history bare. Light says that the stories of those who don’t feel seen – those crossing the border or child workers, for instance – are particularly important stories to be recorded and remembered. He recalls speaking to a group in Turkey, where he presented many of the same photographs that were included in the BDC exhibit. The audience was surprised that the images were created in America.
“There was an incorrect notion that everyone in America was wealthy and rode BMWs,” Light recalls. “The idea that the same type of poverty that existed within their own country could also be experienced in the United States was shocking to them.”
In an age that sends billionaires to space while so many others live in squalor within their own country, it’s no surprise so many Americans feel neglected and disenfranchised. For that very reason, Light believes that the role of documentary photography is as vital now as ever before.“We, as Americans, look at the rest of the world and tell them what to do, but we rarely look in our own backyard,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for 55 years, and maybe now is a time where we should stop telling everyone else what to do, and look inside our own country, and see the conditions that exist.”
Correction: a previous version of this story misstated when Light first documented campus protests.
