One of these images resulted in an FBI investigation of me that produced a three page file. Twenty years later, I finally got a copy of it under the Freedom of Information Act, and then had to file an appeal with the Attorney General to obtain a paragraph that had been deleted!
![[~wallopix/img0102a.htm]](img0102a.gif)
IMG0102A
is a picture of Stokely Charmichael. If the name is not familiar
to you, go check your encyclopedia under "black activists".
He had just come back from Hanoi (yeah, just like Jane Fonda)
and was under FBI surveillance. The guy my sister was living with
at the time knew him. In return for providing transportation for
him from their apartment to church and back, I was able to take
some candid portraits of him.
I cannot find either the negative or a print of this image. At this date, I am not even sure if I have the negative of the picture of the wall of pictures, although I have the print that appears here. CONFUSION ALERT! What you are looking at is a 300 dots-per-inch laser print of a 2,048 dots-per-inch digital scan (onto a compact disk) of a 35mm Ektachrome transparency (color slide) of an 11x14 inch black and white print that is a photograph of a wall covered with 22 photographs. (Whew!)
Not very impressive is it? Well, considering that the original 8x10 inch print was hanging on a wall 20 feet from the camera, and then the 11x14 inch print of that photograph was shot on slide film, it's remarkable that any detail is at all recognizable.
One of the posters on the wall behind him is of Malcolm X, and the other is H. Rap Brown. Stokely is semireclined, reading a newspaper. I think that you could read the headline in the original 8x10 print, and that, coupled with who these three people are, is what makes this photograph worth hanging on a wall.
There is also a certain irony; Stokely Charmichael's trademark was his sunglasses - I was one of very few photographer permitted to photograph him without them. At the time, he was as famous as the two men in the posters, but his aversion to photographs of himself meant that few people recognized him on sight ... unless he was wearing the sunglasses, which are pulled back on top of his forehead in this photograph. Even the FBI agent said that he had never seen him without them, and he'd been following him for months.
Last update: 13-May-96 by dennette@wiz-worx.com
<Who is this "Dennette" person?>