NY Times, August 14, 2020
Matt Herron, Whose Camera Chronicled a Movement, Dies at 89
As a magazine photojournalist, he immersed himself in the South as a
witness to civil rights marches and clashes. He was killed when the
glider he was piloting crashed.
A civil rights protest in Alabama photographed by Matt Herron.
“Matt had a sensitivity to the subject matter and was able to
envision it in a way that was both powerful, dramatic but also
touching,” said Ken Light, a professor of photojournalism.
A civil rights protest in Alabama photographed by Matt Herron. “Matt had
a sensitivity to the subject matter and was able to envision it in a way
that was both powerful, dramatic but also touching,” said Ken Light, a
professor of photojournalism.Credit...Matt Herron
Sam Roberts <https://www.nytimes.com/by/sam-roberts>
BySam Roberts <https://www.nytimes.com/by/sam-roberts>
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PublishedAug. 11, 2020UpdatedAug. 13, 2020
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Matt Herron
<https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/a-cultural-history-of-civil-rights/>,
a photojournalist who vividly memorialized the most portentous and
promising moments from the front lines of the 1960s civil rights
movement in the Deep South, died on Aug. 7 when a glider he was piloting
crashed in Northern California. He was 89.
His wife, Jeannine Hull Herron, said Mr. Herron was flying his new
self-launching glider (he had learned to fly at 70) when it crashed
about 125 miles northwest of Sacramento after taking off from Lampson
Field in Lakeport, on Clear Lake. He died at the scene. The National
Transportation Safety Board said the crash was under investigation.
A child of the Depression and a protégé of the Dust Bowl documentarian
Dorothea Lange, Mr. Herron assembleda team of photographers
<https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/10/books/not-afraid-of-white-folks-anymore.html>to
capture the clashes between white Southerners and Black protesters,
aided by their white Freedom Rider allies, as they sought to claim the
rights they had been legally granted a century before.
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Mr. Herron, who worked for newsmagazines, described himself as a
“propagandist” for civil rights organizations, including the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which gave him rare
behind-the-scenes access to its members.
ImageMr. Herron, in an undated photographed taken by his wife, had
behind-the-scenes access to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Mr. Herron, in an undated photographed taken by his wife, had
behind-the-scenes access to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
Credit...Jeannine Herron
His photographs of the civil rights movement appeared in Life, Look,
Newsweek and other magazines and in books like “This Light of Ours:
Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement” (2012) and
“Mississippi Eyes:**The Story and Photography of the Southern
Documentary Project” (2014).
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From 1963, when he was arrested at a protest to integrate a Maryland
amusement park, to 1965, Mr. Herron immersed himself in the South,
living there with his wife and two young children. His daughter went to
the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham two weeks before a bombing
by white supremacists killed four Black girls attending Sunday school there.
On one occasion, he recalled, he strapped his cameras on “like armor
plate” for protection while being chased by a club-wielding deputy
sheriff. “That gave me the courage that otherwise I lacked,” he said.
Mr. Herron focused his lens less on the leaders of the marches than on
the ordinary Black residents who joined them, people who might work
manicuring the lawns of their white neighbors.
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One of Mr. Herron’s most famous photos was of a confrontation with the
police in Jackson, Miss., in June 1965.
Alyene Quin, a civil rights worker whose house in McComb, Miss., had
been firebombed, had come to the state capital with her three young
children to protest the election of five congressmen from districts
where Blacks were not allowed to vote. Refused admittance to the
Governor’s Mansion, they sat on the steps. Mrs. Quin held a sign that
read, “No More Police Brutality. We Want the Right to Register and
Vote,” while her children waved small American flags.
“Anthony, don’t let that man take your flag,” Mrs. Quin said as a
highway patrolman tried to wrench the flag away from her 5-year-old.
“So Anthony holds onto the flag,” Mr. Herron toldThe Princeton Alumni
Weekly <https://paw.princeton.edu/article/mississippi-eyes>in 2014. (He
was a 1953 graduate.) “The patrolman, Hughie Kohler, probably had never
met resistance from a small Black child before, and he’s trying to take
the flag, Anthony’s hanging onto it, and Kohler goes temporarily
berserk. So Kohler wrenches the flag out of Anthony’s hands. And the
gods of chance sent me this sign in the background being held by another
policeman: ‘No More Police Brutality.’”
Recalling the incident in anoral history project
<http://tellingstories.org/civilrights/fullmovies/matt_herron/index.html>in
2010, he said, “The simple act of a small child carrying an American
flag represented defiance of Mississippi law and custom.”
Image
“The simple act of a small child carrying an American flag
represented defiance of Mississippi law and custom,” Mr. Herron
said of one of his most famous photographs, taken in 1965 at a voting
rights protest in Jackson, Miss.
“The simple act of a small child carrying an American flag represented
defiance of Mississippi law and custom,” Mr. Herron said of one of his
most famous photographs, taken in 1965 at a voting rights protest in
Jackson, Miss.Credit...Matt Herron
Matthew John Herron was born on Aug. 3, 1931, in Rochester, N.Y., to
Matthew and Ruth (Coult) Herron. His mother was a master fabric artist
and weaver, his father a certified public accountant. Given a camera as
a gift, Matthew started taking pictures at 7, and his mother built a
darkroom in the basement of the family’s home. As a teenager he was an
Eagle Scout.
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Mr. Herron graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton
in 1953 and for a time pursued a master’s in Middle East studies and
Arabic at the University of Michigan with the thought of forging a
diplomatic career. He never completed the degree, however.
During the Korean War he registered as a conscientious objector and,
drawing on his Middle East studies, fulfilled part of his service
teaching in a Quaker school in Ramallah on the West Bank. There he
returned to photography. “Matt’s heritage was Irish,” his wife said in
an email. “He was a natural storyteller.”
Mr. Herron mingled with photojournalists in the Middle East, where he
met and married Jeannine Hull, who was teaching there. Returning to
Rochester, he briefly worked as a corporate photographer for Kodak
(using a Speed Graphic) and was mentored by the landscape
photographerMinor White <https://monovisions.com/minor-white/>, who
taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
In addition to his wife, who later became a research neuropsychologist,
Mr. Herron is survived by two children; Matthew Allison Herron and
Melissa Herron Titone; and five grandchildren.
Image
Volunteers clasped hands at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
meeting.
Volunteers clasped hands at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
meeting. Credit...Matt Herron
Mr. Herron wrote a book with his family about their two-year sailing
trip to West Africa from Florida in 1970; participated in Greenpeace
protests against commercial whaling; and served as chairman of the Media
Photographers International Committee. (Besides learning to fly at 70,
he learned to play the double bass at 80.)
Image
Bobby Simmons, a civil rights marcher, wrote his demand on his forehead
in zinc oxide sunscreen.
Bobby Simmons, a civil rights marcher, wrote his demand on his forehead
in zinc oxide sunscreen.Credit...Matt Herron
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As a photographer, “Matt had a sensitivity to the subject matter and was
able to envision it in a way that was both powerful, dramatic but also
touching,” his colleague, Ken Light, a professor of photojournalism at
the University of California, Berkeley, said by phone.
He sought ways “to intensify the image,” Mr. Light added, like shooting
a bombed Black church through the shattered windshield of a parked car.
In an oral history, Mr. Herron recalled the civil rights movement as a
difficult but also a magical time.
“We embraced each other,” he said. “We sang freedom songs together. We
wept together. It was the only time in my life that I lived in what I
consider a truly integrated society, where there were no barriers.”
“I was photographing things that I wanted to photograph,” he added. “I
was trying to bring to life a political movement which eventually
transformed the country.”
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