As featured in February 1997
Don Camp's Vision of Nobility
Dust Shaped Hearts is Equal Parts Tragedy, Inspiration, and Convenience
By Chad G. Glover
In a small newspaper in Farrel, a Pennsylvania steel town, there was a column called "News Fit for Colored Folks." The editors made up small towns like Mud Pie, Mississippi, and quoted its residents, Redbone, Bigeyes, and the Spook family. It was just a nine-inch column, but the editors loved it, and Farrel's white residents traded stories about it at the steel mill.
Don Camp was a child then, cloistered in a house full of art books and literature. The youngest of five children, and eight years younger than his next brother, he could spend all day inside reading. He couldn't understand, though, why his mother used to shoo him out of the house whenever he picked up the paper.
"Get outside...play with your friends," she said. "You
need some sun."
Camp understands now. It wasn't about the sun. It was about things like "News Fit for Colored Folk." It was about the images. The only black faces in the paper were mug shots or "Wanted" photos. The only way to the front page for a black man was to kill.
Camp understands the mug shot and the other images that hang around the necks of black men in the media. As a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Bulletin, he took the photos. Now, through his work, Dust Shaped Hearts, Camp--recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pew Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship--intends to reclaim the images.
Likened to a kind of rogues gallery, Don Camp's work is as gritty as the "Wanted" photos on the post office wall. His subjects are black men, wizened and powerful, sometimes tired, sometimes sad. He renders them in earth tones, forsaking the typical grey crystals for softer, richer shades of brown.
Camp said that they were made to make you feel uncomfortable. They do. "The media and the country teach people to see us in a certain way. They tell us that black men are to be feared." Looking at his photos, though, one doesn't know what to do. There is too much of the old in them to feel completely at ease. The photos have strict borders, like a mug shot, and they are weathered to look almost ancient.
His subjects, always solemn, seldom smiling, seem to be as uncomfortable as the viewer. But something in the eyes eases the pain. There's love, respect, and care. If you look closely enough, they appear to be family.
To Camp, they are family. His first subjects--the ones who began it all--were his brothers. In the first series, "his suite of "Sons of My Father," are titles like "The Brother who taught me to see..." and "The Brother who taught me to ride a bike." According to Camp, the first prints were equal parts tragedy, inspiration, and convenience.
"My brother was dying," said Camp "so we all went home." When asked if he had Dust Shaped Hearts in mind when he began to take the photos, he replied, "I'm not sure...I knew I wanted something raw, but I don't know if I realized where it would take me."
The second series were the men of his faith. That, too, was part inspiration and part availability. They are the BaHai, and in them, the ideals of his art were formed. Camp tells of a meeting at the Lewis Gregory BaHai Institute in South Carolina.
"We were about 25 black men, and we had all gotten together to pray. I didn't realize until then the emotions that I had attached to other black men. The media teaches us that black men are a threat, and I had internalized it. In a way I was afraid of myself." By the end of the weekend, they had all prayed together, and cried together. Then he fully realized the depth of sensitivity that was within his brothers.
Camp's subjects don't have as many commonalities now as they did before. They are all black men. Most of them are older. The rest depends on what Camp sees when he looks at them. Camp says his subjects now embody a kind of struggle for the future, or they have made a contribution. "It doesn't have to be the traditional kind of thing," Camp said. "He might just be a damned good father."
Had he lived long enough, his father might have been
one of his subjects. He was a damned good father. Ira Camp died in 1985
at almost 95 years of age. He never saw Dust Shaped Hearts, though
Camp feels that his father would have understood this exhibit the most.
The issues discussed in Dust Shaped Hearts were a part of Camp's life, before he ever thought of being a photographer. They were a mainstay of Sunday dinner discussions. The vilification of black men, the disregard of the rest of the black community, caused his family to view the media with a mixture of incredulity and disgust.
"My father would have loved it," Camp said. "I am just talking about the things we would have discussed around the family table."
He can remember his father's expression as he looked at his earlier work. Camp had been working at the paper for four or five years, and had grown tired of its restraints. He was bored. His editors weren't happy. He tried to push positive images, only to find the editors pushing back.
Of his earlier work, Camp said you could always tell it was his. "I was always more interested in shapes and texture," he said. Beyond that, it is hard to describe. And for his father, it was hard to understand.
"I can remember him looking at my earlier work but never really understanding it. He looked at it in a quizzical way, and you could tell he was trying." Though he didn't understand his son's work, he encouraged him.
To see the depth of his father's support, we must look into his past. Born in 1890, Camp's father's life was forged by misfortune and abuse. He dreamed of being a veternarian, and when he was 16, there was a doctor who promised to send him to veternarian school. Ira's father said no. His father was jealous. His parents stopped him from doing so much that Ira spent his whole life ensuring that his children would know no limits.
He and Camp's mother, a gospel singer and community leader, filled their house with books, art, and music. They pushed their children to find themselves. It was on the heels of the depression and art held many benefits. It broadened the mind, but just as importantly, it was cheap.
His first exposure to photography came when his brothers brought home a small photography set and built a little darkroom in the basement. Then, the grandest attraction to photography was the fact that they wouldn't let him participate. "I remember saying, 'I'm gonna have all that stuff one day, and I won't let them play with it.'" That, like many childish vendettas, was soon abandoned.
Camp called his home a safe haven. It was a womb where he could grow into an artist without pressure or discouragement. It was one of few places in his life where he could be whatever, and still feel loved for simply being him.
He left Farrel for the Air Force. He was stationed in France, where he became immersed in a community of expatriates and artists. There he discovered the work of Roy DeCarava, and realized for the first time that a man could make a living at photography, and do it on his own terms, without a shred of compromise. There, too, he fell in love.
He met a woman named Marie in the small town of Jonville. When the time came for him to leave, he said he wouldn't leave without her. That was 30 years ago. She created a haven for him that was even more powerful than his home in Farrel.
According to Camp, it isn't easy to be an artist, particularly a photographer. The equipment--cameras, film, photographic paper, and developing chemicals--costs money. Money is something artists seldom have an abundance of. "Marie sacrificed as much as anyone," Camp said. "She allowed me to do what had to be done, and gave me the time and space to do it."
Dust Shaped Hearts, the fruition of 56 years of pained observation, is what had to be done. In it, Camp found a chance to heal some of the wounds caused when a country would rather see you as a threat than a person. According to Camp, Dust Shaped Hearts is an opportunity to show a people endowed with nobility and dignity. It is something that he could never have done had not his family seen the nobility within him first.
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