Join us for a book launch and celebration of Soul City: Oakland, U.S.A. with Ken Light and Ishmael Reed in conversation with Lewis Watts.

‍

Uncovered after 50 years, an absorbing and illuminating photographic archive of Black West Oakland in the 1970s, featuring a stirring foreword by celebrated author and longtime Oakland resident Ishmael Reed.

‍

In 1974 Ken Light, a young underground press photographer recently arrived in California, was encouraged by residents of West Oakland to document daily life in the neighborhood. A white activist building relationships in an eminent Black community, Light was invited into homes and churches, flagged down on the street for impromptu portraits. The resulting images, taken over two years, ended up unpublished and nearly forgotten for half a century.

‍

Now made public for the first time in Soul City, they form a stunning and historically important archive of Black urban life in a major American city in the 1970s. These photographs reveal the deep pride running through West Oakland, despite the formidable attempts of local governments and agencies to tear the neighborhood apart. Soul City presents the everyday experiences and emotions of West Oaklanders: hard work, love, determination, resistance, humor, delight. 

‍

The conversation will be followed by a book signing.

‍

‍

‍

About the Speakers

‍

‍

‍

Ken Light has worked as a documentary photographer and filmmaker for over fifty years, focusing on social issues facing America. His books include Course of the Empire, What’s Going On? 1969–1974, Valley of Shadows and Dreams, Witness in Our Time, and Picturing Resistance. His work has been presented in over 250 exhibitions worldwide, and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts photographers’ fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts survey grant, and the Dorothea Lange Fellowship. Light is the Reva and David Logan Professor of Photojournalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is represented by Contact Press Images, NYC. Visit his website at kenlight.com.

‍

‍

‍

‍

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz. His research and artwork centers around the “cultural landscape” primarily in communities in the African diaspora. He is the author of "Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” Chronicle Books 2006 and “New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition” UC Press 2013. His work has been exhibited at and is in the collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Citè de La Musique, Paris France, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, The Oakland Museum of California, The Neuberger museum of Art, Purchase NY, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, Conn, Light Work, Syracuse NY, The Paul Sack Collection, San Francisco among others. He is currently working on photographic projects on “the Black Presence in France” and migration throughout Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

‍

‍

This program is presented in conjunction with Thrive@MoAD, a free community day sponsored by Kaiser Permanente.

‍