Overview

"And I Said No Lord is a chronicle in photographs and words of a twenty-one-year old white northerner's experience of segregated Mississippi in the summer of 1964. On June 17, 1964, Joel Katz boarded a Greyhound bus in Hartford, Conneticut. He was bound for Jackson, Mississippi, the farthest he had ever been from home. He had with him a Honeywell Pentax HI-A camera, 28 and 55mm lenses of his own, a borrowed 135mm lens, money lent to him by both the Hillel and the Church of Christ at Yale University, and a written invitation to call on Frank Barber, Governor Paul Johnson's special assistant when he arrived. The morning's Jackson Daily News carried on its front page the FBI's """"missing"""" poster for Andrew Goodman, James Cheyney, and Michael Schwerner, who had ""disappeared"". Living out of YMCA's and private homes for the next ten weeks, Katz encountered people of both races, newspaper editors and ministers, James Silverman and Eudora Welty, and various leaders of White Citizens Councils throughout the state. He photographed Martin Luther King Jr. and James Abernathy, taught at a ""freedom school"", was harassed by Jackson police, and threatened with death in Vicksburg. Moved and influenced by the social documentary photography of Walker Evans, Cartier-Bresson, and Robert Frank, Katzdocumented everyday episodes in what came to be known as Freedom Summer: ""The summer of 1964 was a cusp, or a fulcrum, between the beginning of the end of one era and the beginning of another, a process of transition that would be too slow (and long overdue) for many, and too revolutionary (and unnecessary) for many others. Whites and Negroes had been living together in Mississippi for years. They were going to live together for many summers after 1964, although differently. I knew that the civil rights movement didn't need another photographer and/or reporter. I knew that Freedom Summer didn't need another observer or historian. I figured that beneath the fears, anger, frustration, and rhetoric of both sides were individual lives, white and black, worthy of witness."" ""What I chose to create out of what I was privileged to see and experience is a document of the ordinary. This is a record of people in evolution, not revolution, of endurance and continuity."

Full Product Details

9780817318338

Table of Contents

Reviews

In And I Said No Lord , we venture with twenty-one-year-old Joel Katz (no relation), then a Yale undergraduate, into Mississippi during the fraught summer of 1964. His focus is not the horrific events of that violent season, though they hover always in the background. Rather, with notebook and camera, he sets out on a voyage of comprehension. With his extraordinary capacity for precise observation, he creates portraits from words as well as photographs. His art is respectful, often disturbing, always memorable, but never sentimental. We witness a self-reflective young man's agonizing education through the contradictions of a culture based on racism, exploitation, and fantasy. This book is at once an utterly original work of social criticism and a compelling probe into one corner of the soul of America. -- Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania Joel Katz's searing and stark photographs and poignant prose take us back to another time and place to make something he will not let us forget: 1964's Freedom Summer and the Jim Crow South still cast in black and white. Katz looks at southern people and the places that mattered to them and captures their very soul. He does so with a rare ability to respect their dignity and integrity, without necessarily endorsing their purposes. And I Said No Lord is highly personal, which also makes it highly pertinent and potent, for it shows how one can find oneself by learning to know others. The genius and beauty of Katz's book lies not only in what it reveals but also in what it demands. It cuts to the quick of one's consciousness and conscience about matters of race, power, place, and moral obligation. It makes us see. It is a book, like Walker Evans's images, that will stay with anyone who dares to seek the truth. --Randall M. Miller, author of Dear Master Letters of a Slave Family In And I Said No Lord, we venture with twenty-one-year-old Joel Katz (no relation), then a Yale undergraduate, into Mississippi during the fraught summer of 1964. His focus is not the horrific events of that violent season, though they hover always in the background. Rather, with notebook and camera, he sets out on a voyage of comprehension. With his extraordinary capacity for precise observation, he creates portraits from words as well as photographs. His art is respectful, often disturbing, always memorable, but never sentimental. We witness a self-reflective young man's agonizing education through the contradictions of a culture based on racism, exploitation, and fantasy. This book is at once an utterly original work of social criticism and a compelling probe into one corner of the soul of America. -- Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania In And I Said No Lord, we venture with twenty-one-year-old Joel Katz (no relation), then a Yale undergraduate, into Mississippi during the fraught summer of 1964. His focus is not the horrific events of that violent season, though they hover always in the background. Rather, with notebook and camera, he sets out on a voyage of comprehension. With his extraordinary capacity for precise observation, he creates portraits from words as well as photographs. His art is respectful, often disturbing, always memorable, but never sentimental. We witness a self-reflective young man s agonizing education through the contradictions of a culture based on racism, exploitation, and fantasy. This book is at once an utterly original work of social criticism and a compelling probe into one corner of the soul of America. Michael B. Katz, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania Joel Katz s searing and stark photographs and poignant prose take us back to another time and place to make something he will not let us forget: 1964 s Freedom Summer and the Jim Crow South still cast in black and white. Katz looks at southern people and the places that mattered to them and captures their very soul. He does so with a rare ability to respect their dignity and integrity, without necessarily endorsing their purposes. And I Said No Lord is highly personal, which also makes it highly pertinent and potent, for it shows how one can find oneself by learning to know others. The genius and beauty of Katz s book lies not only in what it reveals but also in what it demands. It cuts to the quick of one s consciousness and conscience about matters of race, power, place, and moral obligation. It makes us see. It is a book, like Walker Evans s images, that will stay with anyone who dares to seek the truth. Randall M. Miller, author of Dear Master: Letters of a Slave Family And I Said No Lord is a remarkable book. It evokes the fear and hope that swirled around Freedom Summer in Mississippi, 1964, as seen by a 21-year old who was probably more courageous than he knew at the time. A door opened in Joel Katz world, and with the wonderful brashness of the young he stepped through it. The seismic shift that was taking place in the country then vibrates below the surface of these quiet photographs. They hold within them a tension that continues to this day. It is surprising and wonderful to find this new collection of words and images coming into the light. The book takes readers back to stand on the shifting ground of that historic time and leaves it to them to draw their own sight-lines from then to the present. And I Said No Lord brings a deeper resonance and understanding to those who remember the startling rupture at the center of America that summer. For those who were not yet born, Katz s book will help them grasp what it felt like to be present, to be a witness, and to be changed . Sean Kernan, author of Secret Books, Among Trees, and From Prison And I Said No Lord is a remarkable book. It evokes the fear and hope that swirled around Freedom Summer in Mississippi, 1964, as seen by a 21-year old who was probably more courageous than he knew at the time. A door opened in Joel Katz' world, and with the wonderful brashness of the young he stepped through it. The seismic shift that was taking place in the country then vibrates below the surface of these quiet photographs. They hold within them a tension that continues to this day. It is surprising and wonderful to find this new collection of words and images coming into the light. The book takes readers back to stand on the shifting ground of that historic time and leaves it to them to draw their own sight-lines from then to the present. And I Said No Lord brings a deeper resonance and understanding to those who remember the startling rupture at the center of America that summer. For those who were not yet born, Katz's book will help them grasp what it felt like to be present, to be a witness, and to be changed . --Sean Kernan, author of Secret Books, Among Trees, and From Prison

Joel Katz's searing and stark photographs and poignant prose take us back to another time and place to make something he will not let us forget: 1964's Freedom Summer and the Jim Crow South still cast in black and white. Katz looks at southern people and the places that mattered to them and captures their very soul. He does so with a rare ability to respect their dignity and integrity, without necessarily endorsing their purposes. And I Said No Lord is highly personal, which also makes it highly pertinent and potent, for it shows how one can find oneself by learning to know others. The genius and beauty of Katz's book lies not only in what it reveals but also in what it demands. It cuts to the quick of one's consciousness and conscience about matters of race, power, place, and moral obligation. It makes us see. It is a book, like Walker Evans's images, that will stay with anyone who dares to seek the truth. --Randall M. Miller, author of Dear Master Letters of a Slave Family

Joel Katz s searing and stark photographs and poignant prose take us back to another time and place to make something he will not let us forget: 1964 s Freedom Summer and the Jim Crow South still cast in black and white. Katz looks at southern people and the places that mattered to them and captures their very soul. He does so with a rare ability to respect their dignity and integrity, without necessarily endorsing their purposes. And I Said No Lord is highly personal, which also makes it highly pertinent and potent, for it shows how one can find oneself by learning to know others. The genius and beauty of Katz s book lies not only in what it reveals but also in what it demands. It cuts to the quick of one s consciousness and conscience about matters of race, power, place, and moral obligation. It makes us see. It is a book, like Walker Evans s images, that will stay with anyone who dares to seek the truth. Randall M. Miller, author of Dear Master: Letters of a Slave Family

Author Information

Joel Katz is an information designer, photographer, author, and teacher. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he was a winner of the Rome Prize for 2002-2003 and named a Fellow of AIGA Philadelphia in 2002. He lectures widely, both in the United States and in Europe, and teaches information design at The University of the Arts. Katz is the author of Designing Information: Human Factors and Common Sense in Information Design and co-author of Brand Atlas and The Nature of Recreation.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available