MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In October 2009, a photography exhibition entitled A Moment in Time: Bingham’s Black Panthers opened at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Made over forty years earlier, the photographs, by Howard Bingham, were to appear in LIFE magazine alongside a story on the Black Panther Party by journalist Gilbert Moore. In 1968, writer and photographer, both African American, spent months embedded with the Panthers, gaining access to the public activities of the Panthers and the private lives of its leaders. Ultimately, Moore and the magazine disagreed on the tone of his article, and LIFE declined to publish the work.

Little is known regarding the specifics of the disagreement, and the 2009 catalog primarily celebrates the images rather than the rejection of the story by LIFE. Reflecting years later, Bingham wrote, “(T)he great irony is that LIFE magazine after spending all that time and all that dough to get a Panther story, never got around to running the article, mostly because they never got quite the slant on the Panthers that they wanted.” When observing Bingham’s photographs in light of the dominant narrative presented by the magazine on issues including the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, race relations, urban unrest, anti-poverty programs, and related material, the reasons for their rejection are clear. Bingham’s photographs capture a movement of fashion forward young people determined to make change and to be heard on their own terms. This paper will examine the photographs from both a historical and an art historical perspective, to explore the manner in which LIFE attempted to construct as outsiders groups such as the Black Panther Party in the pages of the magazine, and why the work by Moore and Bingham so threatened their “othering” as to necessitate a total rejection.