Wings Press

After his Black Like Me journey in 1959, John Howard Griffin, along with his young family and aging parents, were forced from their home town of Mansfield, Texas -- by death threats from local white racists. They escaped to safety in Mexico in 1960, where Griffin wrote his classic book, and began a distinguished photographic career.

In the mountains of Michoacán, in a an old hacienda in the village of Santa María overlooking the valley city of Morelia, Griffin began creating luminous photographic prints of the native Tarascans. Since he was first a writer, he also crafted an insightful, unpublished essay on his own approach to photography, as well as essays about side trips he made to photograph two fascinating religious rituals of Tarascan culture.

Relying only on available light -- from the candle lit watch of the dead to the crystalline brightness of the Sierra Tarasca mountain range -- Griffin’s vision shines with spiritual illumination and clarifying intelligence.

Knowing that he would become a controversial public figure once he returned to the States, he kept an intimate Journal of his ethical queries on racism and injustice, as well as the effects of Black Like Me, a book that would become an integral voice in the decade’s debate about human rights in America and beyond. Griffin would succeed with seeming effortlessness as a voice in the public arena because he kept focus -- and the audience’s attention -- on the central issues of racial discrimination and segregation. Since he was always his own harshest critic, virtually all questions asked had been asked constantly in the privacy of conscience.

Drawing on Griffin’s passionate Journal -- written between the end of traveling as a Black man through the Deep South in 1959 and the publication Black Like Me in 1961 -- Robert Bonazzi’s Introduction provides historical context and new commentary on this crucial period of Griffin’s life.

John Howard Griffin lived the words of Mahatma Gandhi,"You must be the change you want to see in the world". As Griffin walked the high road of social justice he kept his feet on the solid ground of craft in both writing and photography. He knew the only tools available to him to make the changes he sought were those he made his own through the relentless pursuit of mastering his materials, becoming one with camera and darkroom. Griffin's inner eye saw what was essential to our humanity and in "Available Light" his outer eye blazes forth.-- Alan Pogue, photographer

Black Like Me took seeing as its subtextual main theme: seeing, being seen, being not seen, the consequences of judging from surfaces, the relations between surfaces and what lies beneath them. These issues prove central to photography, of course; and the question of where one stands as a documentary photographer or photojournalist, whether one observes from inside a culture or from outside it, has proven one of the enduring issues confronting practitioners of those forms and their critics. So my encounter with this book informed my later work as a critic and theorist of photography. Unsurprising, then, to learn that Griffin had acquired serious photographic skills and practiced the medium himself, thoughtfully and well. So this welcome collection of his photographs and essays on photography enriches his canon, and the literature of the medium. Perhaps it will bring a younger generation of photographers to Black Like Me and the lessons it still has to teach about walking that mile in another’s shoes. -- A. D. Coleman, photography critic and lecturer, author of The Grotesque in Photography, Depth of Field, and The Digital Evolution, et al.

This is Griffin’s great gift: that he does not doubt our humanity. That he truly feels, as did so many of the great social documentary photographers, that this magic medium can and "must soften in its little way, even for only a few seconds, the great callous that lies on the hearts of so many". -- from the Foreword by internationally acclaimed photographer Kathy Vargas