NEW YORK, NY, September 7, 2021| Claire Oliver Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery’s debut solo exhibition by photographer Jeffrey Henson Scales, In A Time of Panthers: The Lost Negatives. The exhibition features 20 photographs from the 1960s including Scales’ earliest forays as a photographer during the electrifying summer of 1967 when at age 13 with his paternal grandmother he toured the Midwest to see relatives. As a Black teenager, he saw the poverty and oppression of Northern Black communities and when he returned to Oakland, CA became immersed in photographing the milieu of the Black Panther movement in Northern California. The images chart the emergence of his awakening as a documentary photographer as well as a Black man in a pivotal moment in the 20th century that echoes today’s Black Lives Matter movement. In a Time of Panthers: The Lost Negatives is on view September 16 – October 29, 2021 at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem. “I hadn’t seen these images since the 1960s until recently and was struck by not only my origin story as a photographer but also the new urgency these images and the civil right movement takes on in the context of today’s ongoing struggle for racial justice,” states Scales. “These images serve as a time capsule of sorts, not only of my adolescence and political awakening, but also for the country whose ongoing struggle with racial inequality, police brutality and resistance is as urgent and timely as ever.” Hailing from a family of activists and artists, Scales was no stranger to photography or visual art but his interest in photography was catalyzed by his experience surrounding the Northern California chapter of the Black Panther Party, drawn to the movement with an urgency to document the struggle. Scales notes the powerful visual presentation of the Black Panthers, with whom he forged close ties through his parents’ connection to the civil rights movement of the era as well as on his own as a burgeoning documentary photographer. The images also capture key events that convey the violence and tumult of the era including the leadership and the aftermath of the killing of Panther member Bobby Hutton. Several of Scales’ images from the era were used in Black Panther publications including an iconic image of Bobby Seale.
The negatives for the images Scales created from this era were lost until 2018 when his mother passed away and they were discovered when his family home was cleared out. Since then, Scales has revisited these images and their foundation for his career as a photographer and journalist. For the first time, a curated selection of these Lost Negatives will be presented to the public in advance of a forthcoming book published by SPQR Editions.
