Ilka Hartmann and the Pictures of Protest

Photographer Ilka Hartmann was 15 years outdated, sitting in her all-girls classroom in Hamburg, Germany, when a instructor handed her a slim paperback ebook with a single black-and-white {photograph} printed amongst its pages—of a pile of human corpses at a Nazi focus camp.

It was 1957, a dozen years after the battle. Hartmann’s earliest recollections had been of the starvation and chaos that adopted Hamburg’s firebombing by the U.Ok.’s Royal Air Force. Her father, a younger physician, had gone lacking throughout his German navy service and by no means returned—a loss skilled by each lady in her grade however one. Now, at school, she was studying concerning the Holocaust for the primary time and discovering in that second what her personal nation had accomplished to systematically annihilate the Jews of Europe.

“It affected me really a lot. It was overwhelming to find out we were responsible for such things,” Hartmann says, within the first of a number of conversations we had been to have this spring in Bolinas, the tiny, proudly insular West Marin city she’s referred to as residence since 1969.

This article seems in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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She describes being a toddler of battle who whilst a younger teenager didn’t but perceive {that a} authorities may inflict such grotesque struggling on its residents. It was as if the battle that had shattered her household and the genocide that had taken six million Jewish lives had been in some way divorced from human company, “more like a big hurricane or a great disaster that had happened,” she says.

Now 84, Hartmann sees that having the ability to confront the reality of what had occurred knowledgeable her method to pictures. Taking photographs has at all times been equal elements activism and artwork. Her eye was sharpened at a younger age to note injustice, and she or he has by no means been inured to it.

Hartmann has spent greater than six a long time documenting among the United States’ most essential social justice and civil rights actions, coaching her compassionate eye on the collective braveness of freedom fighters and on human dignity and wonder within the face of oppression.

Think of among the most iconic human rights campaigns of the previous half century. Hartmann, who’s been referred to as a “Zelig of history,” was there. You won’t know her identify. Surprisingly, there isn’t any coffee-table monograph of her work. But her photos have been reproduced extensively—in additional than 130 books and 25 movies—and plenty of are immediately recognizable: UC Berkeley’s anti–Vietnam War protests. Black Panther rallies. The 19-month Native American occupation of Alcatraz. United Farm Workers marching for higher wages and circumstances. Anti-nukes, pro-environment, and early LGBTQ rights demonstrations.

“Whenever I see the taking away of human rights, I have very strong feelings,” Hartmann informed the Pacific Sun newspaper in 2005. “It’s like I’m a little child again; I want to make things better. My whole being is to do what I can to prevent such suffering.”

Ilka Hartmann with a few of her images at her son’s residence in Bolinas.

LEARNING BY SEEING

Hartmann, who has two synthetic hips and walks slowly with a pronounced limp, possesses a youthful, exuberant love of individuals. She recollects the names of seemingly everybody she’s photographed and has developed lasting friendships with a lot of them.

In dialog, she merely can’t abide injustice or violence, and she or he additionally has a reflective facet that simply turns philosophical. Each time we meet in individual, she’s sporting a colourful beaded necklace—a present from a Navajo man named Michael Jackson, who took half within the Alcatraz occupation and reconnected along with her a long time later.

It turns into clear as we discuss that Hartmann’s life behind the digital camera has by no means been about neutrality. Forgoing the impartial-observer mannequin of photojournalism, she has at all times seen her work as an unabashed service to the actions and to the folks inside them. She has typically been warmly embraced by the communities she photographed, given uncommon entry to their internal circles and the non-public sides of their lives.

It’s a stance Hartmann developed quickly after taking on a digital camera—a pursuit she by no means would have guessed could be her life’s ardour. As a lady in Germany, “I wasn’t good at art at all,” she says. “I couldn’t draw.”

In truth, she was an mental 22-year-old school scholar finding out theology and Hebrew when her mom, who had already immigrated to California, urged Hartmann to affix her in Stockton. They lived throughout the road from the University of the Pacific, the place Hartmann’s mom taught, and Hartmann enrolled in pictures courses at close by San Joaquin Delta College—$15 per semester and an opportunity to flee the summer time warmth in a basement darkroom. Her instructor, Edward E. Schwynn, inspired her to check Life journal.

“I got copies at the library,” she says, “and that’s how I learned about the great West Coast photographers,” like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, and W. Eugene Smith.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Hartmann says, recalling the gratification she felt after creating her first photographs and discovering she had an innate expertise for portraiture and balanced composition.

“I have a feeling in my stomach, and I just know” it’s going to be an awesome picture, she explains. She began to know what Henri Cartier-Bresson meant by “the decisive moment.”

Mrs. Belva Cottier and a Young Friend (1970) was taken throughout the occupation of Alcatraz Island. Cottier (Sioux) led a quick takeover in 1964, which impressed the later, bigger effort.

That first summer time in Stockton introduced two revelations that may form the remainder of Hartmann’s life. The excessive poverty she encountered within the predominantly Black neighborhood Boggs Tract shook her. So did the darkish California historical past she uncovered throughout a driving tour along with her mom to go to all 21 missions.

“They’re really beautiful, and being European, I appreciated that,” she says. “But my mother told me about what happened in California with Native Americans, and it was very hard to understand how genocidal it really was, what they had done to the Native people. What affected me most deeply was that she told me that if male Indians were shot, the white people who shot them would get a $3 bounty. Oh, it just affected me so much. I connected it to the Holocaust.”

Her idealized imaginative and prescient of the United States was exhausting to sq. with this violent previous and the persistence of racial inequality and deprivation. “In Germany, we all had this really positive image of America, that it was so democratic and free and wonderful, and that’s why so many immigrated here. We had no idea about all the injustices and how bad it was for African Americans or Chinese or Native Americans at all.”

“I hadn’t seen such poverty in my whole life,” she recalled of her go to, throughout that very same street journey, to the Pala Indian Reservation, close to San Diego, the place she took a few of her earliest photographs of Native folks. It was the start of a lifelong dedication to Native American communities—one that may lead, a couple of years later, to Alcatraz.

We Will Not Give Up! exhibits Oohosis (Cree) and Peggy Lee Ellenwood (Sioux) after their elimination from Alcatraz Island on June 11, 1971.

POWER TO THE CAMERA

After greater than a 12 months of educating at UC Irvine, Hartmann was totally disillusioned with mainstream American middle-class suburbia. “It was super conservative, white only, practically, and I disliked it so much. I realized I could transfer to Berkeley.”

She arrived at UC Berkeley in 1967 and located a campus, and metropolis, electrified by protest and function. Hartmann recollects wrapping up the German courses she was educating earlier than midday after which turning her full consideration to the activism erupting in Sproul Plaza. Hartmann took photographs for the campus paper the Daily Californian and began submitting others to the weekly underground paper the Berkeley Barb and the anticapitalist Liberation News Service.

When the Black Panthers gained nationwide prominence following the 1968 killing of 17-year-old Bobby Hutton by Oakland police, Hartmann discovered a topic near her coronary heart and created her first photographic essay, up shut and private with the Panthers, modeled on the cinematic visible narratives by W. Eugene Smith that she’d seen in Life.

Hartmann’s strongest photos in some way seize a humane portrait even inside a convulsing crowd. Her eye, and now ours, is drawn to a single face whose countenance says greater than most information reportage. In one, an exultant Black man is waving Mao’s “Little Red Book” at a “Free Huey” rally in San Francisco in 1969. For one other, Hartmann seemed up from a Panther march by means of downtown Oakland to seize a visually placing shot of white businessmen, every in a white costume shirt, leaning out their open home windows to see the Panthers marching on the street under. (She titled it Bureaucrats Watching the Demonstration Below.)

Three Black Panthers in Front of the National Headquarters, which depicts Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Donald L. Cox, and Roosevelt “June” Hilliard in Oakland in 1970. Hartmann typically receives requests from publishers and filmmakers wishing to breed her photos of the Black Panthers.

In one in all Hartmann’s favorites, Black Panthers Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Donald L. Cox, and Roosevelt “June” Hilliard are standing in entrance of Panther headquarters. A poster taped to the window calls out the federal government for “kidnapping” Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale to face trial in Chicago on conspiracy and homicide costs.

The three look pretty stoic, however Hartmann recollects them laughing simply minutes earlier than. Hilliard’s son later informed her that “Newsweek had called them and wanted to take their picture for the cover in their black leather jackets. They told Newsweek, ‘We’re too poor for leather jackets. We don’t have them.’ So [without knowing their sizes] Newsweek sent them these $250 jackets, which is like $800 now. That’s why they’re a little too tight.”

Hartmann nonetheless fields calls from publishers wanting to breed her Black Panther photos. Many had been included within the Black Panther Rank and File exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2006. And 20 photographs are on show on the Alameda County Law Library. “They were supposed to be up for one afternoon” in 2012, says Hartmann, and so they’re nonetheless on view.

By the late Nineteen Sixties, Hartmann was already residing in Bolinas along with her associate, famous China scholar and former dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Orville Schell. They had been each back-to-the-land fanatics who discovered a like-minded “tribe” of artists, writers, and thinkers within the fiercely various enclave. They had been collectively for seven years and have a filmmaker son, Ole.

The tiny group noticed an inflow of environmentalists, farmers, and hippies following a large oil spill on January 18, 1971. Two Standard Oil tankers had collided underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, inflicting greater than 800,000 gallons of thick bunker gasoline to scrub ashore on Marin County seashores. Seven thousand birds had been smothered, and Hartmann documented the Bolinas group’s efforts to save lots of as many birds as attainable. One of her most well-known photos, taken the morning of the catastrophe, exhibits Schell’s arm raised to the sky holding a useless, oil-drenched grebe. It was reproduced extensively, on anti–Trans-Alaska Pipeline posters, and was even submitted to the Congressional Record by then–Marin County supervisor Gary Giacomini.

Hartmann’s West Marin photographs from this era are an earthy counterpoint to all of the city demonstrations and protests. Another standout, Leah Cutting Thistles, exhibits a Bolinas resident caught midswing as she’s clearing a dense subject with a scythe, her hair a blur as a horse grazes within the background. Off-the-grid Bolinas within the late ’60s was simple to fall in love with, however “it took me a long time to get used to being in this isolation,” Hartmann says.

She returned to Berkeley frequently, normally hitchhiking throughout Marin County to the East Bay along with her digital camera gear, trusting within the kindness of strangers for rides. Sometimes they had been slightly too form. “People would ask you, ‘You want to go to the hills?’ ” That was free-love-speak for “Do you want to make love?” Hartmann recollects the invites with amusing. “I remember saying one time, ‘No. I’m not a hippie, I’m a radical. Get me to the protest!’ ”

Back on Berkeley’s campus, she noticed a duplicate of the Daily Cal “which said the Indians have taken a boat to Alcatraz. I couldn’t believe it!”

Hartmann made her approach to San Francisco and landed a spot on a ferry shuttling water to the island to doc the 1969–71 occupation of Alcatraz, when Native Americans commandeered the vacant federal jail in San Francisco Bay for 19 months. “The government had cut off all water and electricity,” she recollects.

The hours she spent on Alcatraz that day, after which once more on June 11, 1971, when U.S. marshals rounded up the occupiers, resulted in a few of Hartmann’s most indelible photos: Native American youngsters enjoying on deserted Bureau of Prisons gear. A waterfront signal painted with the phrases “Indian Property.”

And then there’s the only picture she’s most frequently requested for permission to breed: a close-up of Canadian Cree activist Oohosis and his buddy Peggy Lee Ellenwood, a Sioux from Montana, elevating their fists within the Red Power salute moments after being faraway from the island.

“For me, everything was connected, a solidarity between groups,” says Hartmann. The Black Panthers, Berkeley’s antiwar demonstrators, and marching farmworkers “were the same people who were speaking up later at Alcatraz.” And she needed to assist all of them be seen.

Leah Cutting Thistles, photographed in Bolinas in 1974, captures the spirit of the countercultural back-to-the-land motion.

RADICAL EYE

“Ilka’s work is extremely important for the historic record of activism in the Bay Area when it was the hotbed of resistance,” historian and curator Amy Long tells me. She found Hartmann’s work whereas organizing a 2016 exhibition on the New Museum Los Gatos on the Urban Relocation Program, initiated by the federal authorities in 1952 to encourage Native Americans to maneuver from reservations to cities by providing assist with housing and employment.

“I tracked her down and was absolutely blown away by her body of work,” Long says. “I remember thinking, She put herself on the front lines of these movements, and it’s insane she’s not more widely known and her work, with its incredible volume and scope, isn’t archived.”

Long organized a retrospective take a look at Hartmann’s pictures the next 12 months, Faces of Resistance: Through the Lens of Ilka Hartmann.

One of the times I go to her in Bolinas, Hartmann is sporting a T-shirt display screen printed with one in all her personal photographs of scholar and activist Angela Davis. It’s the form of picture you could possibly see a whole bunch of instances with out realizing it’s hers.

She explains that she needs to remain knowledgeable, however present occasions go away her shaken. She admires the citizen-photographers documenting the ICE raids and protests in Minneapolis however says it’s troublesome to remain optimistic about human nature and the arc of ethical progress, given her aversion to authoritarianism and battle, within the period of Trump 2.0. “I’m beginning to think there’s really something wrong with us,” she says. “How can we not keep peace and get along?”

Without a cellular phone or tv, she sometimes sits in her automotive to tune the radio to the choice station KPFA. Then she goes again into the home, the place she’s surrounded by her images. “I have about 30 rolls of film that I’m going to develop pretty soon,” she says.

“Ilka is such a great visual storyteller, and her work is an inspiration,” Emory Douglas tells me. The former Black Panther tradition minister created provocative illustrations and collages for the social gathering’s newspaper that popularized the motion’s iconic militant-chic look and helped disseminate its revolutionary targets. (A retrospective of his work, Emory Douglas: In Our Lifetime, is on view at San Francisco’s African American Art & Culture Complex by means of October 2026.)

Douglas admired Hartmann’s photographs throughout the Panthers’ heyday and even used a number of of them as supply materials for his political posters, but the 2 activists, each now of their 80s, didn’t meet till a Fortieth-anniversary occasion in Oakland in 2006. They’ve saved in shut contact ever since.

He lets out a loud snicker after I inform him his buddy Hartmann calls herself a radical. “Yes, she certainly was. In fact, she still is.”

Hartmann calls me in the future with one thing she needs to make clear from our earlier conversations. She says she needs to make certain I do know that her work was “always done to support the movement” she was protecting.

She admits she’s by no means been bold when it comes to amplifying her personal status. “The work has always been a real joy, but I didn’t have ambition at all. I would have had to go to New York to cocktail parties and so on. I didn’t want to do any of that.

“I couldn’t be a Black Panther or a marching farmworker, but I felt like this was how I could contribute.”•

Jessica Zack is a Bay Area journalist who writes about books, movie, and visible tradition.