Roland Charles

Roland Charles (August 31, 1938 – May 26, 2000) was an African-American photographer and gallerist, best known for co-founding The Black Photographers of California and its associated exhibition space, the Black Gallery, in Los Angeles, among the first institutions by and for black photographers.

Roland Charles was born in Louisiana in 1938.

He moved to a community known as Bobtown (near Houma, Louisiana) as a child, and lived there until he graduated from high school.

He served in the Air Force, and then moved to California in the early 1960s, where he worked in the aerospace industry.

The cooperation among these galleries and the community of black artists in Los Angeles had given rise to a thriving art scene by the 1970s, and it was into this scene that Charles arrived as a curator in the 1980s.

After a friend gave him a camera as a gift, he became a full-time freelance photographer in 1971, securing work on music album covers and with gossip reporter Rona Barrett.

In November 1983, Charles organized a show at the California Museum of Afro-American History and Culture in Exposition Park, called The Tradition Continues: California Black Photographers.

It was a major exhibit featuring seven pioneering California photographers and 40 contemporary ones, including Frank Herman Cloud, Vera Jackson, Harry Adams, Jack Davis, Fred Cooper, and Howard Morehead.

As a gallerist and photographer, Charles had an appreciation for the mix of utilitarian and fine art photography produced by many black photographers of his era, such as the newspaper photography of prolific black press photographer Harry Adams, whom Charles was acquainted with.

Charles also expressed appreciation for the fundamental craft of photography — in discussing a double-exposed photograph of his daughter dancing in the Los Angeles Times, he said, “when I think of this photograph, I think of poetry in motion.”

“The cooperation among the galleries has created a bond, a new kind of spirit and a camaraderie,” Charles told the L.A. Times in 1985.

Charles and the other co-founders of the Black Gallery wanted to foster and promote a range of black creative expression, focused on a nuanced depiction of black life in America that pushed back against stereotypes and visual tropes.

Charles told an interviewer: "Growing up in New Orleans, the only images of blacks that I saw were sharecroppers. I didn't know we had a history and culture above and beyond that.”

In 1988, Roland Charles and Thomas L. Wright curated a show at the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles called A Day in the Life of Black Los Angeles, which displayed 120 photographs taken by black photographers on Martin Luther King Day of that year.

After the success of this exhibit, Charles embarked on a book project, Life in a Day of Black L.A., which would feature commissioned photographs from ten local black photographers.

The project would, he hoped, "fill the void in the projection of black culture."

In the 1990s, Charles and the Black Gallery struggled with vandalism, and had windows in their gallery broken many times.

This led Charles to initiate a variety of community outreach and school programs aimed at emphasizing the value of art in the community.

In 1992, to coincide with the release of the book, Charles organized an exhibit called Life in a Day of Black Los Angeles: The Way We See It.

The images, displayed at the Museum of African-American Art and then as a traveling exhibit, were intended to show black life across the spectrum of black social experience, and specifically sought to address what Charles and co-editor Toyomi Igus described as the misrepresentation of black culture in the media.

The images in the show drew from communities across Los Angeles county, including Pasadena, Watts, and Beverly Hills.

As Charles was finalizing the book, the Los Angeles Riots occurred, and the project was amended to include numerous images from that event and its aftermath.

“We were right in the book’s final selection process when the ‘epilogue’ happened,” Charles told the L.A. Times.

Following the Los Angeles Riots, Charles was active as both a photographer and curator in a number of events and retrospective exhibitions about the event.

His photograph "Going to the Dogs" was called “the most powerful image” in the first major show after the event, at the Louis Stern Galleries in Beverly Hills.

Charles’ dedication to a fair depiction of black life could be seen in his participation in the controversy around the Whitney Museum’s 1995 show, “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” The show spurred a series of counter-exhibits called “African American Representations of Masculinity,” led by a group of black artists in Los Angeles including Charles.

Interviewed by LA Weekly, Charles said that he hoped to humanize black men and dispel fear with his images, and said: "Since Birth of a Nation, we’ve had an image problem."

The success of the show led Charles to help found the Black Photographers of California, a nonprofit educational institution for emerging and established African American Photographers.

Sponsored by that organization, Charles and co-founders Calvin Hicks, Donald Bernard, and Gil Garner started the Black Gallery in Santa Barbara Plaza, now Marlton Square.

Supported by grants and donations, the gallery curated and encouraged black photographers.

Charles later said, “L.A. is very rich visually, but most images that are supposed to represent it are not done by people in the community.” Hicks stated that the Black Gallery was “the first gallery in the black community dedicated to black photography.”

The gallery served as an incubator for black photographers, offering workshops and slide sharing, as well as a meeting place and coffee house for other events.

Charles and his co-founders were part of a burgeoning group of black gallerists in Los Angeles, like Dale and Alonzo Davis of Brockman Gallery, who are credited with the first major gallery run by and for black artists.

The Black Gallery closed in 1998 and its archives were donated to the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge.

Charles's photographs were included in several local and national exhibitions.

Charles’ photographs were published in several books, including:

Charles’s photographs are included in collections at the California African American Museum, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Getty Center for the History of Arts and The Humanities.

The collected archives of the Black Photographers of California, including over 50,000 photographs taken by Charles, are housed at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center in the University Library at California State University, Northridge.

Interviews that Charles conducted with other Black photographers are also stored in the archives of the Bradley Center.

Roland Charles passed of complications from a heart attack.