Selected Press
JONATHAN CALM @ RENA BRANSTEN
by Renny Pritikin - 03/31/2022
“Willful and malignant ignorance about the nature of the Black experience runs through American history. Photographer Jonathan Calm’s work posits a three-part relationship among, respectively, that unexamined history; photography’s role, both complicit with or (revelatory of) hidden oppression; and architecture as social restriction and control—whether in public housing, prisons, or public accommodations…”
Daily Art Moment: Jonathan Calm
by Julia Dolan - 02/01/2021
“In the self-portrait Double Vision (Record), artist Jonathan Calm assumes the position of past and present-day landscape photographers—standing under a dark cloth, using a large-format view camera. He poses in the act of creating an image of the California coastline, a site long favored by revered “masters” of photography like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston…”
Edited by Sandra S. Phillips and Sally Martin Katz
Art and Disrupting the Confederate Monumental Landscape
by Hilary N. Green - 05/18/2021
“Jonathan Calm's Green Book — Journey Through the South photographs recall the alternative geography of Du Bois and others escaping the indignities of Jim Crow travel. He reminds us of these segregated safe spaces across Jackson, Mississippi, and other destinations throughout the American South. Some locales, like Crystal Palace and the barbershop-turned-museum of its famous African American patrons, show how celebrities, public intellectuals, politicians and everyday folks found refuge [Plate 61]…”
Dail Art Moment: Jonathan Calm
by Julia Dolan - 10/28/2020
“Prior to World War II, segregation was a reality in many national parks, particularly in the south, where visitors found segregated campgrounds, restrooms, coffee shops, and even parking lots. In late 1945, new federal regulations required the desegregation of all national park facilities, but full integration was a years-long process. Today, although African Americans make up nearly 14 percent of the population, less than 2 percent of national parks visitors identify as Black…”
Selected Video
Nominated for a 2020 Emmy® Award
Jonathan Calm Revisits 'Green Book' Locations in Search of America's Past and Present
“When African-American travelers wanted to drive across the U.S. in the Jim Crow era, they consulted a guidebook specially made and marketed to the growing Black middle class. The Negro Motorist Green Book, published between 1936 and 1966, told them where it was safe to stop for gas, where to eat and where to sleep, where they wouldn’t be refused service because of racial discrimination. “Vacation without aggravation” reads one volume’s cover…”
Chicago Humanities Festival
Chicago Humanities Festival
Recorded: 11/09/2019
“In 2016, the BBC commissioned photographer Jonathan Calm to capture images of sites featured in the Negro Motorists’ Green Book, a guide published from 1937 to 1966 that listed safe places for Black Americans to stay while traveling. Inspired by this trip, Calm, a professor of Art & Art History at Stanford University, dove into the history of African American automobility, an oft-overlooked aspect of race relations in America. Using photographs and words, Calm conveys the meaning of automobility for Black Americans, from the freedom gained through car ownership to the ongoing risks incurred when “driving while Black.” Calm comes to CHF to show his photos, and discuss how the ability to choose where, when, and how we travel has influenced American history…”
Published Writing
Ride or Die
02/01/2020
I have spent more time driving a car over the past three years than in decades prior, due to my move cross country from New York and Boston to the California Bay Area. Since then, I have been wondering how this practical shift in my mobility has also led to a more profound change of pace and purpose in the way I perceive and navigate the different worlds I move through as an educator and artist…”
A Safe Space
08/22/2017
“I took these two photographs at one of the landmark sites of modern American history and African-American commemoration: the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, and which since has been preserved as part of the National Civil Rights Museum. It is impossible to fathom how often the Lorraine has been photographed, from the now famous picture by Joseph Louw taken right after the assassination to the millions of shots snapped by visitors drawn to the motel over the past half century…”
The Green Book – A Visual Journey
11/29/2016
“The image of the open road and the idea of free travel across a boundless land of opportunity lies at the core of the American spirit. The struggle for civil rights has historically revolved around overcoming limitations of mobility based on racial prejudice. Major activist efforts like the 1962 Freedom Rides, or their little-known 1947 predecessor, the Journey of Reconciliation, carried the powerful symbolism of mixed-race groups of passengers who sat together on bus rides through the South to protest segregation. The Green Book guides, published between 1936 and 1967, were about different, far less chronicled right of African-American mobility: the right of upwardly mobile black citizens to travel with a sense of dignity as well as security with the knowledge of welcoming accommodations and services had been mapped out for them…”