Veetta Terrell - Terrell, 91, is the aunt and godmother of Gary Kirksey, Her father William David Jackson, served as the first black member of the Alliance City Council in 1932.
 

Veetta Terrell is a very busy woman today and doesn't have much time to have her photograph taken. But the petite 91-year-old lady, who climbs out of photographer Gary Kirksey's Jeep in a casual blue dress, a bright sun cap, and big, round spectacles, gamely poses for him between morning appointments. She's an old pro at this, having previously served as a subject of Kirksey's documentary of African­-American elders in his small, northeastern Ohio hometown of Alliance. She's also got a soft spot for Kirksey, who happens to be her godson and one of her favorite nephews.

"I want the whole enchilada," he tells her as she tries to leave a bulky leather purse on a lawn chair. She stands against a white paper backdrop in front of Kirksey's uncle's garage, located in a tidy neighborhood near a rubber plant, the pocketbook and a metal cane at her sides. Her hands rest gently on her midriff as she gazes proudly at the camera lens about 10 feet away. After he finishes shooting the black and white film, Kirksey snaps a Polaroid to show her the shot.

"Yes, that's me," she quips in her rich voice. "You did better than the Alliance Review."

The local newspaper had spotlighted Terrell after a picture of her and her late husband, Andrew, appeared in the venerable Wall Street journal in February. It accompanied a review arguing that Kirksey's documentary photography series A Vanishing Generation: 44601 (the numbers are Alliance's zip code) was one of the true gems of a Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibit that had attracted notoriety and the wrath of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for including another photographer's controversial, yet artistically questionable, remake of The Last Supper.

Kirksey's project also has been displayed in several galleries across the country, is part of the permanent collection of the Dallas African-American Art Museum, and was featured in the 2001 anthology Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers.

But he embarked on this documentary work for very personal reasons. A few years ago, Kirksey watched as his elderly relatives and neighbors in Alliance began to pass away. This was a generation that had migrated north to the once ­ thriving steel town, and the photographer realized that with each death, the community was losing pieces of its history. So, in 1996, he began to capture these faces on film.
 

James G. and Edna Jenkins -- The Jenkins, Gary Kirksey's aunt and uncle on his mother's side of the family, have been photographed twice by Kirksey - once here in formal attire, and again in 2001 in casual clothing. The couple, who live in Perry Township near Canton, have been married for 60 years. 

Austin Kirksey -- Austin Kirksey, Gary Kirksey's Grandfather, settled in Alliance in 1923 and worked in the steel mills. Kirksey took this portrait in 1975.

One sight the Alliance community has grown accustomed to over the years is Kirksey roaming town with camera over shoulder. Photography first lured him around 1967 during junior high school. He set up a dark room in the basement, began processing his own film, and soon had a reputation as the local shutter bug. At one point, he was the official photographer of Alliance's celebrated Carnation Festival.

Kirksey worked as a commercial photographer for a number of years before approaching the documentary style. He earned a bachelor's degree in advertising from Miami University in 1978 to create a practical outlet for his photography skills, and worked for Procter & Gamble before spending five years at a New York City advertising agency.

Since joining the university, Kirksey, an associate professor of visual communication, has had the freedom to maintain his own studio, opening the door to his documentary work. He has completed a documentary project on the Tuskegee Airmen and has photographed dancers and musicians from Ballet African.

In 1996, he was working on a project to document black Appalachian coal towns when he got the idea for A Vanishing Generation: 44601. At first, the assignment was intimate, with Kirksey photographing immediate family members. But the 46-year-old photographer soon realized he couldn't stop there. There were notable members of Alliance's black community outside his kin and no one else was recording their history or their contributions to his hometown.
 

Wilma Kirksey Bradford, Annie Kirksey Adams, and Aaron Duncan -- Wilma Kirksey Bradford (left) is Gary Kirksey's great aunt and the youngest child of his great-grandfather. She is the aunt of Annie Kirksey Adams (right), who ran the Kirksey General Store in Alliance. Aaron (A.J.) Duncan (lower left) is Annie's great-grandson.

Kirksey Sisters -- Clauda May and Caressa, who were 86 and 80, respectively, when this picture was taken in 1998, are the sisters of Gary Kirksey's late father. Clauda May was visiting from Tucson, Arizona. She lives there still; Caressa died in 1999. The photograph was displayed in the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
 
 

Alliance is a quiet community of about 23,000 residents just southeast of Akron, Ohio, that flourished at the hands of a half-dozen steel mills during the last century. The thriving industry attracted blacks who were eager to leave the South after the establishment of the Jim Crow laws in the late 1800s. Henry Kirksey, Gary's great-grandfather, and Austin Kirksey, Gary's grandfather, were among many who chose to head north. Henry sold his business in Gilberttown, Alabama, and took a job at American Steel in 1923, and the family settled in Alliance. (Gary's mother's family, on the other hand, came to Alliance from Canada.) Years later, Austin would regale his grandson with tales of hot shoes and flying molten metal.

The African-American transplants began to establish leadership roles in the community, though not without some resistance from their white neighbors. Veetta Terrell's father, William David Jackson, became the first black member of the Alliance City Council in 1932, though some voters later were surprised to discover his race. Except for one teen stricken with polio, the white class­mates of Terrell, the fifth African American to graduate from Alliance High School, refused to walk beside her at their 1928 graduation. Gradually, things changed, and Alliance welcomed a black police chief, a barber, and other shopkeepers. In the early 1950s, Curvis Rhyne, a distinguished African-American gentlemen with a warm smile, began a 48-year stint on the Alliance City Council, reportedly the longest-running consecutive public service in the nation.

Today the steel industry has dwindled and young people often leave town to find work in bigger cities. But the African­American community, which makes up about 11 percent of the Alliance population, continues to have a notable presence in this town.

"This is a small slice of the Alliance community, but it is representative of a lot of communities," Kirksey says. "The railroad tracks separated the African Americans from the Caucasian community, and there was a whole different social structure."

The need to preserve this black community's history not only sparked Kirksey's documentary project, but also drew family and neighbors to the photo shoots. Their desire to educate others - including younger African Americans - about the past drives their involvement in the project.

"There is a need for profiling history," says James Jenkins, one of Kirksey's uncles who has participated in two photo shoots. "In black culture, we have lost a lot of our history because we didn't know how to record it. All of a sudden, we need something to relate to our past."

Terrell says her late husband Andrew, the subject of several of Kirksey's photos, also was supportive of the project's broader aims. "He was for it - for anything that was for the advancement of our race."

Since 1996, Kirksey has photographed a number of key community and family members, and has a wish list of other subjects that continues to grow: the respected reverend, the former member of the World War II Black Panther tank battalion, a local school teacher. Some, like Curvis Rhyne, the longtime local politician, are used to being photographed, and nonchalantly stand before the lens. Others, while supportive of the project, are a bit more camera shy. In those cases it's clear that a photographer needs not only technical prowess and an artistic eye, but the ability to sweet-talk a person into standing still.

Rex Kirksey -- Rex Kirksey, Gary Kirksey's father, was the first black employee of the U.S. Postal Service in Alliance. He died in December 1998.
 
 
 
 

"You took that! You weren't supposed to take that!" cries Rae Kirksey, one of Gary's aunts. She's been coaxed onto the wide swath of white art paper that serves as the backdrop for the photographer's portraits, located in front of her garage. There's a reason for Gary's ambush: The only other photo he has of his beloved aunt is an image of her running out of the frame of the camera. Rae humors her nephew today, at one point standing defiant, hands on hips, warning him not to capture her in this pose.

"But that's what I want - you just the way you are," he says. The assurances pay off, and Kirksey gets several candid shots of his aunt and uncle Sam.

Capturing his subjects as they really look - and not dressed up for a formal portrait - is a priority for Kirksey. He often gives little warning that he'll be visiting town, much less taking photos. On one Friday in June, for example, he quickly called people late morning, hoping to catch them on their way to and from lunch. Several showed up between work shifts and appointments, the businessmen in suits and the retirees in jeans and golf shirts. When the project is complete, the photographs of these subjects will be displayed as large prints, about 2 feet in height. The aim is to not only show these people almost life­size, but to highlight details that otherwise might be lost in a smaller photo - hands, for example, that have been broken and marked by years of working in the steel foundries. To create photographs of this size, Kirksey uses a special camera called a medium-format Hasselblad. The resulting images are stark, simple, powerful black and white portraits against the repeating white backdrop.

"Shooting them against bare white makes you look at them for who they are," he explains. "You can't make judgments based on their surroundings."

Kirksey realizes, however, that it could be quite monotonous for viewers to look at a long series of photos with white back­drops on a gallery wall. To add a bit of texture to his exhibits, he's begun a second set of photos that show his subjects in their natural environments. An elderly man sits on a rocking chair at a country home; a woman prepares a meal in her kitchen. Kirksey must look for key settings that represent something personal about his subjects. For example, he once photographed an aunt who still owned one of the first electric stoves from the 1920s. He's glad he snapped the picture when he did, as the appliance broke and was hauled away soon after.

Other times the problem is the photograph that got away - times when Kirksey arrives at a scene that is picture perfect,
but maddeningly so because he wasn't armed with his camera. But through his documentary series, Kirksey aims to make up for some of those lost images.
 

Gary Kirksey -- The photographer, 46, says a steel company in Alliance once offered him a job as the company photographer. He turned it down but doesn't regret the decision, as the company soon laid off two-thrds of its staff.
 
 
 
 

One surprise for Kirksey is the way the project has helped unearth lost stories about his clan and community. He's organized some photo shoots in the midst of family reunions, and the gathering of these elders seems to wring out happy memories of kin, discoveries of new relatives, as well as some unpleasant recollections of life in the South.

"I almost wish I had a tape recording of what they talk about," says Kirksey, who muses that it would be good fodder for a multimedia exhibit.

His elderly relatives aren't Kirksey's only connection to the South, as the photographer lives in Atlanta with his wife during part of the year. For that reason, he's begun a companion documentary series of senior African Americans in the Georgia metropolis that he expects will serve as a sharp contrast to his photos of folk in Alliance. Racial groups are more segregated, he says, and the African-American lifestyle has a different flavor down south.

"There is a group of ladies I'm trying to photograph in Atlanta who sit down on a monthly basis to play bridge," he says. "They won't go out without hats and gloves because that's the southern way to do it."

Kirksey's long-term goal is to compile both series of pho­tographs in a book. In the meantime, he has been displaying A Vanishing Generation: 44601 in galleries from Athens, Ohio, and Pittsburgh to Dallas and Brooklyn. Critical acclaim has followed the photographs around the country. Critic Clyde Taylor, who wrote about Kirksey's work in the book Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers, compared his signature portrait of Andrew and Veetta Terrell to Grant Wood's American Gothic.

Several art critics have pointed out that while many portraits of African Americans are political or steeped in stereotypes, Kirksey's images are refreshingly simple and honest. They reveal a slice of American life that is often unexamined and yet incredibly familiar to viewers. Lynne Munson, who reviewed the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition for the Wall Street Journal, argued for the universal appeal of Kirksey's photos, especially the portrait of the Terrells.

"They are the picture of commitment and, though they are black and elderly, anyone who knows the meaning of marriage can imagine him or herself as one of `The Terrells, Andrew and Veetta,"' she wrote, adding that "The best artists aren't compelled by politics or theory, but by what they see."

Through the portraits that make up A Vanishing Generation: 44601, Gary Kirksey hopes others will under­stand what he sees in the faces of the people who stand before his camera. This is family, this is history, this is home. And as one of his favorite aunts, Veetta Terrell, says, this is something to be proud of.
 

Andrea Gibson is assistant editor of Perspectives.