The Charwoman Photograph

He was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of fifteen children to a sharecropping family. He was orphaned at fifteen, slept in trolley cars in St. Paul, Minnesota, worked as a busboy, brothel piano player, semi-professional basketball player, and railroad-dining-car waiter, and at twenty-five bought a camera at a Seattle pawnshop. By forty he was the first Black photographer on the staff of Life magazine. By fifty-eight he was the first Black director of a Hollywood studio feature — The Learning Tree, Warner Bros., 1969. The 1942 photograph he made of the Black charwoman Ella Watson standing in front of an American flag with a broom and a mop is one of the most reproduced images in the history of American photography.

Sofía Estrada's biography opens earlier and follows the arc with the documentary rigour the subject demands. The book traces the Fort Scott childhood, the Farm Security Administration assignment under Roy Stryker that produced American Gothic, the long Life magazine years, the 1971 Shaft with Isaac Hayes' theme song that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the 1972 Shaft's Big Score! and the long second act in fashion, classical-music composition, and three autobiographies, and the death in his Manhattan apartment in 2006 at ninety-three.

What emerges is a portrait of a multi-medium Black artist whose work in photography, film, and writing redrew the visual record of twentieth-century African-American life.