Lot 147: JONES, PIRKLE (1914- ) "Portfolio Two."

JONES, PIRKLE (1914- )
"Portfolio Two." With 12 photographs of California and Arizona. Silver prints, approximately 6 3/4x8 1/4 to 10x13 inches (17.1x21 to 25.4x33 cm.), and the reverse, each with Jones's signature, set and print number, in ink, and his hand stamp on mount verso; numbered 24 (of 110 copies), in ink, on the colophon. Elephant folio-size gilt-lettered olive green clamshell box; contents loose as issued. 1947-1958; printed 1968

with--Untitled (rolling landscape). Silver print, 9 1/4x13 1/4 inches (23.5x33.7 cm.), with Jones''s signature, in ink and hand stamp, on mount verso. Circa 1955; printed circa 1965.
From the photographer; by descent to the present owner who assisted Jones in exposing his work to key figures in the photography market in the late 1960s.

Pirkle Jones, who was named after the doctor who delivered him, studied with both Ansel Adams and Minor White. For almost six decades, Jones documented the landscape, people and politics of California, an area that has long held a place in the cultural imagination of America. In 1956 Jones and Dorothea Lange were hired by LIFE Magazine to produce a photo story about the last year of Berryessa Valley in California. It never appeared in the magazine, but in 1960 Aperture published their images in a story entitled "Death of a Valley."
In addition to his landscape work, in 1968, Jones and his wife, Ruth-Marion Baruch, photographed the Black Panthers and were given personal access to political meetings and private family gatherings. While the media portrayed the Panthers negatively, Jones showed them in a different light, as symbols of strength and pride.