John Simmons has been photographing the daily experiences of African Americans in (predominantly) Chicago and the American South since the 1960s. His latest exhibition, No Crystal Stair, currently on view at The Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles, focuses on his work from the 60s and 70s. Intimate portraits volley against photos that capture the period's charged racial segregation. Iconic images of pivotal civil rights activists like Angela Davis sit beside candid photos of everyday life: a young girl eating an ice cream cone, two lovers on a bus, a woman playing tambourine in church.

Simmons notes a heartfelt nod to Roy Decarava’s classic The Sweet Flypaper of Life and the poetry of Langston Hughes, reflecting the era’s many moments as often turbulent, often beautiful visual poetry. We recently connected to discuss his exhibition and work as a photographer and Emmy Award-winning cinematographer.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with John Simmons

White Coat, 1971, Nashville, TN. © John Simmons

Feinstein: These images, for me, go deeper than straightforward reportage or documentary. I “feel” them - whether it’s a candid street scene or someone looking back at you. Can you talk about this and your approach to making photographs?

John Simmons: When I’m shooting it’s never with the intention of documenting or reportage. Sometimes things have come out that way. For the most part, even when I was young and working for the newspaper I always wanted the picture to be more than just an image covering an event. I can’t say this was always the case. Sometimes news was just news.

My mentor Bobby Sengstacke would talk about a picture having a “ghost”. A ghost was like an image having its own soul. Like when you hear music or see art that stops you for a minute, makes you think and, in that minute, it changes you. When it has that effect I’ve done something right. When that happens, it’s a convergence of my life with my subject’s life. We get to share something that is revealed to me, I get to see it and photograph it. It’s a moment when a lot of elements fall into place. It’s something I can’t make happen. It feels like we both had to be there to share the moment together to make the picture happen. When it gets printed it takes on a life of its own.

Feinstein: Building on that, I think it’s interesting to think about your photographs in the context of your career as a cinematographer. A few of your pictures - for example, the image of the couple on the bus - feel like film stills.

Simmons: If the image feels like it’s cinematic in any way it’s just by coincidence. I’ve been looking through a still camera for a long time. Longer than I’ve looked through a motion picture camera. I hadn’t even heard the word cinematographer when Love on The Bus was taken. I feel like cinematography and photography have only a few things in common. The capturing of an image with light and lens. The act of composing within a frame but that’s where the similarities stop.

When I work as a cinematographer I manufacture images to interpret the ideas on a page, each image leading to the next image creating a montage of images to support a narrative. Cinematography involves a collaborative effort. By the time my work as a cinematographer hits the screen there’s been a lot of agreements made. The director, the producer, the client, studio, or network have all decided that we’re going to do this or that.

I do get to create the image and the look. It’s a wonderful job and very creative within its pre-decided boundaries. Taking photographs is personal there’s no committee. Just me and a camera. The still photograph is the entire narrative in a single frame, it’s what’s there. It’s an honest moment, it’s what I saw. The mounted photograph lives on a wall like a painting it stands alone. My cinematic work appears on a screen, we watch it and when it’s over, it’s over. The experiences are very different.

Man With a Pistol. Chicago, IL. 1967.. © John Simmons

Feinstein: Can you talk a bit about your relationship to DeCarava’s “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” and Langston Hughes’ writing?

Simmons: Bobby Sengstacke, my mentor, was the first street photographer whose work I admired. He was also a compass that pointed me in the direction of artists I needed to know about. He gave me a copy of The Sweet Flypaper of Life with a story by Langston Hughes and photographs by Roy DeCarava. It had a wonderful story about the day in the life of a black family in Harlem, New York. The story was something that fit into my life: I knew that family, I could see myself in that family.

Roy’s photographs in the book are candid pictures of black folks in Harlem, photographed with love, dignity, and sincerity. It was 1955 when it was published and that was something very special for the time. That book became the bible for black photographers that wanted to tell their story with a camera. That book is a gift. “The Sweet Flypaper of Life” was a major influence when I started taking pictures.

Angela Davis, Nashville, TN 1972 © John Simmons

Feinstein: The images in this exhibition were made during a different time. A lot has changed for civil rights, but there’s clearly still a lot of work to be done (and you’re clearly still making pictures.) Does our current social and political climate impact how you look at this work?

Simmons: Looking back at my work is like looking back into a time that has shaped our present. It was a period of becoming aware of my country and myself as a person. I was pretty young, fifteen years old when I started taking pictures. My world was shaping me every day. It was giving me a point of view. We are always in a state of becoming and there’s no arrival. My perception of things is continually changing. Nothing is stagnant. There are those people that want to hold onto outdated values in a changing world or reach even further back in time to resurrect values they think will combat their fears of this changing time. I feel like my work always reflects who I am. The work is about humanity and I see it from where I am and my experience of being black in America, it’s my inescapable point of view.

Feinstein: Building on that, does the time and path of history since you made the images in this exhibition change how you think about them?

Simmons: I was a different person when I took the photographs that make up the current exhibit No Crystal Stair. The earliest picture in the show I took when I was 15 or 16. I saw everything through those young eyes. When I look at those pictures now they make me look inside myself and put my life in rewind. So many thoughts come up of who I was and who I am now. Buddha says “We get to live our lives twice, once in real-time and then again in our thoughts.” Seeing my older work touches a place in me that hasn’t changed, which is my love of conversing with people and getting to tell stories within a frame. It’s really special that people are getting to see them now.

Girl Eating Ice Cream. Chicago, 1967. © John Simmons

Feinstein: Do you see yourself approaching subjects differently now than you did when you were younger?

Simmons: The photographs in my show reveal a life within the community I lived and grew up in. They are evidence of a young man’s viewpoint shaped by the times. Today my work reflects the point of view of a person who travels and sees the world from a global perspective. I’ve gotten to travel and live in different communities since those days. I don’t think I’ve changed my approach in the technical sense. I think my approach is the same but I’m someone with more life experience now.

I turned 69 this year and my excitement and curiosity have grown and my framing has matured as well. I think there is an individualization of style that connects the aesthetic of my early work to what I do now. In other words, it looks like the same person took all the pictures, then and now. That’s nothing I do on purpose I think it’s just a product of continuing to express myself through the same instrument and same amazement.

John Simmons' "No Crystal Stair" Pays Homage to Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava