Time to Get Ready: Revisiting Courage Through the Lens of Maria Varela

About to fold camp in one of city’s many unheralded treasures, the Civil Rights Photography of Maria Varela has a mere four weeks left at the National Mexican Arts Museum in Pilsen; ending its five-month run.   Varela, a native Chicagoan baptized in activism in high school, captured images that freeze history and drip with intimacy.  The sight of Stokely Carmichael in hot and close quartered conversation with two men in front of a grocery store shows what it means to organize a liberation movement more than words could ever do.  I wish I could say there are scores of such images in the exhibition.  Maybe it’s their limited number that makes them so precious.  Each has its own beauty and power.  Some even tilt toward abstraction when considering Varela’s view of a plantation road.  It’s Ansel Adams meets Stephen King; stark and foreboding.

All of Varela’s work is in black and white.  And in much of it, her subjects allow her to get close enough to see and show their souls.  As a 23 year old in 1963 she received an invitation to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) where she helped create a voter literacy program.  One of her mentors was the astonishing Ella Baker; now finally acknowledged as one of the pillars of the civil rights movement.  Two years in, Varela was also SNCC’s only woman staff photographer.

By 1968, Ms. Varela also received and accepted an invitation to join the Land Grant Movement in New Mexico whose mission was to restore ancestral lands and cultural practices.  Here too she took her camera to chronicle what liberation looks like from a native American perspective.  The images remain immediate and electric in their depiction of unrelenting resolve and commitment.  They too are represented in this marvelous exhibit.

Time to Get Ready: Fotografia Social closes July 30.