Rangefinder Magazine

Profile: Don Rutledge
Photographer with a Mission
By Lou Jacobs Jr.

Perhaps you remember a book titled Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, published in 1959. Griffin was a reporter who, with chemically blackened face and hands, traveled in Southern states to write about his experiences as a white man in disguise. His revelations, first published in Sepia magazine, and soon after in his book, created a great deal of dialogue about the difficulties black people faced in the severe segregation of those times. Had not photographer Don Rutledge spent 10 days with Griffin picturing many situations that dramatized a temporary black man’s ordeals, public reaction to the story and book would not have been as strong.

Rutledge and Griffin connected quickly in Atlanta, worked three days, then drove to New Orleans for seven more days of shooting. Don, a lifetime photojournalist, says, “I had called Black Star [the picture agency] and said I was going to disappear for a while, but I‘d be sending them my film.” Shooting black and white with a Leica, Rutledge wasn’t surprised to find how much discrimination Griffin faced as they worked together with Don trying to be inconspicuous. Don admitted later, “Neither of us had any inkling of the commotion our project would create. John wanted to reveal conditions blacks faced, but he couldn’t predict the attention he’d get when his impersonation became public.”

Sepia’s articles with Don’s photographs began in early 1960 under the title “Journey Into Shame,” and Black Star began getting calls from publications worldwide. “Magazines were bidding against each other for rights to the photos,” Don says, “and figures ran into the thousands.” However, there were unfortunate consequences when Sepia’s publisher began to pressure Don for his negatives, threatening to sue him. Black Star asked for the negs, but Don didn’t want to jeopardize the book, so he asked Griffin to hold them “I was young and intimidated, and should have allowed Black Star to handle Sepia, and I made a mistake.” The uproar over rights which Sepia claimed but did not legally own, discouraged sales to other magazines. “I don’t know how much money we lost,” Don reminisced. Later when the situation was diffused, Black Star took responsibility for protecting Don’s rights and he joined their staff, which he wanted all along. (Oddly enough not until after John Griffin’s death in 1980 did Don request the negatives from John’s widow.)
Don shared his unpublished memoir with me and it was obvious that he was precisely the right person to illustrate Black Like Me. He had grown up on a farm in Tennessee and was already socially conscious in high school when he and two siblings walking home in a group were approached by a cluster of black students. Don wrote, “Some white kids I was with began making racial slurs and throwing rocks. I immediately demanded they stop, and when they didn’t, I joined the black children and threw rocks back at my ‘friends.’ This didn’t endear me to them, but made me to think more deeply about the ways people treat others.”

As a teen-ager Don became what I’d call an accidental Baptist clergyman, preaching in a white church, running a Bible class for black families and officiating at a funeral service. Before he could vote, he agreed to take over a church and admits it was a tough learning process but between the lines it is clear he was popular with parishioners. At his own pastor’s request Don attended Temple University and their seminary where he studied theology. He says, “I enjoyed the pastoral role but couldn’t get rid of my desire to be a photojournalist. I wanted to tell stories of how Christians care for others and live their lives.” At college he also met his future wife and began getting involved in photography for publications. He arranged with his own church to be away some weekends on photographic assignments.

Eventually Don was faced with the conflict between photography and being a pastor, and he resigned the latter. But then he was confronted with a serious problem. He explains, “At that time there were almost no religious publications using photographic stories. Religion editors were used to static images and didn’t identify with my concept of reportage, similar to that in Life and Look, involving pictures of unposed people in their daily activities.”

So Don turned to secular publications, “Hoping to find an outlet for my dream assignments, and I also shot photo stories for a news/feature service. Often I noticed the Black Star name credited with photographers’ names, but I figured scores of photographers sent portfolios to the agency. Few made it, but I was naïve about that so I blithely wrote them a letter introducing myself. They asked to see a portfolio but I didn’t think mine would be convincing, so I asked to shoot a demonstration assignment. When they weren’t interested, I responded with a list of 10 story ideas.”

Black Star was still not clamoring for his services but they said one of Don’s story ideas seemed interesting, and they would query an editor about it. “That sounded the same to me as an assignment,” Don remembers, “and I blithely phoned the subject and arranged to shoot the story which I sent to Black Star with captions. They were amazed I’d worked with no assignment, but they suggested additional situations that I shot and sent. Meanwhile the editor who had been queried decided to take a chance on giving me an assignment. The agency sent the finished piece, and it was published. That began my association with Black Star, and searching for more story ideas became part of my daily life. Black Star appreciated my energy and generated many assignments for me from my ideas.”

During the 1950s and 1960s Don shot frequent assignments centering on the Civil Rights movement that often involved conflicts in dangerous environments. He was threatened by law enforcement officers, and intimidated by white civilians who objected to his photographing blacks registering to vote. “Hatred was noticeable on peoples’ faces,” he recalls.

During a long association with Black Star, Don shot a myriad of subjects including former German missile designers who became American space scientists. “The PR rep at Huntsville, AL told me the Germans would refuse any coverage of their private lives, but I asked them anyway, and for 10 days I was dined and welcomed by each of their families. Later someone told me I had been well accepted by the reticent scientists because they appreciated my treating them like human beings and without awe.”

Covering former Cuban missionaries in Texas, the airliner in which Don flew was hit by a small plane that crashed, though Don’s plane landed safely. In Alaska he hired a plane that had to land at a village on a partly blocked runway because Eskimo leaders no longer welcomed air traffic. The pilot flew very low over the dirt blockage, dropped the wheels and hit the ground with his brakes on. The aircraft stopped at the edge of a huge lake with a 20-foot drop at its end. Taking off was just as risky.

Don Rutledge, working through Black Star, made it a major priority to search for story ideas about interesting Christian activities or individuals. That’s how a Canadian Sunday magazine assigned him to cover a missionary couple living with a primitive Indian tribe in the Amazon jungle. “They still used bows and arrows, and if their hunt was unsuccessful, no one ate unless the women found fish in the river. I learned a valuable lesson there: When you eat unknown food, don’t ask what it is, or at least wait till after the meal.”

Don’s memoir is filled with accounts of traveling to out-of-the way places, using hazardous transportation, and meeting engagingly helpful people as well as empathetic subjects. In a dumpy South American hotel he endured a bed of wood slats and was quickly attacked by mosquitoes. On a trip from Alabama overland to Nicaragua he rode three weeks in a the back of a pickup that was loaded on a flatbed rail car when the road disappeared.

Though Don is still a Black Star staff photographer, in 1966 he moved fulltime into Christian photojournalism as a staffer for Missions-USA Magazine. The Southern Baptist Convention published several magazines, and he found the work fascinating, and enjoyed being closely involved with the staff. Home Missionaries worked all over the U.S., and Don, his wife and two sons, traveled together during the summers. In 1980 he became a staffer for The Commission Magazine and remained there until retirement in 1996. He says proudly that he has worked in 142 countries on hot and frozen locations, at peace and at war (Lebanon), civilized and otherwise. Don summarizes, “To survive in an international career of photojournalism requires learning a lot of travel techniques and foreign customs.” Not to mention being spied upon in Communist countries or spear fishing for frogs at night with native tribes in Brazil. He has also received hundreds of photographic awards from secular and religious organizations. If his beguiling, anecdote-filled memoir ever finds a publisher, I’ll ask him to let the editor of this magazine know.

There’s a lot more one could say about Don Rutledge’s career if there were space. I will summarize briefly about three publications. The first is a paperbound book titled See How Love Works, a collection of short verse illustrated with Don’s fine black and white images on almost all its 96 pages. It was published in 1971 by Broadman Press in Nashville, TN in case you want to search for it at used book sources. Next is Don’s most recent book, A Journey of Faith and Sacrifice, Retracing the Steps of Lottie Moon published in 1996 by New Hope Publishers, Birmingham, AL. Lottie Moon left home in Virginia to become a famous missionary in China and died there in 1912. He retraced her steps and her life photographically.

Finally, in the September 1996 issue of The Commission Magazine is a striking one-man show of Don Rutledge’s photographs on 18 pages. Some of those images with this story show the pathos, drama and sensitive empathy for humanity you associate with the work of Gene Smith or FSA photographers. In his way, Don has been a one-man FSA with enviable warmth and superb seeing.

Lou Jacobs Jr. is the author of 23 how-to photography books, the lat-est of which, The Big Picture, was recently published. He has taught at UCLA and Brooks Institute of Pho-tography and enjoys shooting stock on his travels in the U.S. and abroad.

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