Growing up in California’s legendary Bay Area in the 1960s, African-American photographer Jeffrey Henson Scales had a front-row seat to the hippie explosion in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and the Black Power Movement in Oakland. In those heady, transformative years, Scales amassed an extraordinary collection of photographs, the bulk of which had gone missing for the past 50 years.
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“I always assumed it was stolen by the FBI,” Scales says. “At the time, it wasn’t an unfeasible assumption because my family was under surveillance by the FBI. I assumed they were the FBI — they looked like they were in the Matrix, sitting in unmarked cars parked in front of our house and making movies of us.”
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It wasn’t until 2018 that the photographs finally resurfaced. While cleaning out the house after Scales’ mother had passed, his stepfather and older brother came upon a cache of 40 rolls of film stashed in the back of an old filing cabinet. From this extraordinary find, Scales unearthed some of his earliest works made in 1960s California — including 15 rolls documenting his time with the Panthers.
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In the new exhibition and forthcoming book, “In a Time of Panthers: The Lost Negatives”, Scales brings together works made between 1967–1971, offering a timely at efforts to confront police brutality, racial injustice and inequality, and the horrors wrought by capitalism — issues the nation continues to confront today.
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