"During his six years covering the South, he wore out four portable Olivetti
typewriters." - The Washington Post, March 10, 2015.
Claude Sitton's Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter was on display in FBI exhibition called "G-Men and Journalists" at Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC a few years ago. Underneath it were the words, "1960s 'Laptop': This well-traveled Olivetti portable typewriter accompanied New York Times reporter Claude Sitton as he chronicled the civil rights era." Now (starting as of yesterday), The New York Times is featuring Sitton's photographs in a series based on a book titled Unseen: Unpublished Black History From the New York Times Archives, to be published by Black Dog & Leventhal in the northern fall.
The newspaper says, "the renowned New York Times correspondent shot photos and
took meticulous notes, exposing the racial violence with his pen [sic] and with his
lens. Mr Sitton is best known for his words. But the typewritten letters that he
sent, along with his film, to John Dugan, a Times photo editor, reveal that he
was also determined to capture history with his camera. He carried a Leica,
according to one of his sons, and wrote about light and shadows and underexposed
frames. He lamented the gloom inside a crowded black church and the time
constraints he faced as he scrambled to report the news and illustrate it at the
same time.
Notes addressed to Dugan accompanied film Sitton sent from his tour through Greenwood, Mississippi, and other Southern
cities.
"There is power in Sitton’s plain-spoken letters and in the
black-and-white images he captured on Tri-X film in March of 1963. Shown
together here for the first time - as part of a weekly series running throughout
the month [of February] - they offer a first-hand glimpse of life on the front lines of the
civil rights movement."
Atlanta-born Claude Fox Sitton (1925-2015) was a Pulitzer
Prize-winning newspaper reporter and editor. He worked for The New York
Times from 1957 to 1968, distinguishing himself by his coverage of the
civil rights movement from 1958-64. He went on to become national news director of the
Times in 1964 and then in 1968 editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, North
Carolina. Sitton started out with
wire services, working for International News Service and United Press. He joined the United States Information Agency in
1955 as an information officer and press attaché at the American Embassy in
Ghana. Sitton joined The New York Times as a copy
editor in 1957. Nine months later, he was named Southern correspondent.
In the
Pulitzer Prize-winning history of civil rights journalism, The Race Beat, authors
Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff describe Sitton as the standard bearer for civil
rights journalism. "Sitton's byline would be atop the stories that landed on the desks of
three presidents," they wrote. "His phone number would be carried
protectively in the wallets of the civil rights workers who saw him, and the
power of his byline, as their best hope for survival."
3 comments:
The photos show a Lettera 22 instead. :P
Yes, sometimes there may be a Nice & Neat story behind a typewriter. xD
Looks like that last photo has been flipped horizontally — note the position of the carriage return lever. Unless Sitton was typing in Hebrew or Arabic!
Good reporting. I like his notes. I wonder why he did not swap out film when he was going from well lit to poorly lit or carry an exposure meter. Would have been easier to push process the film, but Tri-X had quite exposure latitude. Part of its fame as the news photographers film.
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