Pirkle Jones; photographer depicted migrants, activists

Pirkle Jones was noted for his pictures of California's landscapes and people, including a Black Panthers series. (eric luse/san francisco chronicle/file 2002)

NEW YORK - Pirkle Jones, whose images of migrant farm workers, California towns and valleys under threat, and the Black Panthers at the peak of their power made him one of the most admired photographers of his generation, died March 15 in San Rafael, Calif. He was 95 and lived in Mill Valley, Calif.

Mr. Jones, a disciple of Ansel Adams, brought a sensitivity to visual texture and a sense of historic urgency to subjects as varied as the California landscape, the San Francisco skyline, and a countercultural houseboat community in Sausalito.

Perhaps his most remarkable photographs, taken in the tumultuous year 1968, captured the leaders of the Black Panther Party as they would have liked to be seen: bold revolutionaries poised to overturn the white power structure.

"He was a man of huge social conscience, and he brought that to the work," said Karen Sinsheimer, the curator of photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which gave Mr. Jones his first retrospective exhibition in 2001. "But he also made absolutely beautiful prints, just perfect, with crisp detail and a vast tonal range in black and white."

Adams, his mentor, who died in 1984, paid him a high compliment. "His photography is not flamboyant, does not depend upon the superficial excitements," he said. "His pictures will live with you, and with the world, as long as there are people to observe and appreciate."

Mr. Jones was born in Shreveport, La., and bought his first camera, a Kodak Brownie, when he was 17.

In 1941, when he was employed at a shoe factory in Lima, Ohio, he enlisted in the US Army and served in the Pacific theater. He passed through San Francisco on the way out and returned after the war to enroll in the new photography department at the California School of Fine Arts, headed by Adams.

From 1947 to 1953, he worked as an assistant and printmaker to Adams, who brought him into an artistic circle that included Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, and Minor White. He also met and married Ruth-Marion Baruch, a fellow photography student and poet, who became a lifelong collaborator. She died in 1997.

In 1956, Lange asked Mr. Jones to help her document the Berryessa Valley, soon to disappear underwater with the completion of the Monticello Dam. Their photo essay, "The Death of a Valley," recorded the last year of life in the valley's towns and farms and, published as a single issue of Aperture in 1960, became a classic of photojournalism. Mr. Jones later called the collaboration "one of the most meaningful photographic experiences of my professional life."

He went on to collaborate with Adams on a photo essay on the building of the Paul Masson Mountain Winery. In 1961, he and his wife spent time in Walnut Grove, Calif., to create the portrait of a dying town.

"I've always thought of my career as a bridge between the classic photography of Ansel Adams and the documentary work of Dorothea Lange," he told Art & Antiques last year.

In 1968 Baruch became a friend of Kathleen Cleaver, the wife of the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, through their work with the Peace and Freedom Party. From July to October 1968, Mr. Jones and Baruch photographed Black Panthers in the Bay Area with the stated goal of promoting a better understanding of the party.

The moment was fraught. Huey P. Newton, the party's minister of defense, was on trial on a charge of murder in the death of a police officer, and relations between the Panthers and the police threatened to become open warfare. (Newton was convicted of manslaughter.) Mr. Jones's photographs of three Panthers standing on courthouse steps holding a "Free Huey" banner and of male and female Panthers posing with guns became emblematic images of the era.

In the final decades of his life, he concentrated on the landscape around his glass-and-redwood house in Mill Valley.