C. Daniel Dawson: This was actually taken the night that [Kenneth] Gibson became mayor of Newark, the first Black mayor of Newark. And it was taken in the Committee for a Unified Newark’s Meeting Hall where they were celebrating the victory of Gibson.

Narrator: Kenneth Gibson was Mayor of Newark from 1970 to 1986. C. Daniel Dawson.

C. Daniel Dawson: What I’m playing with I don’t know if you know design, but I’m playing with the vectors. Vectors are just lines or signs indicating energy or movement, it’s a term from physics meaning lines, signs or symbols of energy, or the visual indications of the movements of energy. Although originally a term from physics, vectors have been use to analyze visual compositions especially in photography and cinematography. In this photo there’s the foreground with a v-shaped vector caused by the arms uplifted. And by the background fluorescent lights in the ceiling. But those kinds of lines are also things that give it energy, give it a certain foreground and background of energy. And in the center of those energies, those lines moving away you have the face. The face is topped with a big Afro, the upraised arms are topped with a closed fist, two symbols of African American culture at that time.

You have a kind of symbolic and graphic things fused together. The gesture of the upraised fist and them forming the graphic v’s, and the light forming another kind of vector in the photograph. It works because of a combination of things like that.

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