Adams. Adams had founded the program and taught
many classes there. Jones worked as Adams’ assistant
from 1947 until 1953 and the two photographers
forged a lifelong friendship. Jones has spent much of
his 60-year career as a teacher of photography, pri-
marily at the San Francisco Art Institute; he joined the
school’s faculty in 1952, and remained there until his
retirement in 1997. Jones has also drawn inspiration
from his associations with some of the other luminary
American photographers of the twentieth century—
Edward Weston, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham,
and Dorothea Lange. Jones is perhaps best known for
two collaborative documentary projects:Death of a
Valley, with Lange; andA Photographic Essay on the
Black Panthers, co-created with his wife—writer, pho-
tographer, and poet, Ruth-Marion Baruch.
Jones is noted for the breadth of his work, which
includes landscapes, architectural photographs, por-
traiture, cultural impressions, and politically charged
social documentary photographic essays. While his
career was shaped by his proximity to a community
of great artists, Jones developed his own idiosyn-
cratic photographic vision. Though the body of his
work is difficult to characterize, nature is certainly
one of the dominant themes. Jones’s technically mas-
terful images of waterfalls, trees, marshes, and rocks
are not solely intended as photographic illustrations
of the environment, but rather as impressions of his
own relationship to nature, which in its untouched
state has sacred overtones. This idealization of the
land, which issues from the Adams tradition of land-
scape photography, is used to instill nostalgia. For it
is through this more arcane and Edenic ‘‘before’’ that
Jones suggests the negative impact of human devel-
opment upon landscapes and customary ways of life.
In his social documentary photography, Jones simi-
larly plays the dual roles of artist and witness. One
senses Jones’s personal commitment to and passion
for his subject matter, his images often expressing his
point of interest and his point of view. His sensitive
and acute observations of human behavior are emo-
tionally charged and visually poetic.
Jones’s first major project motivated by social
consciousness was conceived in 1956 when Dor-
othea Lange approached him to collaborate on a
photographic essay commissioned byLifemaga-
zine. This piece documented the final year of Ber-
ryessa Valley in California, which was about to be
flooded after the completion of the Monticello
Dam. While the assignment was never published
byLife, it was later reproduced as a single issue of
Aperturemagazine in 1960 under the nameDeath
of a Valley. Lange and Jones chronicled the com-
munity’s last year before their forced relocation.
The pictures look with a vivid sense of nostalgia
and empathy at a small town, small farm way of
life. Images of the orchards in bloom; pears,
grapes, and grain being harvested; pastoral sun-
bathed countryside; quaint homes; and well-sea-
soned locals are contrasted with melancholic
scenes of profound loss, dispossession, destruction
and dislocation: severed power lines, burning struc-
tures, and tractors scarring the once-fertile earth.
The essay and the subsequent exhibition remain
powerful testaments to the price of progress. The
series received popular and critical acclaim, and it
figures among the highlights of Jones’s career. Two
years after theDeath of a Valley project, Jones
collaborated with Ansel Adams to document the
construction of the Paul Masson Winery in Sara-
toga, California. Completed in 1963, as both a
publication and a touring exhibition,The Story of
a Wineryillustrated the growth of a new industry,
telling the story of winemaking from the early bud-
break on the vine to the final product in the glass.
Jones’s most enduring creative partnership was
with Ruth-Marion Baruch. Over the course of their
marriage, Jones and Baruch produced a number of
photographic milestones, the first occurring in 1961
when the pair was drawn to a small, forgotten town
located on the banks of the Sacramento River.
Walnut Grove: Portrait of a Towndocuments a
small, racially diverse community in transition.
While the town’s fertile soil and location made it
a thriving business gateway and agricultural hub,
the introduction of a freeway which bypassed Wal-
nut Grove led to the town’s decline. The location
gave Jones another opportunity to visually explore
the manner in which development has changed a
town’s habitation and landscape.
Perhaps Jones’s greatest photographic legacy is
the landmark seriesA Photographic Essay on the
Black Panthers. Eventually gaining the trust of the
party leaders, Jones and Baruch were granted
unprecedented access to the group’s inner circle.
Portraits of Panther leaders Kathleen and Eldridge
Cleaver, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Stokely
Carmichael appear alongside other photos of par-
ticipants at Panther rallies and demonstrations in
Oakland and San Francisco during 1968. Jones and
Baruch also captured more intimate moments—
images of members’ family gatherings and the
young recipients of the Panther’s Breakfast for
Children Program. Jones’s and Baruch’s photo-
graphs clearly humanize their subjects, connecting
the activists’ struggles with universal themes of fa-
mily and hope for a better future. The project
intended to create a better understanding of the or-
ganization; images projecting dignity, pride, and
sincerity were used to temper the violent reputationJONES, PIRKLE