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Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry and you're with The Takeaway. Now, if you've picked up a New York Times during the past decade, you've likely seen the photography of Jeffrey Henson Scales. As editor of his photography column Exposures and of the Times' Year in Pictures, it is through Henson's eyes that so many have come to see the people of the city. The now Harlem-based Scales spent his childhood in California's Bay Area. It was there that he found his photographic voice by training his lens on Oakland's Black Panther Party.

Jeffrey Henson Scales: Our house happens to be on the actual borderline between Berkeley and Oakland. I mostly went to Berkeley schools but spent a lot of time in Oakland. It was the mid-1960s we had moved there from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. It was pretty nice, high quality of life. It's a beautiful area. A lot of optimism that we were going to be able to change the world.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Are The Panthers part of the memory of Oakland for you at that time?

Jeffrey Henson Scales: Absolutely. It was a significant part of-- I was 14 and 15 years old and I was discovering my voice as a photographer and the voice of activism. It was a pretty profound experience for me and it was a very exciting time in the Bay Area.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What does it mean to discover your voice as a photographer?

Jeffrey Henson Scales: I had been studying photography since the age of 11. My father was an amateur photographer and we always had a darkroom. He gave me a Leica camera when I was 11. He also gave me and my older brother a box that had every issue of Life Magazine from 1936 to 1964 or 1965. I've been studying all of those magazines for years and years looking at the great work of Gordon Parks, Eugene Smith, and many others.

I was making photographs mostly before The Panthers. I was basically doing photographs of my friends and whatever nature. Then, when I started photographing The Panthers, I became much more focused on documentary work with a slant toward photojournalism. I was mentored by photographer Stephen Shames who showed me a lot of things about photographing news events and people.

It really set how I would look at things, the visual voice, the things you look for, and what you try to achieve in a photograph with framing, with detail, with choices of lenses, and access. How much you work on trying to make a photograph that you see in your head, but you necessarily haven't been able to achieve that in a camera. It was in those years that I was able to achieve things that I saw in my head in photographs.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The photographs in this book, you took them, but you took them as a teen. You took them these many years ago. As I hear you describing the skills that you were developing, the voice that you were finding, the way of taking what was in your head and bringing it into the photograph, I would not publish the poetry that I wrote as a teenager. [laughs]

I'm fascinated to know, for you, did you find these photos? Did you remember that you had taken them? What is it like for you to look at your teenage self, to listen to your teenage voice in these photographs?

Jeffrey Henson Scales: Being a teenager, I wasn't really an organized professional photographer, I wasn't really keeping track of photographs I was making. Our family was under surveillance by the FBI and I had misplaced the negatives for all of this film I'd shot. One of the things I thought was maybe the FBI or some government agency had stolen them out of the dark room.

Then, in 2018, we were selling our family home and they found a box of negatives in the back of a file cabinet that my mother had tucked away 50 years ago or 48 years ago. It was all this film-- My older brother and my stepfather sent me this box and was all of my pictures of The Panthers riots in Berkeley. It was really an amazing thing to actually see the work that I remember having taken but not having actually looked at these photographs for almost 50 years.

Considering I'd gone on to make my life in photography, it's also fascinating to see things I was doing and editing photographs, particularly after being a photography editor for many years. It's been very fascinating looking at myself as a teenager. It's odd at the same time going back to the beginning and trying to sort out the trajectory. I can't say I've figured it all out, but it's quite interesting looking at them.

Also, The Panthers gave me a lot of access and a lot of encouragement because they wanted to publish my pictures in their newspaper. They gave me a lot of access. They were very supportive, the leadership. That entitled me to really believe in my photography and that was a really important lesson.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm going to pause on that for a moment because that phrasing is extraordinary. Their support and the access they gave you entitled you to believe in your photography. Can you just keep walking down that road a bit?

Jeffrey Henson Scales: One of the things, when you're a photographer in general, and particularly if you're looking back to the 60s and the 70s as a Black photographer, often you're not entitled to be certain places or you're not given access or you're not supposed to be here. This isn't a career for you. You should do something else, get a job at a factory or become a teacher.

These are all good jobs, but the job of an artist is a special thing. What they gave me was that my work was special and I should be in those situations making those photographs. You don't always get that when you're just out there making photographs or making some kind of art.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Walk me through some of the photographs. Let's start with some of the folks, Bobby Seale, Kathleen Cleaver. As a teenager, how did you know to put them in your lens? What's the story you were telling us?

Jeffrey Henson Scales: My parents were activists and they'd been involved with the Civil Rights Movement. I first met Stokely Carmichael at an event my parents had at our house. He had left the organization SNCC and turned it over to H. Rap Brown and they had a celebration of that at our family house. A lot of the people like Eldridge Cleaver and various Panthers were there.

I was around these people and some of them knew me. They said, "You can take pictures for the newspaper." Getting the work published was really significant for me. These were the leaders. These were the people that were making the speeches. Bobby Seale was-- They were all extremely kind to this teenager from Berkeley. I remember Bobby-- I used to go to the Huey Newton's trial. They'd search you before you went into the trial. Bobby Seale said, "You can just hide a camera on your body because you're a kid and they won't search you that much."

Which wasn't true because they searched everybody. The takeaway for me from that was these are things you might consider doing to go the extra mile to get a photograph. That was one of the most fundamental lessons I learned as a documentary photographer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When I teach the social movements and history of The Panthers to college students, one of the things we talk about a lot is the aesthetic that among many strategic brilliances of The Panthers was their very clear and strong and identifiable-- [chuckles] When Beyonce shows up at the Super Bowl, whatever, 40, 50 years later, you still know what she is signaling back to.

You understand the citation. Here you were a teenager in part making the history of that aesthetic. Part of the reason we know it is because of your images.

Jeffrey Henson Scales: Yes, that is part of that. There's many images by many photographers of The Panthers. Their aesthetic was just riveting, black berets, black leather, and Black power. It was just an amazing thing that they put together just in terms of a look. They were very organized and they would do these-- There's several photographs of how they would stage events outside the courthouse during Huey Newton's trial out with everybody formal stance with flags and the leather jackets and the berets. It was really just phenomenally exciting and always very, very visual. As a young person finding their way in photography, that being something to actually photograph, that's really exciting. I was really fortunate that I was there at that moment.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This was first an exhibit. Talk to me about the decision to turn it into a book.

Jeffrey Henson Scales: When I found the film when it was returned to me, that was just exhilarating going through that and there was so much work. I had made prints up of a bunch of it, and I was moving it around trying to get a magazine story, and I wasn't getting a lot of bites. The publishers at SPQR really believed in the work and had a real vision for what a book could be and so the exhibit went up.

We had pretty much decided, we wanted to do a book before the exhibit went up, but then the exhibit got a lot of press and so that just gave it a lot of momentum. I remember when the book was put together, they very much felt that what would distinguish this book from other books about the Black Panthers, which many are just great collections of photographs, but this would be a little bit more about me than just a photojournalist look at the Black Panthers, because they said, "The fact that you went on to a life in photography, this is kind of like the prequel to that life." I really liked how they saw that, and that's how we structured the book.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jeffrey Henson Scales is the author of the new book In A Time of Panthers Early Photographs by Jeffrey Henson Scales. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Jeffrey Henson Scales: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me.

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