Jasper Wood

Jasper Wood (January 2, 1921-June 7, 2002) was a self-taught writer and photographer and a lifelong free speech activist. He was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and moved to Cleveland around 1936 with his family, where he attended Cleveland Heights High School. In 1946, while living on Walton Avenue in Cleveland, Wood purchased his first camera and started taking pictures in Cleveland and in Mexico. Wood won many awards for his photographs, which he continued to take until the late 1950s.

Jasper Wood Biographical Sketch

Jasper Wood (January 2, 1921-June 7, 2002) was a self-taught writer and photographer and a lifelong free speech activist. He was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and moved to Cleveland around 1936 with his family, where he attended Cleveland Heights High School.

In 1938 Wood published the film script of Ernest Hemingway's The Spanish Earth, which resulted in a disagreement with Hemingway when the author insisted on a disclaimer on the title page of the book.

Wood attended Cleveland College, Western Reserve University's downtown extension school, in 1939. While at Cleveland College, he was assistant editor of Sky Line, the school's literary magazine, and wrote poetry and a play which was produced and performed. He was the local jazz critic for DownBeat magazine in the 1940s.

Jasper met his future wife Nancy Manning in 1944. She was the co-director of the 1030 Gallery and daughter of artist Wray Manning. They had their first child, Denis, in 1945.

In 1946, while living on Walton Avenue, Wood purchased his first camera and started taking pictures in Cleveland and in Mexico. Around 1949 Wood and his young family moved into Lakeview Terrace public housing project (1294 Spruce Court).

He first exhibited his work in 1947 at the Cleveland Museum of Art's annual May Show. According to the Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, he won three first place May Show awards (1949, 1951 and 1953) and two honorable mentions (1947 and 1952) for his photographs. In the 1950s Wood had several one-man and two-man shows, including shows at Image Gallery (New York City), the San Francisco Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum. Jasper Wood presented an exhibition of Scovill photographs at the 1030 Gallery in Cleveland from February 19-March 11, 1950. Titled "A Street in the City-Scovill Avenue Document," the exhibit consisted of "44 vivid photographic essays by Jasper Wood." He started a film society in his home in the 1950s.

In 1951 Wood won first place in American Photography magazine's annual contest. He won this prestigious award for a Scovill photograph titled "Girl with Doll." The original print of this photograph was scanned by the Library in 2010 from the collection of the Christopher Wood family. A copy of the image also appears on page 529 of the September 1951 issue of the magazine.

One of Wood's images was included in Edward Steichen's 1955 exhibit The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. A copy of this photograph can be seen on page 191 of the catalog that accompanied the exhibit (CPL owns copies of the catalog).

Wood also took extensive photographs in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and in Ohio Amish Country. Wood's last May Show entry was in 1958. He had ceased taking photographs by 1960.

Outraged by what he felt were infringements on free speech, Wood founded Citizens for Freedom of the Mind in the 1960s. In May 1967 Wood organized a fundraiser for the defense of bookseller James Lowell and counterculture poet d.a. levy, who had been arrested on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor during a poetry reading on November 15, 1966. Planned to feature a concert by the Fugs and a poetry reading by Allen Ginsberg, the fundraiser almost did not take place after the managers of Masonic Auditorium, where the event was originally to be held, cancelled the organizing committee's rental contract. The fundraiser was instead held at Case Western Reserve University's Strosacker Auditorium, where it was attended by a capacity crowd of 600 people.

In an interview in 2003, photographer Nicholas C. Hlobeczy (born 1927), made this mention of Jasper Wood, whom he had not seen in decades:

I lived in the projects when I was young, and I had a very close friend there, Jasper Wood. He was something of a photographer and an "intellectual." He always ribbed me, "What do you know about philosophy? What do you know about psychology?" . . . which I knew nothing about at that time. He asked, "What really interests you, Nick?" and I said, Death. He said, "Okay, I'll give you a book to read." It was Moby Dick. I'd never read anything serious up to that time and I was 24 years old. Every night I would go over and we would talk about the chapter I'd read. Jasper was a very fine, contentious, difficult person, but he was very important to me.

Sources Hlobeczy quotation: http://www.conversations.org/story.php?sid=110 The biographical information on Jasper Wood was supplied by the family of Jasper Wood.

Jasper Wood's Photographic Style

Jasper Wood was not a hesitant photographer. Through his honest and direct approach, he formed immediate, natural and trusting relationships with his subjects. Influenced by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, Wood developed a unique photographic style. Through his photographs, many of which were taken with a Contax 35mm camera, Wood attempted to capture what he called the "felt moment seen," or the emotional essence of what he, the photographer, was seeing. Jasper Wood took photographs to feel alive and connected to the world. Although he exhibited his photographs widely, he did not create a career from them. To him, the creative act was most significant.

As he explored the Scovill Area, Wood attempted to capture the pulse of the neighborhood's residents as they conducted their lives, photographing people in unposed moments of joy, play, and ordinariness. Unlike the art reviewers of his day, Wood did not invest deep sociological meaning into his photographs. Wood rejected these interpretations and insisted that he was merely trying to capture the feeling of a particular moment.

Jasper Wood in His Own Words

In 1951, the Akron Art Institute had a double show of photographs by Jasper Wood and his friend Harry Schulke. In addition to displaying their own work, Wood and Schulke were each asked to invite 13 photographers to exhibit work along with theirs. Among the photographers Wood (who emphasized subject) invited were Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams, Edward Steichen, and Bernice Abbott. Among the photographers Schulke (who emphasized form) invited were Henri Cartier-Bresson, Harry Callahan, Erwin Blumfeld, Edward Steichen, Brett Weston, and Richard Avedon. As part of this exhibit, Wood was asked to prepare a statement on his photography, which is transcribed below in its entirety:

Photography as a phenomenon owes its very existence to the desire of many artists and scientists of the past to devise an instrument which would secure a picture of objective reality. The why behind this history-long quest was man's constant need for an objective-correlator with which he could more consistently approach the perplexing problem of his subjective relationship to an external world. The contemporary embodiment of this search is the camera as we know it today.

I believe, therefore, that photography by its very existence must deal with subject before all else, and that the objective-correlative so long sought can only exist in direct presentation of subject. The method of photography in these terms makes the straight unmanipulated print the be-all and end-all of the photographic process.

Further, the photographer exists as the operator of the machine and the observer of the objective reality through the machine. The operator clicks the shutter of the mechanism: the man-observer establishes a relationship between his subjective self and the objective reality. This act of man viewing through camera results in two phenomena: (1) the felt emotion, (2) the objectivity seen. This is the universal experience which for thousands of years has resulted in what we know as art. Now this experience can be recorded objectively through the "seeing eye" of the camera and the chemistry of the negative and print.

The subjective self determines what the photographer will externalize and objectify through the photographic process and sets the shutter-clicking man into operation. This particular moment is the moment of full responsibility. This responsibility is the most serious responsibility the photographer can know. He must accept all consequences for establishing the relationship which will, when the chemical process of the medium is fulfilled, become objectively evident in the photo-print.

The complexity or simplicity of the relationship of the photographer to his subject is determined only by his philosophy or approach to life. But his responsibility exists whenever the shutter is clicked and the print made. This responsibility can be shared by no one else, by no editor, critic, audience or ism of group belief. It is the glory and the damnation of the photographer, the very marrow of his life.

Source American Photography July 1951: pages 420-423

From the guide to the The Jasper Wood Collection, 1946-1960, 1946-1960, (Cleveland Public Library)