Exhibit displays Bay Shore's black history

He was born a scant generation after slavery's end, in the Virginia ruins of the old Confederacy. After he died in relative obscurity in Bay Shore nearly 80 years later, much of his life's work faded like the old photographs that they were.

But over a career that spanned at least five decades, Bay Shore photographer James T. Johnathan used a camera to open a window into life on pre-suburban Long Island, including a small but determined black middle class that went mostly unnoticed before the 1960s.

During February, the Suffolk County Historical Society is hosting a show of Johnathan's photographs at its gallery on West Main Street in Riverhead. The exhibit, which includes about 30 of Johnathan's works, was timed to coincide with Black History Month.

There is a picture of an all-black baseball team posing in a field, as an American flag flies in the background. Another features a prosperous-looking Johnathan in a suit and fedora, leaning against his automobile. And there is a street view of the studio Johnathan owned on Main Street. Portraits of sailors and brides and someone who could have been Billie Holiday smile out from the plate-glass expanse. Yet another self-image shows the photographer neatly coifed and with a boutonniere adorning his formal suit, standing for a studio portrait.

"They are completely the opposite of images that you might have expected to see of African-Americans of that era -- migrant workers, sharecroppers, people standing in soup lines," said Walter Garcia, a photographer and historian who helped preserve more than 100 examples of the thousands of black-and-white images Johnathan produced before his death in 1966. "It's definitely an upwardly striving African-American middle class that he captured."

To be sure, many of the show's images distill day-to-day life in what was a thriving, predominantly white community.

One is a nighttime scene of Main Street, in which the glow of passing headlights and the glitter of movie theaters animate Bay Shore's small-town main drag. Another is a captured 40-foot whale shark, whose moribund body has drawn a gawking crowd.

But many of the show's images hint of the arc toward equality traveled by black America during Johnathan's lifetime.

Johnathan, who lived for a while in Harlem, moved with his wife and family to Bay Shore in 1916. Relatives describe him as a tall, avuncular man who harnessed an entrepreneurial spirit to provide for his family. They say he doted on his children, but also found time to supplement his photography business by running a barber shop and a restaurant.

His career grew in the 1920s, the decade during which photographer James Van Der Zee began documenting life in Harlem. From a studio at what was 72-74 W. Union St. -- now Union Boulevard -- Johnathan began churning out driver's license photos, family portraits, wedding pictures and images of fishing-contest winners. He took an aerial photograph of the newly constructed Bay Shore High School in 1939, and snapped class pictures for a generation of Bay Shore public school students as the district's official photographer. In a surviving print not included in the show, his camera captured a British zeppelin looming majestically -- possibly over Roosevelt Field -- not long after the World War I-era aircraft completed one of history's first trans-Atlantic flights.

"People are so drawn to these old images," said Kathy Curran, the historical society's director. "I've had auto enthusiasts come to look at these pictures of old cars, and people who are captivated by his old pictures of Bay Shore's Main Street. It really is a broad-reaching show that can tell us a lot about life in a community like Bay Shore from the '20s to the '60s, and the changes that have come about."

Some of the photographs hint at the racial complexity of an era on Long Island in which black people a few generations removed from slavery were redefining themselves as full participants in the American middle class. This redefinition was happening even as notions of racial superiority continued to shape habits and traditions on Long Island.

Two photographs in the exhibit hint at this dichotomy. One is a formal portrait of four of Johnathan's six children, who played in a family band that won gigs at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and the 1939 World's Fair in Queens. Johnathan wanted his children to absorb the culture and discipline music imparts, according to his grandson, Kent Johnathan, a teacher at Bay Shore Middle School. The subjects of the photograph -- a teenage violinist, a drummer, a saxophonist and perhaps a singer -- project an image of middle-class accomplishment.

The other is a photograph of a pair of white men riding a horse-drawn carriage that advertises a minstrel show sponsored by the Bay Shore unit of the Columbian Republican League. Affixed to the carriage is the grinning image of a man in blackface.

"I'm not saying there weren't issues or problems in Bay Shore, or that my family didn't face prejudices," wrote another grandson, Keith Johnathan, of Eau Claire, Wis., in a profile that accompanied a 2009 exhibition of his grandfather's work at the restored Second Avenue Firehouse, in Bay Shore.

"But for every door that closed for my family, they opened others and persevered despite the time."

The current show was organized by Curran, who was named the historical society's director last year. She learned of Johnathan's work while at her last job as director of the Islip Art Museum, where she had been pulling together an exhibit of African-American photographers.

"I'm not in love with Black History Month, or Women's History Month, or sectioning history in general," Curran said. "I just think it's important to honor this man for his wonderful photography and the frozen pieces of time that are captured in his work."

Despite Johnathan's prolific energy, few of his images survive.

A relative ran his studio briefly after his death in 1966. But when the business shut down, Johnathan's negatives and prints were stuffed into boxes and stored for nearly 30 years, first in an Amityville basement, and later in a shed behind the family home. Mold, humidity, summer temperatures and leaking roofs took their toll.

By the time work began on their restoration, there was not much left to be saved. None of the images in the show is an original print. Garcia digitized what was available, but said the copies lack the immediacy and subtlety of the originals.

"It was heartbreaking that a whole lifetime of work was lost because no one seemed to realize their historical value," he said. "Sadly, most of it is gone."