Barbara DuMetz: My Name is Barbara DuMetz, and the book that we are doing an interview for is called Picturing Black History.

Damarias Johnson: I wanted to start with, if you could talk about your entry points of photography. I know that you have family history in terms of photographers in your family. Could you just talk about how you became interested in photography?

Barbara DuMetz: I started with a camera that my, well, I should go back to that. My grandfather was a photographer that, you know, you may have read that somewhere. And he would. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan and whenever he would come to visit us, I would go to Charleston, West Virginia, which is where my family is from. He would be photographing this that and the other. And, he made his living as a photographer so he wasn’t just an amateur. He had a studio where he did commercial work and a lot of portraiture on the photograph. He was a staff photographer for the Charleston Gazette. And he also photographed the yearbooks for West Virginia State. A lot of other folks. And he did a little bit of screening work for the Pittsburgh Courier, things like that. So I was always around it, in terms of watching him do what he did. You know, and I guess that’s where my curiosity came in. I mean, I didn’t use a camera until I was in college, but my dad sent me my first camera in college. And so it was a little Instamatic, one of those things with a little cube on the top and, I shot stuff on campus, you know, just when the sororities and fraternities were doing their thing.

I went to an HBCU, I went to Fisk University. And so I used that camera to shoot, and I even shot Felonious Munk on that camera. There was a jazz concert in Nashville and I went and took my camera. At that time, I guess I was just working for the yearbook and I was just taking pictures on campus. And then that was about as far as it went up to that, to that point that I was in college when I graduated, I moved to New York to work. I was working in retail at this department store where they were training folks to be buyers. You know, that was in the late, the late, late 60s. So everybody, everybody Black got jobs because that was when they started the they opened up everything and had affirmative action and had a lot of things going on, because we’re talking about the Civil Rights Act that passed in ‘64.

So anyway, I went to New York, worked there, and while we while we were being trained those first six weeks, we went to a photo shoot because they were showing how the advertising worked. So we were at the top of that and in the studio and we went to a location shoot at the UN. So I was like, really excited about that. I saw the big umbrellas and they, you know, they were all outside and, you know, everything was set up. I really, I really got jazzed, you know, I really enjoyed it. And I was like, oh, I want to come here. I want to be in this department. And, that really wasn’t a department that we could join. We were just learning that, you know, the ins and outs of how the garments and other things that they sold at the store were going to be promoted and advertised. So life went on. I couldn’t go to that department. I left New York. Went to school, went back to school, and got a Masters here in Atlanta in the early ‘70s and then, I think I got a bigger camera. My father gave me a bigger camera. I was shooting different things and then I decided I didn’t like Atlanta. I didn’t want to study counseling. I was a psych major in undergrad. So it was suggested that I go to get a Masters in counseling, as a, to get a Master’s degree. So I didn’t really that wasn’t really something that I liked. You know, when you are young you just start out with something and see where you land. And, so my aunt, while I was here in Atlanta, my aunt had come to town, you know, this is my, my grandfather’s other daughter. My father, he only had, it was only two of them. My father and she was a counselor, and she asked me, well, what do you like to do? Because maybe you start with what you like to do, then we could figure out what you should do because I told them I was leaving Atlanta and I was only twenty-two. They’re like, what are you doin’? You went to Atlanta, then to New York and now you want to go to L.A.

So I said, well, I like doing photography. And so she said, well, you could be a photographer. And so I was like, oh, because, you know, there weren’t that many women that were doing photography. And so since I had been to New York, I saw that advertising and stuff, I figured that’s great. I’d love to do that. So there was a young man that I met in Atlanta that I had befriended and he was from California and he said if you are going to California, you want to be you want to take photography, you should go to the Art Center College of Design.

So I looked it up and did what I had to do to get in, and I got in, and that’s what happened. And so that’s where I studied. It was a commercial arts school. It’s pretty much, you know. So, which was good because I loved advertising. I loved all of the production and the lights and the assistants and the makeup, you know, all of that. That was really exciting to me. So, Art Center was a perfect place for me to go because that’s what they trained me to do. Mostly work with art directors on magazines, advertisements, and that. So that was my introduction and that’s how it started, and that’s how it stayed.

Damarius Johnson: Yes. Well, this is this is wonderful. I’m interested in, could you talk to me about Central High School in Detroit? The kind of, your experiences in Detroit? I would think Motown had a huge influence on youth culture then. But would you talk more about that?

Barbara DuMetz:  Yeah, growing up in Detroit was fantastic at that point. My family moved there, I think, in ‘50, ‘51, something like that. Maybe it was even ’55. But, my dad was a dentist. His first cousin had moved there to be a teacher. My grandmother had said, you know, told my dad, you need to move up to Detroit. Everything was going on there, all the auto companies and your dental practice would just do great because of all the dental insurance and so many people needed work. Detroit was just a boomtown to African Americans then.

Somebody really needs to do a serious documentary about that era, because we had evolved, and we learned a lot. We were, it was a pretty segregated city, but it wasn’t to the detriment of the African Americans, I don’t think. Most everybody was working class, middle class. It was not, I don’t remember a lot of poverty. I mean, probably it was somewhere. Obviously, there always is. But Detroit was a good place to grow up in white or black because of the auto industry so much excitement around people being able to have jobs. Everybody had a job. I don’t have. I don’t have, I don’t know one friend of mine whose parents weren’t working and doing well, and most of them all had houses. Nobody was living in a tenement and all that. You know, Chicago was a bigger city, and a lot more urban. Detroit was more of a neighborhood, capital city, lots of neighborhoods. So Detroit is a good place to be from.

Damarius Johnson: Yes. And so could you talk to me about Fisk? How did you decide, I mean, there are many HBCUs in the area. How did you decide that Fisk is where you would end up?

Barbara DuMetz: Well, it was time to go to college. Well, my dad had gone to Meharry Medical College, which is in Nashville, and so I had lived there as a baby. And I don’t know if that had anything to do with it, but most of the HBCUs came to our high school to talk about the schools, Howard and Fisk are the ones I remember. And there were a lot of Fisk scouts who had come from Detroit that were there already, like a year ahead of me, that were a year ahead of me in high school. So it was an, it was kind of the place to go for Detroiters at that time. And once the counselor came and talked to us about it, I decided that’s where I wanted to go. So, it was just I had gotten I had been accepted at Howard and Western Michigan, but I picked Fisk based on the woman who had come to talk to us about the campus.

Damarius Johnson: Yes, and so could you talk about in terms of your experience on campus in the late 60s? I imagine there’s a lot happening in terms of student activism.

Barbara DuMetz: Yes.

Damarius Johnson: What kind of influences they have?

Barbara DuMetz: Yeah, yeah, lots of activism we had. You know, we did all of the marching, sitting, rebelling and all of that stuff. We did that pretty consistently, I think probably all through, all through the early ‘60s. I mean, I was there from ‘65 to ‘69 so I was there when King was killed, which was in Memphis. But it was pretty, pretty uproarious times. Everybody was so upset, and lot of national violence came out because people were so upset and rioting. But it’s a pretty insulated campus, so there was not a lot of strife and uncomfortableness about being in Nashville. Now, you couldn’t go to too many places inside the city, you know, you could go to a few places close by, around campus.

But I don’t think, I didn’t, I never had any real direct discrimination that I can remember anything that was direct in my face, type of stuff. I mean, we grew up in an era where we were considered separate but equal, that, you know. So, it was very segregated, which I can’t say was all that terrible. I mean, the concept is terrible, obviously, but in terms of the way we lived, we were pretty insular. And I think even Charleston was like that, West Virginia. There was a, you know, black people at every level, so you didn’t have to go too far out of your community to get your needs met. You know the doctor, the dentists, the teachers, the lawyers, the architects, you know the businessmen that did, you know one of my girlfriend’s fathers owned the gas station, you know, things like that, so you didn’t have to go too far into the other part of society to get your needs met. So we lived well, because we had everything. You know, we had everything. My high school was pretty much all black. There were a few white kids that went there because that neighborhood had been white beforehand it turned black, which is the way it is in most big cities. So going there was like an extension, like, like being in an extension of being in Detroit. And that was probably the way it was for people coming from Chicago, from Cleveland, from, you know, Atlanta, wherever they were coming from, it was probably an extension of what their neighborhoods and what their life is like in those cities. I still have friends that are from all over the country. And I think we had a pretty, I think it was a great education. We have excellent professors, teachers, and our department is full of artists that are celebrated today. We didn’t, we didn’t lack anything. It was. It was like our Camelot. That’s what we used to say. This is our little Camelot. You know? It was, it was great. And I think probably most people being at the HBCUs at that time, and even now, they probably feel the same way.

I mean, the world is so, right now, it’s really bad. But even though you have friends that are of other races, the world is still so separate. I guess it’s just the way our country was built. You know, it was always built on some kind of separation. So having gotten to the point where we can blend but I think most people enjoy being in an insulated situation, because it could be so traumatic, if you were not, you know. If you were to go too far outside the boundaries, you might not come back. I mean, my grandfather on my mother’s side, they say he went out to get, he went to the store, went off to do something. He never came home. My mother and my grandmother never saw him again. So we don’t know what happened to him. He, you know, back then, we could have gotten lynched and nobody would have known or just killed, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nobody ever found him.

So I never knew my grandfather on my mom’s side, and she was a young, young girl, maybe, maybe not even 10, somewhere, pretty young. I don’t even know the timeframe. So, I don’t know what else I could say. Fisk was just a beautiful experience.

Damarius Johnson: Yes, yes. Well, thank you. I just want to ask a few questions about the cover, the image here, which is a photograph that is entitled, American Gothic, 1970s style.

Barbara DuMetz: Right.

Damarius Johnson: And so, I wanted to just start with, can you explain what Gothic photography is?

Damarius Johnson: Wonderful. And could you talk to me about how the photo was received, or how it’s been received over time?

Barbara DuMetz: Oh, it’s been received very well. It’s, it’s become a collectible. I have about four different people have it in their collection as a collectible piece of art, and it’s a limited edition. I have like four different limited editions, four different sizes. The largest is like 36 by 20 something, 28 something like that. I know those numbers aren’t exactly right. The largest is about that size, and then I go all the way down to 16 by 10, but it is good to see that a lot of people like it.

Damarius Johnson: Yes. Wonderful. Could you tell me more about the importance of, in this photograph you talked, about over your career, the importance of photographers, the power of photography to represent black life, black history. Why that’s important.

Barbara DuMetz: Well, I mean, anything in our society that’s visual, the image is depicting a certain lifestyle or certain place or style, then whoever is looking at, whoever gazes upon that image, they’re getting information about the situation that they’re looking at. And so as far as the kind of work I did, particularly that most people saw was in advertising. And, you know, of course, up until the time that I started doing photography, advertising was generally a lot of it was not photography way back. And then once we they started using photography. And of course, it was always a white family or white person, white female, you know, whatever. It was always white. And then eventually, in the early ‘70s, late ‘60s, I guess late ‘60s, early ‘70s, there were a lot more Black advertising agencies that wanted to market to a black audience, because we weren’t included.

So my feeling is that those images help to educate the general population as to, you know, what our lives were like, because we were photographing it as we saw it, and we were photographing it as a way of letting the people who were going to buy the products know that, you know, this is, this could be you at your dining room table. And so, we had the dining room tables from all the way all different stations in life. You know, you have a dining room table that was right in the kitchen because we didn’t have a good space, but you still had a great family life, like everybody else. Everybody ate in the kitchen, around the family dining room table to, the middle-class people were dining in a room separate from their kitchens and all the way up, you know. So over, over those years, they depicted African Americans doing normal everyday stuff like everybody else.

But it wasn’t unusual for us to have a regular life, you know, like everybody else, well, particularly white people, because that was the juxtaposition at that time. So I felt like it was the type of work I did. I felt like was very educational for the general population, even though it was segmented marketing, obviously everybody was able to see it.

So did that. Does that answer your question? Is there anything else about it?

Damarius Johnson: Yes, that’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. And we’re right at 9:30 I want to be mindful of your time.

Barbara DuMetz: Thank you.

Damarius Johnson: But thank you so much. Thank you. This has been wonderful. We learned so much about your work and the photography that graces the cover of this book, so thank you.

Barbara DuMetz: Yeah, I was excited when people at Getty told me it would fit, and I have a lot of connection to Ohio and Ohio State. My cousins went there. I have a lot of cousins that are in Columbus still. So, I’m like, oh, cool.