James E. Hinton’s Unseen Films Reframe the Black Power Movement

'As a photographer, James E. Hinton made pictures of some of the most prominent figures of the civil-rights era. Yet the majority of his images—more than forty thousand, many of which are being digitized by Emory University—capture the specifics of more ordinary Black life in mid-century America, that of small-business owners, activists, and, often, children. Hinton’s work as a cinematographer and filmmaker achieved a similar balance between taking in the grander sweep of history and considering the nature, appearance, manner, and presence of the individual people making it. We see that eye, with its deft movement from wide to narrow focus,  in The New-Ark and May Be the Last Time, two documentaries that Hinton filmed in the late sixties, about the poet Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, respectively. Both films were recently digitized by the Harvard Film Archive, which holds a collection of Hinton’s work.'