With luminaries such as former residents Alfred Stieglitz and Dorothea Lange, Hoboken has a rich history of renowned photographers.
Following their lead is Hoboken resident Benedict J. Fernandez, who has gained acclaim for his work portraying bare-knuckled middle-class life at the Hoboken shipyards, the struggles during the civil rights era, and the last year of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life.
Currently, the Hoboken Historical Museum is showing an exhibition titled “Like Family,” a collection of black-and-white images by Fernandez taken at the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard in 1973.
The son of a longshoreman
Fernandez’s father, Benedict Fernandez II, worked at Bethlehem Steel in Hoboken from 1936 to 1983. Ironically, Bethlehem Steel was located on the exact site of the Hoboken Historical Museum, which is now displaying Fernandez’s photographs.
Fernandez recalled Monday that his father started out as a laborer and moved his way up through the ranks over his nearly 50 years at Bethlehem Steel. In fact, Fernandez said, his father was the very last Bethlehem Steel employee to leave the property when the shipyard closed in the early 1980s.
“When he walked off of the property for the last time, and turned the key to lock the gate behind him, that was it. He was the last one,” Fernandez said.
The show at the Historical Museum presents one of juxtaposition. The photographs show the industrial grit and vast enormity of equipment used by longshoreman. The cranes, propellers and chains are so large that they look more like massive abstract sculptures than a longshoreman’s tool of trade.
But this stark cold steal is buoyed by red-blooded, hardworking employees. Fernandez, with a great deal of empathy, portrays the human scale and connectivity between the toiling middle-class laborers.
It shows a world where sons follow their fathers into the workforce. Fernandez’s father convinced him to become an apprentice for a short time at Bethlehem Steel before later being employed as a crane operator at the Brooklyn Shipyard.
Enhancing the pictures are some interesting anecdotes about the subjects. In one picture there’s a smiling worker, slogging away on a massive propeller blade as a cigarette hangs from his lips. The photograph identifies him as “Moneybags John.” He got the name because of his willingness to lend money to his fellow employees.
In another picture there is a man named “Chainfall Willie” who looks towards a giant propeller that is being lowered onto a ship. His nickname comes from the lengths of chain that are seen during the operation and are everywhere in Fernandez’s shipyard shots.
From the crane to the camera
From 1955 to the early 1960s, Fernandez was the operator of a large hammerhead crane at the Brooklyn Shipyard. Much like Hoboken, the Brooklyn Yard in the 1960s was becoming obsolete due to containerization and the need for deeper-water ports. That meant that jobs were becoming hard to come by, and in 1963 his crane came down, and with it his usefulness at the yard.
He remembered that the surplus workers were put on waiting lists for the remaining jobs in the yard. His name was placed on the list to become a ladies hairdresser.
“That was the moment that I realized that it was time to turn my hobby into a profession,” Fernandez said.
He started out as a wedding photographer at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. He also held several odd photography jobs, such as in 1964 when he photographed Boy Scouts for a year at the New York World’s Fair in Queens. He said that 26,000 scouts came through the grounds, and he got $1 from each of them for his pictures.
A picture of the protest and civil rights struggles
But his real passion at the time was pursuing a career as a photojournalist.
His big break came in November of 1964 during a Vietnam War protest in Union Square. A draft-card burning law had just been enacted, and five men planned to break the law in an act of civil disobedience and burn their draft cards at Union Square in New York City. When the demonstrators started to burn the cards, a counter-demonstrator put out the flame with a fire extinguisher. Fernadez was there to catch the water dousing the draft cards. The shot was picked up by the New York Times, and his career as a photojournalist was off.
“It’s always about timing,” Fernandez said. “So many times in my life I’ve been lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.”
From that point on, Fernandez gained acclaim with his photographs of the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam. His black-and-white 35 millimeter camera powerfully portrayed the social confrontations and bubbling civil unrest of the day. Race riots, tense protests, and the American dissent of the 1960s were some of his favorite topics.
MLK’s last year
While he has a wide body of work, Fernandez’s hallmark came from 1968 when he photographed for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It would be the last year of King’s life.
Fernandez became closely acquainted with King’s family, and was given a tremendous amount of access.
One of the most famous photographs ever taken of King was on April 15, 1967 outside the United Nations. According to Fernandez, King was about to give a critical speech where he was going withdraw his support for President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
It was a difficult decision for King, because Johnson was a supporter of the Civil Rights movement, but King could no longer support him because of the Vietnam War.
“He considered it to be a racist war,” Fernandez said of King.
That day, a famous shot of King was taken just moments before his speech. He is seated leaning on his left elbow, with contemplative and pensive look befitting of the speech that he was about to give to more than 500,000 people.
Fernandez said that he remembers crawling on his knees through the crowd to snap the photograph.
Other photographs of King include him in his home with his wife, Coretta Scott King, in front of a portrait of Gandhi; and King marching against the Vietnam War. There are also potent photographs of the crowd outside the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis just after King’s assassination, as well as at his funeral.
An educator
Over the past three decades, Fernandez has become one of the nation’s leading photography teachers. He has taught photography at the New School for Social Research and the Parsons School of Design in New York and received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The photography exhibit of the Hoboken shipyard workers by Fernandez at the Hoboken Historical Museum at 1301 Hudson St. will be up through Nov. 6. For more information, visit www.hobokenmuseum.org.
Fernandez also runs The Almanac Gallery of Photography at 1252 Garden St. (at the corner of 13th Street). The Hoboken Almanac (www.hobokenalmanac.com) also is an online sourcebook dedicated to the advancement and development of photography. According to Fernandez, it is a vehicle through which to inform, entertain, and promote the traditional and progressive techniques and craft of the medium.
Tom Jennemann can be reached at tjennemann@hudsonreporter.com.