In November 2016, FBS interviewed documentary photographer Sue Ross in Atlanta, GA. She has been the unofficial city photographer for five administrations. She talked to me about the origins of this work and growing up during the Civil Rights Movement in the heart of the Atlanta University center. While we have made some choices that help transfer speech to writing, the following is a transcription of Ms. Ross’s words with few editorial interventions. Be sure to check out some of her photographs at the bottom of the piece.


I am a documentary photographer. I am not a commercial photographer. I have done photography because I loved to do it.

Photography is a side thing. I do some of it for the city because we didn’t have a city photographer position for many, many years. So I got to do photography for the different administrations. I’ve worked for all five black administrations in Atlanta.

Some of it just grip and grim, when we have a press conference, you know that sort of thing. Others are when we have to document an event. So like Nelson Mandela’s visit. He was here for a week. And doing a lot with the national black arts festival, as well as some of the cultural institutions in town like the Hammonds House, and the Atlanta Jazz Festival. I’ve done a lot of documentation of the cultural events in Atlanta over the last thirty years.

For Andy’s administration it wasn’t a formal thing of doing pictures because I always had another job. Photography wasn’t a paid job. My job for his administration and for Maynard’s term was working with the Minority Business Program for the city.

When Bill Campbell was mayor, I had moved over to the Cultural Affairs Office doing grant proposals and things like that but I also took pictures at events. After somebody messed up the pictures with Mother Theresa’s visit—they cut off the heads or something like that—he went ballistic. He said, “Go get Sue Ross!”

I didn’t want to do photography full time for the city. My photography is what I do to relax from the city. But in Campbell’s administration I ended up doing work in the Communication Office so I did media stuff there—press releases, speech writing, and stuff like that but I also did the photographs. I was the unofficial city photographer at that point in time. But I still had another job.

Work
I got meet people I wouldn’t have met. I got to go work with projects I might not have gotten to otherwise. I have always been involved.

The work that I do at city hall is very meaningful because it is the place where I grew up and we got to make change on a local level. You don’t really get to see the results of your work when you do it on a national level. You get to pass policies and all that but on a local level you can really see that what you do effects people’s lives. And for the work that I did most of the time working with Minority Businesses you can actually see the companies grow. Some grow and some crash but more grow than crash.

In that respect I am a child of Maynard Jackson because he started the Minority Business Program in the southeastern United States. He refused to build the airport without having minority business participation. And he held the building of the airport hostage until the companies agreed to it. It was cutting edge.

I loved the job that I got paid for and I loved doing photography. It balances out.

Origins
I was born in Connecticut but we moved to Atlanta when I was about 6 or 7. My dad was an anthropologist and he was teaching at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. That’s the first place I remember living. He came down here to teach and we’ve been here ever since. I went out to California to go to grad school but other than that I’ve been here in Atlanta. I went to school for government/political science.

I was an intern for Maynard Jackson’s first term when I was in college. I started working in city government when Andy Young became mayor. He had been at the UN and traveled all over the world and met with different world leaders. When he left the UN, they gave him an album with 24 pictures in it. That was all he had to document all the places he had been. So he said, “We’re going to document.” Two or three of us got cameras and just started taking pictures of everything that was going on. It wasn’t anything formal. We all got the same camera; we had Minolta cameras at that time.

I’ve always had cameras. I’ve always been the person who took pictures for our groups. But I considered myself more a documentarian than a photographer.

I’m from an academic background and I did it more to document what we were doing. My parents both taught at Atlanta University. This was an exciting time to grow up in Atlanta. It was the end of segregation. We integrated high schools when I was a kid.

Although I don’t have a lot of photographs from that time, I do have some. Then I had little cameras like instamatics and brownies. I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures. I’ve always had an eye for it.


Legacy
My mother, Edith Ross, was a social worker. She taught at the Atlanta University School of Social Work and she developed the undergraduate program in social work so that kids could start as undergraduates.

When she first came down it was just the two-year graduate program. She developed an intercollegiate undergraduate program between Spelman, Morehouse, Morris Brown, and Clark. And if they went on to AU graduate school they would have already taken some of the classes so they could finish the graduate program in a year.

We had a lot of old family photographs. It helped me remember names. But being in the AU Center at that time was very exciting. You got to meet people who became superstars later. Maya Angelo used to come all the time. Dr. Richard Long used to have Black Studies conferences so you got to meet people like James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, and Sonia Sanchez. At that time, everybody worked at colleges and wrote.

My father was one of the editors of a journal at Atlanta University called Phylon. He taught sociology and anthropology and was very much into the study of culture and people. That was a big influence on myself and on my brother. To whom much is given much is required—you are always required to give back through politics, through volunteer service, through serving on boards, through a variety of things. As you grow, you also improve your community.

My mother’s family is originally from Charleston, SC. After Reconstruction, white people took the land back so they moved to Bridgeport, CT, which is another seaport. They went North early. They were part of the first wave migration. My mother went to school in Bridgeport and there was a fund that sent black kids to college. She didn’t get to go right after she graduated from high school. She went a year or two later.

She went to Talladega and that was transformative. The women that she met there, they were friends for their who lives. It was kind of an extraordinary class. People like Margaret Bush Wilson, who later became the chair of the board of the NAACP. And Eunice Johnson, Johnny Johnson’s wife, started Fashion Fair Cosmetics and the Fashion Fair clothing line. This small college in rural Alabama. Talladega was a very special experience for all of them. They had talents but they were nurtured at Talladega. They were life long friends and they went on to do extraordinary things.

Dr. Horace Mann Bond, Julian Bond’s father wrote a book in which he talks about the screens of opportunity some of us get to go through. For many people the screen may be a fence—it may be a barrier. But then there are some who get to go through those holes and move forward.

The American Missionary Association founded a lot of the colleges in the South. My father’s home church in New Haven, was the church where the Amistad people went when they took over the ship, and they founded a lot of the schools. So there is an expectation that you are going to do better than your parents did and you’re going to excel. My mother went to Talladega, her sister went to Howard and was in one of the nursing school. She became a head nurse at one of the hospitals in DC.

Rest
My mother was very active in a civic organization and they had dinner and house party every month. The Talladega group would go on a cruise once a month. Alvin Ailey would come every year and we would go see them. The opera would come down once a year. Also being at the college there was a lot cultural things going on there. We couldn’t be at the theater downtown so we had a theater group on the campus. That’s the theater group out of which you get Sam Jackson and LaTonya Jackson and Bill Nunn. All of them came up during my time.

During my parents’ time there were prominent actors who came to perform at the campus so you could see plays. My father went to school with Pearl Primus in New York at Columbia and she would come down and teach dance classes at Spelman. Mozel Spriggs was another friend of theirs. You would have all these people coming to do classes at AU because that was our cultural center when I was coming up during segregation.

We didn’t have a lot of money but we had a rich cultural experience. This was happening during the Civil Rights Movement. Andy Young wasn’t the mayor and ambassador he is now. He worked for SCLC and for Dr. King; he was our neighbor. The people in the Civil Rights Movement were the people you lived with. Dr. Bond lived next door so all the SNCC people were always over and Mrs. Bond was always cooking for the young people in SNCC. At Thanksgiving time my mother would have a big dinner for people who didn’t have any place to go. We’d always have three or four African students, various writers and people Toni Cade Bambara and Hoyt Fuller and Richard Long. It was kind of an interdisciplinary gathering. Kind of a salon. My mother would cook a lot of food. She enjoyed doing that.

One of the first photographs I took that was of something other than family and friends, it was when Eleanor Roosevelt came to speak at commencement. She was very old and in a wheel chair. Dr. Bond took me up to meet her and I took her picture. I still have that.

Sue Ross
Atlanta, GA

Photographs by Susan Ross. Copyright. All Rights Reserved. Eleanor Roosevelt at Atlanta University; Nelson and Winnie Mandela and Coretta Scott King in Atlanta; Selfie at Edmund Pettus Bridge; Rosa Parks; Toni Cade Bambara; Andrew Young's generations; and Gladys Knight.