Howard Bingham is chatting easily through his power lunch, explaining between mouthfuls how he goes about snagging the photos that have eluded some of his peers. He is not at Morton's, enjoying an icy martini as he destroys a filet mignon and Caesar salad. Nor is he perched on a leather booth at Maple Drive, noshing on homemade turkey sausages washed down with an interesting little Chardonnay.
Instead, he is hurtling south on the Harbor Freeway--well above the posted speed limit--crunching on a taquito swimming in a lethal salsa verde and taking gulps of Snapple from a bottle clenched between his knees. Not a drop spills on his handmade ostrich-skin cowboy boots, which, despite their beat-up appearance, cost more than many middle managers make in a week.
That lunch says a lot about how Bingham sees himself and his work. He is a homeboy who has done well and who is still firmly attached to his home in southeast Los Angeles. Although he has documented the glamorous and famous, Bingham's eye wanders to the undocumented parts of the city, to the people who often serve lunch rather than "do" it.
For more than 35 years, he has captured African American life here, doing his work with an unobtrusiveness that has become his trademark. "I can't recall exactly when I met him," former Mayor Tom Bradley says with a shrug, "he was just there. . . ."
His face may seem naggingly familiar, his name may or may not register, but Bingham's photographs garner instant recognition: an elegantly glowering Huey P. Newton, the former (and very late) chairman of the Black Panther Party, surrounded by party faithful; black Angelenos shouting at tense, weapon-brandishing LAPD officers; Muhammad Ali, glistening with sweat, after championship bouts in Miami, Zaire, Manila; Bill Cosby mugging for his Kodak ads; Robert Redford on his illuminated steed as the Electric Horseman.
Bingham's photo files are too disorganized to be called archives. Still, as drawer upon drawer of his filing cabinet opens, pieces of forgotten local history come forward.
Here is former Peace Corps Director Sargent Shriver (father of Maria, father-in-law of Conan the Republican) cutting the ribbon that opened the Watts Family Health Center on Compton and 103rd during the Watts Festival, once an annual cultural celebration. In his summer suit and boutonniere, Shriver looks like a benevolent colonial come, from the mother country, to inspect the natives.
Here are Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis Jr. and James Brown, all young and slim and frightfully earnest, sharing a dais at a Hollywood fund-raiser for Mississippi Freedom Riders. And a dashiki-clad Maulana Karenga, book-ended by look-alike security guards, addressing mourners at the Coliseum in April, 1968, after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
And, a year or so later, an almost willowy former opera student named Coretta Scott King in solo concert at Second Baptist Church. Budd Schulberg instructing his proteges at the Watts Writers' Workshop. The eerily pristine Watts Towers, without scaffolding. Malcolm X, as agog as any other fan, leaning back to snap a photo of Muhammad Ali at a Miami lunch counter.
Although he has lived here nearly all of his life, Bingham was born in Jackson, Miss., in 1939, the first of seven children. His parents, the Rev. Willie E. Bingham Jr. and Willie Emmaline Bingham, sought to escape the suffocating weight of segregation and struck out for a new beginning in the West.
The family settled near 49th and Hooper but soon moved out to Imperial Highway, a bucolic place where young Howard and his friends could finish their chores and fish in a nearby canal surrounded by tall grass meadows. "We lived one block east of Central, right on the canal--we used to catch crayfish down there," Bingham says. "The canal's still there, but it's all concrete now."
The neighborhood contained a little bit of every ethnicity and was a world unto itself. "There was a mom-and-pop store run by a Mexican couple on the corner; we had an account there," Bingham recalls. "And on the next corner was a drive-in."
The Bingham children rode the Red Car to San Pedro, Long Beach and Downtown. "We had a bus line--the Southern California Transportation Company--that would take you anywhere. You could go to Compton or Huntington Park for a dime."
Their parents didn't worry, partly because they were quite clear on the consequences of "acting out"--the Rev. Bingham was a strict disciplinarian--and partly because the streets were safe.
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Bingham attended Compton public schools, graduating in Centennial High's second class in 1956. Several classmates went on to successful athletic careers: Roy White with the Yankees, Bobby Thompson as a New York Giant, Reggie Smith with the Dodgers and Charlie Dumas as a world-class high-jumper.
