Howard Harawitz at The Grand Gallery

March 2026

The storefront entrance to The Grand Gallery in Oakland’s Jack London Square features a display space having a character somewhat like an amphitheater. And in the current exhibit held by it, the effect is especially apropos as its featured works restage the early 1960’s East Bay of the critical protest period of the Free Speech Movement and more.

At The Grand Gallery

These are classic black-and-white photographs laid out in three sections. The left section powerfully iterates “home” in West Oakland. Its numerous scenes, with framing that isolates as well as crystalizes, sit right on the line between each resident possessing perhaps the only space they have or being possessed by it. We see conditions that poignantly say “Doing Without” in a timeless way, but in the context of the whole show they ask “Why?” We easily reflect on a no-win scenario in which today there are forces that create these conditions and there are forces that simply bulldoze it all away.

In the center section the shots move us from the first group’s private individual spaces into the public space of Berkeley, and they time-stamp all of the other pictures. In classic witness posture, the photographer has selectively recorded the high-energy mixed society of non-violent protesters, its diversity spanning gender, ethnicity, occupation, and class. In these shots, the business of being a protester – from the artifacts to occupying space to the body language – is vivid in no small part due to it being archetypal, showing us much of what we see now 60 years later in the wave of federal pursuit of non-legal immigrants spilling over into civilian grounds.

Harawitz portfolio online at http://harawitz.com.

The third section, at the right, contrasts with the first while also suggesting that the three sections together have, from left to right, a narrative arc. Arguably illustrating no one town or site, they are made up mainly of photos of friendships, perhaps lovers, and perhaps families, showing human bonding and dignity in a milieu far more comfortable –  as if depicting the victorious outcome of the prior strife shown and related efforts to overcome it.

Being outside of most of Harawitz’s work that made him historically important in the journalistic genre, this third group attests to his individual personal sensibility. But as viewers standing virtually in his shoes, we get a vibe from these pictures that is part optimism, and part echo of what our own experiences have done to underline our personally shared humanity. In effect, they show us what is at stake in each of the first two groupings.

Curated from thousands of photographs in Harawitz’s library, this is the first time that these particular pictures have been formed into a singular exhibit – selectivity accomplished  as a partnership between husband and wife, painter Cheryl Gillett.

Broader collections of his work appeared at a 2025 solo show in Albany where they now live. Meanwhile, a comprehensive survey of his pictures is readily available on his website http://harawitz.com.

We leave this show not only looking for more of his work but also with a plan to study two of his most notable contemporaries of the period: Nacio Jan Brown, who documented the anti-war movement and counterculture in the Bay Area for the San Francisco Express Times, and Dennis Stock, known for documenting the California counterculture during the 1960s in his work, California Trip.