Bill Shore’s Letters

Museum News Contribution: The Power to Bear Witness

Originally published: April 2005

Originally published in the American Association of Museum's Museum News newsletter.

For those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Pittsburgh, one-time home of philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, the city's most prominent museum was not just part of the community but rather the heart of the community. Just 10 minutes from my house and a short drive beyond the ever fiery, soot-belching mills of U.S. Steel, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History sat like a fortress of intellect and inspiration in a town otherwise known for its industrial brawn. We were brought up to believe that the Carnegie Museums were our town's greatest treasure. For a first-generation American lower-middle class family like ours, that never once took a vacation or spent a night away from home, a trip there was the equivalent of a transatlantic journey, time travel, and a week in Disneyland all in one.

Built in 1895 and home to one of the world's most spectacular collections of dinosaur fossils and skeletons, the museum was a place our parents took my sister and me quite regularly. Maybe the frequency of our pilgrimages was due to the museum's physical connection to the Carnegie Library, to which we made a weekly visit in this era before chain bookstores graced every neighborhood and mall. Maybe it was because our parents thought the setting improved the odds of our being quiet for a few hours. Mostly I think it was because our fascination with the exhibits never wore off.

I can still remember how my shoes slapped and echoed in the dark corridors and how I would circle the Triceratops or Diplodocus from every angle and direction, how my curiosity was piqued, almost unbearably, by those small wooden signs that blocked a corridor with the words "Museum staff only," and how my dad patiently moved us along from one exhibition room to the next. Mostly what I remember is how my imagination simply ran wild whether I was in the Dinosaur Hall or studying the Egyptian artifacts or the American Indian weavings and arrowheads, trying to picture all of the inanimate objects alive, on their own turf, in places that must have been very different than Pittsburgh. I remember what such youthful imagination felt like: its rush, colors, energy, and promise.

So a love of museums and the possibilities of imagination were instilled in me at an age so early as to be almost genetic. It would have been fair to assume that it would manifest itself in an appreciation of art, aesthetics, and culture. But to my surprise, its greatest legacy has been how directly it related to and furthered the career I chose: fighting for social change, first through government service and for more than two decades through the entrepreneurial nonprofit efforts of an organization I founded called Share Our Strength.

We tend to think of museums as places that showcase art, preserve artifacts, and put the past on display. We entrust them with our most beautiful painting and pottery, with models of buildings, with treaties and manuscripts. Civilizations' great accomplishments await us there. But there is another role that museums play, perhaps not overtly and therefore sometimes overlooked, but every bit as powerfully and effectively. They are agents of social change, not only its chronicler but also its incubator.

That's right, social change, broadly defined, whether focused on the environment, education, the oppressed, or the dispossessed. Typically social change is pigeonholed as the province of the politician, of protestors, of the editorial page, of advocates with strident voices demanding reform. But it can also be fueled from the most unexpected places.

Museums, as institutions, have traditionally been seen as just the opposite of partisan political advocates: quiet, staid, dignified. They are often places that encourage study, contemplation, perhaps meditation. But to stop there sells museums short. It is not just because art and history, science, and nature stir our deepest emotions and most basic instincts: desire, despair, outrage, curiosity, and even courage. It is that museums make you want to make a difference. They inspire us by showing what others have done, memorializing it and making it worthy, and leave us both tempted and empowered to emulate it. Their very purpose is to compel us to bear witness, whether to beauty, history, pain, progress, tragedy, or glory. And bearing witness is always the first and most essential prerequisite for changing society's most grievous conditions, for righting injustice, for reaching out to those in need. Bearing witness is where it all begins and no institution can do so in ways that compare with the permanence and majesty of a museum.

I've been stunned by just how many museum exhibitions in recent years have had an initially unexpected but ultimately direct connection to the work of Share Our Strength, the anti-hunger and anti-poverty organization I established around the time of the 1984 Ethiopian famine. Sometimes I seek out such exhibitions, more often they seem to find me, or at least that's true of the lessons they hold, so long as I am open to absorbing them. I've made it a practice always to report back to my colleagues on what I saw and learned. Let me share three brief examples that underscore the powerful focus museums can bring to social advocacy:

In October 1996 I visited the Jewish Museum in New York and spent the afternoon looking at some rare old pictures in an exhibition titled "The Illegal Camera"; a series of photographs more than half a century old depicting what came to be known as The Hunger Winter."

On May 10, 1940, German troops entered and began a long occupation of the previously neutral Netherlands. Over the next five years the Netherlands lost more of its Jewish population than any other Western European country. At the war's end only 27,000 Jews had survived from a pre-occupation population of 140,000. German Civil Law was imposed, restricting photographers from shooting or publishing any unapproved subject.

An underground resistance developed. By working from secret vantage points or hiding their cameras in coats and bags, Dutch photographers were able to document, albeit in oddly tilted and blurred photos, the tragic developments in their country. One of the most tragic came in 1945, during one of the coldest winters on record. The shortage of food resulting from the German occupation, strikes, and evacuations brought severe starvation and death, especially in the large cities like Amsterdam. The underground photographers not only sought to record their images for posterity but courted even greater danger by smuggling them to England to convince the Dutch government-in-exile and Allied forces to authorize food drops to alleviate the suffering.

The black-and-white images themselves, of a boy with bony legs sticking out from his nightshirt, six emaciated bodies awaiting burial, a woman struggling to raise a crust of bread to her mouth, are horrible and sad. But what we see in them is not nearly as remarkable as what we don't see, just inches from the lens: the photographers themselves who accepted the gravest possible risks to their lives and their families to tell the world of hunger. They had no money, no weapons, no legal right to conduct their work. But they had the power to bear witness, as do we all. And they had the courage to use it.

Whether we are rich or poor, black or white, educated or unskilled, each of us has at least the strength to do one personal but profound thing: bear witness to a common vision of what decency and humanity can mean. The Dutch photographers' pictures show what hunger looked like half a century ago, under extraordinary, unprecedented circumstances. But if you look carefully, indeed if you look beyond them, you can see straight through to what a courageous heart could achieve then, now and ever.

In June 2001, I toured the Jacob Lawrence exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Lawrence is one of the epic storytellers of American history and his stories are always about a journey. The show included 200 paintings in all, but what captured my imagination were the 60 panels of the Migration series, through which Lawrence conveys the struggle and strife of the massive African-American population shift from rural south to industrial north.

Each of the 60 panels is a straight-forward depiction of a distinct element of the migration: the lines and luggage at the train stations, crops left to dry and spoil under the southern sun, blacks at a polling place voting for the first time. Lawrence paints in bright, bold primary colors and simple geometric shapes. The paintings are accompanied by a simple narrative that Lawrence wrote in advance using such statements as "They were very poor" and "The trains were packed continually with migrants."

At first the paintings seem almost childlike. For example, panel number 10 is of a man and woman sitting at a brown table that is bare except for an empty bowl and plate. They sit motionless, hands hanging at their side, and it's as if they had so little to eat that it was gone before the painter could capture them eating it. Or number 58, which depicts three girls standing at a huge blue blackboard in simple dresses of yellow, ochre, and pale blue. The right arm of each stretches to write a numeral with white chalk, each one higher than the next. When the 60 panels are viewed as a whole, the paintings are not childlike, but their starkness and strength makes them powerful enough for a child to understand.

Viewed as a whole, patterns emerge. In most of the paintings the migrants have their backs to us, as they stand facing the train station, or the polling booth, or a judge in court. We rarely see their faces and almost never see their eyes. The business of seeing is our job, a task that has been assigned to us. But it was Lawrence's job to make us see. This is one consequence of an act of conscience: it makes us see, feel, be aware. It reverberates through time and reminds us of our own responsibilities.

The brilliance of these paintings is that Lawrence's panels do not only point toward the past. One hundred years later the struggles of great migrations are still being waged around us every day: the 2 million Afghans who have crossed into Pakistan's refugee camps, the Sudanese fleeing civil war, even the Ethiopians walking hours a day for water.

Jacob Lawrence used his paintbrush to swear us in as witnesses. His will was that we should see. His was not the work of protest marches or hunger strikes, not the business of getting arrested or standing in front of tanks. His work took place more quietly, in a studio filled with paper and wood and jars of paint. His contribution came not in a celebrated moment that captured the world's attention, but with diligence and discipline over the course of almost 70 years.

Lawrence asks us to not only to see but also to move with the migration, to follow it, to be part of it. It's as if he's issued a challenge of sorts, not to be complacent, to look around the next corner, to search for the great tides of history and to know them, and to know ourselves.

Late in 2003 I read about an exhibition of pictures taken by Brazilian photojournalist Sebastiao Salgado, as part of a campaign called The End of Polio. Salgado has traveled the globe for 30 years photographing oppressed workers, refugees, and disaster victims. For these pictures he traveled to India, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, and Congo to tell the polio eradication story. The African backdrops look like places I've been. The dusty road and rubble of brick are familiar. So are the gaunt, deliberate people, and the paradox of reticence and curiosity one sees in their dark eyes.

When I saw the story in the newspaper I knew I needed to see the photographs for myself. The idea of ending a disease, eradicating it forever, is a powerful one, inspiring but seemingly impossible, not unlike our goal for hunger. As with polio, we know the solution to hunger, but given the enormity of the task, and the complex obstacles that block the path, there is a question as to whether we have the will, and the long-term vision to sustain it.

About half of Salgado's 38 photos depict children in various settings receiving a few drops of oral vaccine. In each picture a small child is held in the tight grip of an adult, a dropper poised over his or her mouth by a health worker. The children are as fearful as if they are facing a long hypodermic needle. Given the unfamiliarity of the procedure, the parents are, too. In one of the pictures, the mother's face twists in a painful, sympathetic grimace, even though her child is only receiving two drops of liquid from a plastic dropper. Again, certain patterns emerge from the pictures. In many of the photos, there are at least four or five adults surrounding the child. They are there for support, or to hold down arms and legs if necessary, or simply to satisfy their curiosity about such an unusual event. Though they have scant knowledge of the medicine and how it works, there is an innate understanding of the enormous power dripping off of the tip of each plastic syringe. At some level they have gathered out of awe and respect for that unknowable power that ensures life will triumph over the crippling pain and death they have otherwise always known. This is liquid magic. That is what they see being unleashed with each squeeze of the tube's rubber cap.

Salgado's goal was to distinguish his photos from the traditional documentary imagery that dramatizes despair and provokes outrage. He wanted to emphasize the solutions and show that the eradication of polio is within grasp. Exhibiting the photos was meant to encourage more participation, to generate the energy and commitment for the final push to raise the $275 million needed to complete the campaign.

The photos in the rest of the exhibition convey just how enormous is the task and how many unimaginable obstacles must be overcome. They also document the ingenuity brought to bear in some of the far reaches of our planet where it might be least expected.

One picture is of a checkpoint set up on the Congo River where every passing canoe is checked for a child under five. On National Immunization Days in India, no train may leave the station until every child has shown proof of vaccination. In Somalia, the Juba River is the border between two clans, neither of which will accept the vaccine except from their own health workers, and so the refrigerated boxes must be handed off from one group on a raft, to another on shore. For the children of nomads, following their camels through Somalia, one finger is marked by ink so other health workers will know they received the vaccine.

Polio is highly infectious. In 1988, 350,000 children around the world were paralyzed by polio, a disease the world has long been able to prevent. Now there are only 10 polio-endemic countries and there were just 480 cases in 2001. International health groups vaccinated more than 575 million children last year. If just one child slips between the cracks, just one child on either of two vast continents, it could mean the difference between the ongoing agony of the disease and a world in which it no longer exists except in laboratory test tubes, and photographs.

It turns out that the next stop for these pictures -- still touring two years after I first read about them -- is Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where they will be up through May 15.

The power of documentary photographs like these is that they do more than make us think. They make us complicit. Once we've seen the same thing the photographer has seen we are left with a profound choice: do something or do nothing. We can't look for guidance from anyone other than ourselves. The pictures are no longer just objects on the walls. They are within us and we carry them wherever we go. What we see becomes a part of us, imprinted on a neuron as surely as if injected into a vein. What is witnessed can't be erased or taken back. And when an image we've taken in clashes with our sense of who we are, who we want to be, whether as individuals or society as a whole, it's our conscience that makes itself heard. It is for this reason that museums and their exhibitions can have such an enormous impact on awakening consciences to demand social change.

That's why visits to museums should not be relegated only to holidays or weekends. To me they are an essential part of the workday. Years ago I instituted a policy at Share Our Strength that anyone can go to a museum at any time, without taking leave or time off, so long as they share what they saw or learned with the rest of the staff.

More often than not failures in achievement, in problem solving, or in progress are not due to failures of resources, or ability, planning, or discipline but rather to failures of imagination. The greatest advances in human rights, civil rights, science, art, and education, whether by Einstein or Jonas Salk, Mandela or Martha Graham, came from leaps of imagination, an ability to see the possibilities that others simply couldn't visualize or even conceptualize. Museums do more than preserve such acts of imagination, they fuel them. And by bearing witness, and enabling us to bear witness, they hold the keys to powerful social change.

Bill Shore is founder and executive director of Share Our Strength, the nation's leading anti-hunger, anti-poverty organization. In 1997 he launched Community Wealth Venture, Inc. to provide counsel to corporations, foundations, and nonprofit organizations striving to create community wealth. He has authored three books; the most recent, The Light of Conscience, explores how acts of conscience can change the world.

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