Ken Burns on New Bestselling Photography Book “Our America”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Our next guest as one of America’s most important documentary filmmakers, and it turns out that grief is also an influence in his life. He is Ken Burns, who has won every major award for his many series on historical events and figures, as well as on social issues. But his latest work uses the medium of still photography. His new book, “Our America: A Photographic History”, collates images which charts the nation over nearly 200 years. As he now discusses with Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Ken Burns, welcome to the show.

KEN BURNS, AUTHOR AND EDITOR, “OUR AMERICA: A PHOTOGRAPHIC HISTORY” AND FILMMAKER: Thank you, Walter. Happy holidays.

ISAACSON: This is an amazing book. I mean, it’s just a great series of photographs. And it begins with your father. Tell me about your father’s influence on it.

BURNS: Yes, it’s huge. It’s dedicated to him. He was a cultural anthropologist but an amateur photographer. And my very first memory, two and a half, three years old, was sort of snaking myself through the stud walls of a soon to be completed darkroom that he was building in our basement at a track house in a development in Newark, Delaware where he was the only anthropologist in the entire state. And then a second later, the next memory is of sitting in his strong left arm as his right arms manipulated the tongs and the smells and the eerie light, and watched that magic. Still, to me, magic of a blank sheet of paper suddenly becoming an image. And, you know, I was hooked. And still image is still, as a filmmaker, the building block, the DNA of what we do.

ISAACSON: You talk about the influence of your father. But, of course, your mother was a great influence in your life. And in, some ways, part of your soul. Tell me about that.

BURNS: Yes, I don’t think we’d be talking, Walter. I don’t think we’d know each other if she hadn’t lived and died. She got cancer very, very early in my life, two or three years old. It was something that my younger brother Rick and I saw and witnessed. It was devastating. We didn’t have a childhood. She died just a few months short of my 12th birthday, when I was 11. A very heroic struggle. One of the most brave human beings I’ve ever met. And so, a good deal of what I do for a living, as my late father-in-law said to me when I said I couldn’t remember the day that she died. It was always approaching. It was always receding. He said, well, I bet you blew out your candles on your birthday cake as a kid wishing she’d come back. I said, yes. How did you know? And he goes, look what you do for a living. I said, excuse me? He said, you wake the dead. You make Abraham Lincoln and Louis Armstrong come alive. Who do you think you’re really going, trying to wake up? And of course, it’s her. And so, she is ever-present in my life. In — there is not a day — and as you know, the half-life of grief is endless. And yet, what we do with it, the difficulties and the traumas, as we negotiate — art is the negotiation of the fact that none of us get out of here alive. And so, I think my own work has been, in a way, a response to that trauma. And a way to make lemonade out of the lemons I was handed as a little boy.

ISAACSON: One of your other inspirations and mentors was Jerome Liebling, right? And I think it’s the cover of the book —

BURNS: Yes.

ISAACSON: — this wonderful picture on the cover. Tell me about him and why you chose this as the cover picture.

BURNS: Yes, so, when I watched my dad cry after my mom died when I was 12, and he’d never cried before. Not when she was sick, not when she died, not at the very sad funeral. But he cried at an old movie that he let me stay up and watched. And I thought, I’m going to be a filmmaker. I’m going to be a filmmaker. I’m going to be, you know, Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford or Howard Hawks. But I ended up going to Hampshire College, a new — brand-new, experimental college in Amherst, Massachusetts. And fell under the sway of two social documentaries still photographers, Elaine Mayes and Jerome Liebling, her senior. And he just gave me everything. He rearranged my molecules. He would say, go see, do, be, engage in all of these things. And, you know, I graduated in ’75, he died in 2011 and there wasn’t a moment when he wasn’t my mentor still to that day. And even now, he feels very much a part of my life. And so, there was no other photograph but his own to grace the cover which is – – I was asked by someone in an interview, recently, what’s the most important person — you know, photograph in the book? And I said, oh, please, maybe it’s the 1865 photograph of Abraham Lincoln. The last photograph, where he is holding a glass, as you just see the whole history of us in him. And I said, but equally important is this little kid on a street corner in New York City in 1949 with his improbable hockey shirt. His untied, you know, shoes, the shorts, a kind of wary thing, a little fedora on his head. He’s holding his coat in front of a big sweeping arch of a bumper, a wheel hub of an old car from 1940s. And to me, if the book exists in a space, it’s in the very minimal space between Abraham Lincoln and this kid, and the huge space between it. And it is a testament to the extraordinary vision and I of Jerome Liebling that I am also here.

ISAACSON: Your documentaries deal, fundamentally, at times, with race. Whether it’s a civil war or jazz or baseball. And this book does the same, from the cover photo to the very end. Tell me about why race is such an important part of the narratives.

BURNS: You know, I don’t know where to begin. I can count on the fingers of one hand and still have a couple fingers left. The films that I’ve done, out of the 40 or so that have been on PBS, that don’t deal with race. Because you cannot do a deep and responsible dive into American history without running up against this fundamental contradiction. We know exactly where we were born and when. And we know what our catechism is. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The guy who wrote that owned hundreds of human beings and his lifetime. And so, we have, in our own collective memory, a group of people who have had the peculiar experience of being unfree in a free land. And that has been the source of so much pain and so much tragedy in the history. And it’s also been the source of so much joy and so much positive investment. You can just — you know, Louis Armstrong alone helps to balance the scales of injustice with his extraordinary art. But you’ve got — it’s all there in front of us. So, you can’t help but do it — I mean, the main thing about us, Walter, is freedom, you know. Like, and the tension in that, like, what I want, personal freedom versus collective freedom, what we need. And they’re often at loggerheads. And I think the book, without consciously or didactically or pedagogical saying it, you see that dynamic in it. You see the majesty of our beautiful continent that we inherited. You see the tragedy of the dispossession of the native peoples. You see all of those tensions. But underlying so many is what historians — my goodness, I’m an amateur, would call our original sin. Which is the original sin of tolerating chattel slavery just as we are proclaiming to the world a new form of government that was going to be based on the principles of the enlightenment and the equality of all human beings.

ISAACSON: You titled the book, “Our America”. And the pictures show the great diversity of our America. But the title also implies that there are things that we share.

BURNS: Yes.

ISAACSON: Tell me what that — you’re trying to show that we share.

BURNS: Well, I think, you know, Walter, everybody’s talking about, oh, we can’t teach our kids the sad stuff. We can’t do this. We can’t do that. We can’t talk about this. I mean — and I just realized, these are the hallmarks of a tilt towards a kind of authoritarianism in which you suddenly take, you know, the nationalist approach which is, you know, all human beings do horrible things, you know. Every culture everywhere, you know. It’s a litany. What you want to do is say, let’s own it all. The hallmark of a great country is to embrace its diversity. And understand that in the case of the human resource of it, that diversity has been a strength. As Pete Hamill said, that’s an alloy, much stronger than its constituent parts. And at the same time, we can know that the ongoing struggle for freedom has always been complicated and is ongoing. And the fragility of that republic, that Franklin fought that — you know, would be — you, know if you can keep it, it goes along for 250 years, almost. And yet, now, the things we take for granted through the first crisis, the civil war, the depression, the second world war, you know, of free and fair elections, of the peaceful transfer of power. Of an independent judiciary now all seem, kind of, up for grabs. And we, kind of, can sense the tenuousness. You know, we’ve been through this stuff before. We’ll go through it again. We just have to periodically reremind ourselves of that complexity. And let’s celebrate that complexity. As I say in the introduction, it’s our America in an attempt to gather the sense of us in the U.S. But it’s also my America, right? It’s just my attempt to say, this is what I’ve learned. Every 50 state is represented here. Nearly every project we’ve ever worked on is there but not didactically. There are people playing, you know, having a tug of war in downtown in Putney, if you can call it downtown, Putney, Vermont. There’s a beautiful gal for my little village in New Hampshire. There’s girls dancing on the beach it what must have been risque, but it seems to have completely covering their body, swimsuits in Jamestown, Rhode Island. You know, there is a kid with — you know, a sick shooter toy, you know, gun playing. There are native peoples. There’s celebration and dance and music and art and life. But there’s all the other things that we are also too. And you don’t stay great if you think you’re going to paint a sanitized Madison Avenue version of yourself. It just — it ain’t going to happen. So, our history is checkered, but there is no one on Earth whose history is checkered. Just beware. The people who sell you that Madison Avenue, tree Cooley (ph), white picket fence, morning in America have missed the story of us, which has been my beat. And this is just another form of exploring it.

ISAACSON: I was struck by the picture of the fuji athletic club.

BURNS: Yes, yes.

ISAACSON: And it was not just an interesting picture, this is a case where I went to the back and read all about it. So, sometimes it helps to know the back story too.

BURNS: Yes, well, this is — this is what I think is that, you know, it really requires two passes. One, let the photograph work on you. And then you can keep your fingers and go back and forth because in the case of that, the late 19th century photograph of a Japanese-American baseball team in the United States. Well, you know, this is part of the adoption of our national pastime. What you don’t know is that the guy in the lower right-hand corner is a man named Chiura Obata (ph). Chiura Obata (ph) will become a really well- respected painter. But he will also be, at the beginning of the second world war, interned in an internment camp and will have to struggle as an artist. So, this film, you know, straddles our baseball series, and it straddles our film on the national parks, and it straddles other things that have dealt — World War II that have dealt with Japanese internment. But it becomes a great champion of the national parks. And then uses the strengths of the redwoods and the sequoias to permit him to figure out how to negotiate the indignity of him, an American citizen, having to be interned for the duration of the war in one of the most, you know, scandalous things that we’ve done in our long, and a time sorted, history.

ISAACSON: I think the only person who appears twice in the book is Abraham Lincoln. First, the amazing picture of him near the end of his life. And then him as the Lincoln memorial. And both of those pictures talk about what you talk about, the struggle for freedom.

BURNS: That’s right.

ISAACSON: The march to freedom, democracy, if we can keep it.

BURNS: If we can keep it. Yes, that’s right. And you know, there’s another one, just a few pages after that picture, that beautiful picture in early ’65. The last picture, port sitting — portrait of him. It’s so beautiful and so famous, and everything is etched. Everything we’ve been through and everything we’re going to go through is etched in his face.

ISAACSON: The story of America seems — and the fight for freedom all seems etched in Lincoln’s face in that photograph.

BURNS: It’s all there. And he able to —

ISAACSON: It’s there.

BURNS: — he’s able to capture us in, as we know, the best language that any president has used. He’s also, a few pages, later, they’re burying him in Springfield, Illinois in a soft spring rain. Because sometimes, when you’re at the crux of these American questions, violence of then comes. And violence is a byproduct. But there he, enshrined in the most beautiful of all memorials of all-time, the Lincoln Memorial. And he’s — you are up behind him and he is listening because what’s happening — and you don’t know this, it just says Washington, D.C., 1963. It doesn’t say August 28, 1963. Somebody said, oh, that’s Dr. King’s March on Washington. No, you can find that in the back matter. You’re looking at Lincoln watching something take place over his shoulder. You’re with him still. He lives still in the hearts of all of us, as the dedication says, and the nation that he saved. And out there is Dr. King, reupping, you know. If Jefferson is the 1.0 and the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s total body of action is the 2.0, then King is saying the 3.0. He’s coming to collect the promissory note but he’s also got a positive vision of where we can go. And it fits and starts, we’ve gone there. We’ve taken steps backwards. We, sort of, feel things retrenching now. But, you know, we’ll push forward. And I hope that the book is seen as not dark, but is hopeful in that way.

ISAACSON: Another part of the march and fight for freedom in America and the struggles has been for women. And there’s a juxtaposition of pictures on the book, or two pictures in the book that struck me. One is, I think, the Jamestown Beach. The girls dancing on the beach.

BURNS: Dancing.

ISAACSON: And then a very iconic photograph of Susan B. Anthony.

BURNS: Yes.

ISAACSON: Tell me how those play off each other.

BURNS: I love the severity of Susan B. Anthony. She is the, sort of, walking face of the movement, that she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, sort of, started back in 1848, with the Seneca Falls Convention. And their language is what will eventually, long after their deaths — 15 years after the deaths are so, will be enshrined as the amendment giving women the right to vote. 144 years, Walter, after the Declaration of Independence, more than half of our population finally gets partially some rights in it. But also, we have to remember there’s the irony of a black slave, enslaved woman, holding a white baby. You would trust your most precious thing, but you can’t extend to those people who take care of your most precious thing anything other than, you know, enslavement. That’s where the contradiction goes.

ISAACSON: Early in the book, you have the photograph of the U.S. Capitol. It’s 1846, it says. Did you think of ending the book with a picture of the capital under siege in 2021, or would that have somehow warped what you were trying to say in the book?

BURNS: I think it would have warped in every sense of that word, Walter. I mean, as I said, you know, we — we’re in the history business, and it means that we sort of treat the near present with a kind of impressionistic arm’s length. We wouldn’t want to go up to the very present because it then becomes a priori didactic and binary. And what you want to do is begin to understand that his, you know, world we live, both the media, culture, good, bad, red state, blue state or the computer world that dominates everything, whether ware of not of one or a zero, isn’t actually what anything that human life is about. It cannot produce a Leonardo da Vinci. It cannot produce a Benjamin Franklin or a George Washington or, you know, a Ruby Bridges or, you know, Anna Till’s mom, you know. It just — it’s — there’s something else going on. And I want to know about that something else. And I don’t want to be distracted by that. In a book like this, it’s our story. And let’s — I want to keep as many of our brothers and sisters engaged in this story as possible.

ISAACSON: Ken Burns, thank you for joining us.

BURNS: Thank you.