Willie Middlebrook dies; photographer documented African American life
Willie Robert Middlebrook, a photographer who sought to enlarge public perceptions of the African American community through painterly depictions of its people and places, died Saturday at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. He was 54.
The cause was complications of a stroke suffered last month, said his daughter, Jessica Middlebrook.
Middlebrook's death came just a week after the unveiling at the new Expo/Crenshaw Metro station of one of his largest public installations, a series of 24 mosaic panels based on his photographs. He was known for what he called photographic paintings, well-composed photos that he made more evocative by brushing the negatives with developing fluid, a method later replaced by digital enhancement.
The result was portraits full of urban energy, with faces peering "from beneath surfaces that suggest erosion, graffiti, peeling billboards and, ultimately, a symbolic struggle for identity," the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1995.
Middlebrook often used self-portraits to explore conflicting ideas about identity, a theme that he could not escape as a heavy-set, 6-foot-tall black man who wore his hair in dreadlocks and turned heads whenever he entered a room.
"I'm a black man in America — a large, dark, black man with dreads — and I've never robbed, beaten or stolen," Middlebrook, twice awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, told The Times several years ago. "I've never been to jail, and if you put drugs in front of me I probably wouldn't know what to do with them. And I know a lot of black folk like me. These are the kinds of images that need to be seen."
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/11/local/la-me-willie-middlebrook-20120511