Still, Pirkle Jones is unabashedly political, and has sought to have an impact in his own time, never more overtly than in his Black Panthers series of 1968. As before, he wasn’t the one to initiate it. This time his wife, with whom he’d collaborated previously on a portrait of a dying California town, befriended Kathleen Cleaver through their mutual involvement in the Peace and Freedom Party. "Ruth was going to Oakland to photograph a Panthers meeting," he recalls. "She wanted me to drive her. I asked if I could take my camera." Soon they were both deeply involved, not only photographing for a promised exhibition at San Francisco’s de Young Museum but also providing stacks of prints for the Panthers’ newspaper and political posters. "We will admit that we had positive feelings about the Panthers," Jones says. "That happens in photography. You take a stand." The position they took was controversial, unpopular with many people they knew. "Ansel didn’t like the idea. At one time he called Ruth and said, ‘You’d better not be with the Panthers; you’re going to be raped,’" Jones says. Moreover, cancellation of the show was threatened by museum trustees anxious about public reaction. Nobody, including Jones, expected it would draw 100,000 enthusiastic visitors.

The photography that Jones has done in the following quarter-century—before a stroke in the late ’90s left him without the strength to work independently—does not obviously connect to this politically charged series, for which he’s still most famous. "I think people are at a loss to identify what I do," he admits. "Many photographers are working toward a style. But there are so many things that interest me."

For several years, he photographed the notorious Gate 5 community in Sausalito, where a gathering of self-proclaimed drop-outs lived on houseboats, a group with whom Jones became increasingly involved in the early ’70s. "I was probably on the edge of staying there," he says in retrospect, "but I figured there was no future." Instead Jones spent his final productive years exploring the natural world surrounding his simple glass-and-redwood home, a dwelling hidden away in dense protected forest. While this late work appears to be a return to his pictorialist roots, he doesn’t view it that way. "I didn’t just want to do a pretty picture," he says. "I was trying to find my own place in nature. I was looking for myself."

Taken with a head emptied of pre-conceived ideas, almost in a trance, these mossy and marshy self-portraits reflect a photographic eye observant of broad patterns and specific details, of land and life. "I’ve always thought of my career as a bridge between the classic photography of Ansel Adams and the documentary work of Dorothea Lange," he says. Naturally, a bridge can be crossed both ways. In his house overlooking a trickling river, receiving visitors from around the world, Jones keeps both paths open to new generations of adventurous photographers.

Jonathon Keats is the art critic for San Francisco magazine.

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