This stunning collection of images celebrates the remarkable career of Burnis "Mac" McCloud, Denver's premiere Black photographer between 1950 and 1980. His remarkable photographs, focused on Denver's Five Points community, captured the ordinary lives of African Americans during a period that witnessed the end of Jim Crow segregation and the beginning of the Civil Rights era.
Assembled from more than one hundred thousand negatives that McCloud left behind, this collection introduces his creative work to the world beyond the Mile High City. Author William Wyckoff also tells McCloud's life story, revealing the challenges to and vitality of Denver's Black community. At a time when much of what McCloud photographed is being swept away by gentrification and urban change, this collection of images preserves a time and place important not only for Denver but for all of Black America.
William Wyckoff is a professor emeritus of geography in the Department of Earth Sciences at Montana State University. He is the author of several books, including Riding Shotgun with Norman Wallace: Rephotographing the Arizona Landscape (UNM Press).
"William Wyckoff has done a splendid job of exhuming Mac McCloud and his photographs of everyday life in Denver's now-fading Black neighborhood of Five Points."--Thomas J. Noel, author of Colorado: A Historical Atlas
"William Wyckoff breathes new life into a remarkable collection of images taken by Burnis 'Mac' McCloud during the middle years of the twentieth century, introducing Denver's legendary African American photographer to a new generation of admirers. More important, he uses McCloud's evocative photos of the Five Points neighborhood to transport readers to a time and to a place that today exists only in the pages of this book."--Geoffrey L. Buckley, coeditor of The American Environment Revisited: Environmental Historical Geographies of the United States
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction
Gallery 1. Places Gallery 2. Work Gallery 3. Play Gallery 4. Fame
