A Good Eye: Capturing Joy

A Documentary by Floyd Webb | Currently in Production

There is a phrase that veteran Chicago photojournalist Bob Black uses to describe what separates a technician from an artist behind the camera. He calls it having a good eye. It is not a metaphor for talent alone — it is something harder to name: a way of seeing that is also a way of caring, a way of framing the world that refuses to render Black life as problem or spectacle, insisting instead on its full, unguarded humanity.

That phrase — a good eye — became the title of my new documentary. The full title is A Good Eye: Capturing Joy, and it is currently in production.

Bob Black’s career began at the Chicago Daily Defender in 1965, making him part of a lineage that runs through the beating heart of Black photojournalism in this city. He later joined the Chicago Sun-Times, where he spent nearly four decades documenting Chicago’s Black political awakening, its cultural life, its grief and its glory. He is a co-founder of both the Chicago Alliance of African American Photographers (CAAAP) and the Visual Task Force of the National Association of Black Journalists. He was on the West Side when it burned after the assassination of Dr. King in 1968, and his camera bore witness. When Bob Black says you need a good eye, he is not speaking abstractly. He earned that language over a lifetime.

A Good Eye: Capturing Joy is a documentary that traces the arc of Black photography from its early 20th-century roots in Chicago’s Black publishing world to the new visual languages being forged by young image-makers today. The film argues that Chicago is not merely a setting — it is a character. From the pages of the Chicago Defender to the studios of Johnson Publishing, from the park district darkrooms of the South Side to the viral Instagram archives circulating right now, Chicago has long functioned as a visual capital of Black America.

The film moves through six currents. It opens in the era when Black newspapers employed photographers to document the Great Migration, uplift, and resistance — often without credit, almost always without recognition outside their own communities. These photographers laid the foundation for a visual tradition rooted in dignity and defiance. From there, the film follows foundational figures like James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, and Moneta Sleet Jr., whose Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Coretta Scott King at Dr. King’s funeral remains one of the most quietly devastating images in the American archive. The Civil Rights era and the Harlem Renaissance appear not as history lessons but as living contexts — the visual tradition as a political act, as a tool of survival.

The film then turns toward the present, which is where it comes most fully alive. Among the photographers featured:

Tonika Johnson, whose Folded Map Project transforms the geography of Chicago’s segregation into visual confrontation. Lee Bey, documenting the erasure and survival of Black architectural space. Stephan Marc, investigating diasporic identity through documentary montage. Rashod Taylor, exploring the intimacy of Black fatherhood. The youth photographers of the Tuley Park Photo Club on the South Side, who are merging wet plate analog technique with futuristic vision — children developing film in a park district basement, building a practice that is simultaneously ancient and insurgent. Ken Cook, whose decades of community documentation form an essential record of South Side life. Two Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographers with deep Chicago roots: Michelle Agins, known for her dynamic coverage of Black life and urban America, and Ozier Muhammad, whose international and domestic reporting defined decades of visual journalism.

The film also features Rose Blouin, a Chicago-based documentary and fine art photographer whose practice stretches back to 1980 and whose lens has moved from Gwendolyn Brooks’s Chicago to the streets of South Africa and the plazas of Havana. Her work has graced the covers of literary journals and poetry collections, and she is a founding member of Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African American women artists — a reminder that Black photography’s history is also a history of collective practice and mutual sustenance.

Also in the film is Angela Ford, founder of The Obsidian Collection — a virtual archive and portal conceived as a modern Griot for African American stories and the broader Black diaspora. Ford, a Chicago-based entrepreneur with over 35 years of experience across fashion, real estate, and media, launched The Obsidian Collection after a conversation with her son about the absence of accurate Black Chicago history online — and the global dimension of that absence. What began as a local urgency became an international mission. The Obsidian Collection now safeguards photographs, print media, records, and cultural artifacts documenting Black life across generations; it has forged partnerships with Google Arts & Culture and Newspapers.com to make millions of pages of vintage Black newspapers searchable and accessible worldwide, launched Obsidian UK in London, and established a presence in Kenya. Ford sees the archive not as a repository but as a living presence — the collective memory of a people who have too often had their stories taken from them, misrepresented, or allowed to decay. In the context of this film, her work is the institutional counterpart to every individual photographer profiled: the infrastructure that ensures the images survive.

And then there is Rosondunnii Marshall, founder of The Darkroom Chicago — described as a Black mom-led community darkroom rooted on the South Side, housed inside the Tuley Park Cultural Center, the very space where camera clubs convened generations ago. Marshall is an educator, licensed family therapist, and community arts practitioner whose work sits at the intersection of healing, storytelling, and image-making. She started The Darkroom Chicago at her dining room table with a handful of friends and a few cameras. It has since grown into a full community space with open lab hours, a light table, and a gallery. Her curatorial vision, in her own words, honors the permanency of film: the fact that something made by hand, developed in chemical baths under red light, exists as physical evidence that a moment was real. In a time of digital manipulation and algorithmic erasure, that is not a small claim.

What holds all of these voices together — from Bob Black to the teenagers at Tuley Park — is the claim that joy is not a retreat from struggle. It is its own form of resistance. To photograph pleasure, tenderness, beauty, and ordinary Black life is an act of archiving what erasure would destroy. The camera, in these hands, is not just a recording device. It is a spiritual technology, a time machine, a form of community practice.

Visually, the film will juxtapose historical photographs, 16mm recreations, Polaroid montages, and dynamic animations. Scenes of young photographers developing film or composing shots will be choreographed to mirror historical footage, creating visual rhymes across time. The city’s own textures — alleys, murals, front porches, parks, studios — will become a recurring motif. Chicago will be heard as much as seen: trains, church choirs, street corners, galleries.

I began my own relationship with visual storytelling at the South Side Community Art Center. At twenty, I left Chicago to document life across Europe, Africa, and Asia. I have spent decades in film, collaborating with Julie Dash, John Akomfrah, and St. Clair Bourne, among others. But this project feels like a return — not just to Chicago, but to the original question that sent me out into the world with a camera in the first place: What does it mean to see? Who has the right to frame whom? And what is preserved when the image is made with love?

A Good Eye: Capturing Joy is that question, turned into a film.