Tony Gleaton (1948-2015)

July 28, 2015 
/ Contributed By: Quin'Nita F. Cobbins-Modica

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Tony Gleaton, 2007

Courtesy Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times, Fair use image

Leo Antony “Tony” Gleaton was an African American photographer, scholar, and artist who is best known for his photographic images capturing and documenting the African influence in the American West and Central and South America. Gleaton, the youngest son of an elementary school teacher and police officer, was born into a black middle-class family on August 4, 1948 in Detroit, Michigan. In 1959 his mother left his father and moved the family to California. Gleaton played football in high school and briefly at East Los Angeles Junior College before joining the U.S. Marine Corps in 1967. While on his first tour of duty in Vietnam, he became fascinated with the camera.

After serving in the Marine Corps until 1970, Gleaton returned to California and enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). While there, he took a photography class that revealed his talent of shooting photos. He left UCLA and studied for a semester at the Arts Center School of Design in Los Angeles before venturing to New York to pursue his aspirations of becoming a fashion photographer. Gleaton worked as a photographic assistant and performed other various jobs through the 1970s.

Dissatisfied with the fashion world, Gleaton left New York in 1980 and hitchhiked throughout the American West, photographing cowboys first in northeastern Nevada and then in Texas. He captured the lives of Native American ranch hands and black rodeo riders. His photographic ventures in Texas, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho, and Kansas formed the essence of his project titled Cowboys: Reconstructing an American Myth. This collection featured a series of portraits of African, Native, Mexican, and Euro-American cowboys.

Gleatonโ€™s interest in the multicultural Southwest influenced his travels to Mexico. By 1981 he had begun traveling to and from Mexico, shooting photographs. In 1982 he moved to Mexico City, and from 1986 to 1992, he resided with the Tarahumara Indians in northern Mexico and then moved to Guerrero and Oaxaca. Here, Gleaton began what is now his most famous project, Tengo Casi 500 Aรฑos: Africaโ€™s Legacy in Mexico, Central & South America. Gleaton photographed the present-day descendants of African slaves brought to the region by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

Africaโ€™s Legacy gained international recognition. In 1993 the collection was placed on exhibit by the Smithsonian Museum and toured throughout Mexico and Cuba with the sponsorship of the Mexican National Council of Art. By 1996 Gleaton had expanded his project to include Central and South America, eventually traveling over fifty thousand miles with stops in 16 countries between 1993 and 2002.

In 2002 Gleaton became a visiting professor of photography at Texas Tech University.ย  That same year, he finished a Masterโ€™s in Art at Bard College. In 2004 Gleaton became a scholar in residence for the Texas Tech Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library in Lubbock, Texas. The collection houses the Tony Gleaton Archive.

Gleaton resided in San Mateo, California, with his wife, Lisa Gleaton in the last decade of his life. He continued to build a legacy that acknowledged beauty, empowered communities, and created cultural bridges through the images of often forgotten people.

Leo Antony Gleaton died on August 14, 2015 in Palo Alto, California and was buried in the Sacramento Valley National Cemetary in Dixon, California with full military honors. He was 67.

About the Author

Author Profile

Quinโ€™Nita Cobbins-Modica is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches courses in African American and civil rights history.ย  Her teaching and research focus on the history of black womenโ€™s social activism and politics, particularly in the American West.ย  Her most recent article, โ€œLet Usโ€ฆTake Our Places in Public Affairs: Black Womenโ€™s Political Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1870-1920,โ€ explores the early political activities of western black women and the ways they wielded their electoral and political influence to help shape concepts of freedom and progressive politics in the region.ย  Currently, she is working on a forthcoming manuscript that examines the long history of black womenโ€™s organizing tradition, political engagement, and activism in Seattle that extended well beyond formal politics and the fight for womenโ€™s suffrage. While illuminating African American history in the Pacific Northwest, her work offers an expansive new interpretation of the symbiotic relationship between womenโ€™s activism, civil rights, and public service.

As a strong supporter of public history and the digital humanities, Cobbins-Modica works with local historical institutions and organizations and also contributes to online public-facing history projects. She is presently a participant in the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau Program, delivering engaging lectures across urban and rural areas in Washington state and highlighting the central role black women played in the stateโ€™s civil rights movement.ย  She has served as a researcher and guest teaching lecturer for the Northwest African American History Museum and as a gallery exhibit reviewer, exhibition co-curator, and historical consultant for the Museum of History & Industry in Seattle. In 2017, she co-authored a book,ย Seattle on the Spot,ย that explored photographs of Black Seattle through the lens of photographer, Al Smith. She also has published articles profiling western black women activists for the Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000ย digital project.

Since 2013, Cobbins-Modica has been a dedicated member of the BlackPast.org team, having worked in several capacities, including webmaster, content contributor, associate editor, and executive director.

She completed her Ph.D in History at the University of Washington with a Bachelor's degree in History from Fisk University and a Masterโ€™s degree in History from the University of Georgia.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Cobbins-Modica, Q. (2015, July 28). Tony Gleaton (1948-2015). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/gleaton-tony-1948/

Source of the Author's Information:

Richard Baron, โ€œProfile: Tony Gleaton.โ€ Newspaper Tree: El Pasoโ€™s Online Newspaper, Apr. 19, 2004; Tony Gleaton, โ€œBiography,โ€ tonygleaton.com, accessed on July 23, 2015. Vistas Magazine, Unpublished Article, 2007, tonygleaton.com, accessed on July 23, 2015; Sean Mitchell, โ€œThe Unexpected Face of Mexico,โ€ LA Times, Oct. 8, 2007; Pablo Jaime Sรกinz, โ€œExhibit Captures A Culture Within,โ€ UT San Diego, Feb. 23, 2008.

Further Reading