Recording in Progress

Touring the world as a sound engineer—visiting over 30 countries, from Russia to Italy—piqued Keith Rice’s interest in history.

Back home in California, he returned to college at the age of 50 to earn a degree in this subject. By applying his experience in digitization to his passion for history, Rice became a historian/archivist at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), which collects and preserves photographs and oral histories with an emphasis on ethnic minority communities in the Los Angeles area. Rice leads digitization efforts, oversees a team of students, records interviews, and collaborates with visiting researchers for projects.

One of these recent visitors was Mazie Harris, associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum. At the time, she was working on Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and now on view at the Getty Center through June 14, 2026. Seeking photography made in Southern California to add to the show’s run at Getty, Harris turned to the expertise of Rice and the holdings at the Bradley Center.

“Keith has been immensely helpful. As I dug into the Bradley Center archives, I was blown away by the incredible histories preserved there,” says Harris.

We caught up with Rice to discuss his contributions to the exhibition and his work archiving and preserving the visual history of ethnic minority communities in California.

How did the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center archives evolve?

Keith Rice: The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center began as the Center for Photojournalism and Visual History [later the Institute for Arts & Media] within the journalism department at CSUN under the photojournalist Kent Kirkton. Kent started the center because he couldn’t find photographs in the Los Angeles Times archives that rightfully represented African American communities. Since 1991, he has amassed over 850,000 images that tell a different story from mainstream media. Many images are by freelance photographers who undertook assignments with African American newspapers such as the Los Angeles Sentinel and the California Eagle. Once a picture was selected, the photographers would keep the rest––building archives without really knowing where they could end up. Kirkton’s center at CSUN gave the archives a home.

Soon after I joined in 2011, the director of the Tom & Ethel Bradley Foundation, Greg Franks, got in touch with us. They were interested in what we were doing, as a lot of the photographs in the archive were of Mayor Bradley and other political figures. Over the course of his political career, Tom Bradley [the first African American mayor of Los Angeles, who served from 1973 to 1993] was a person who brought different races and people together. And that’s kind of what we do––we bring all these underserved communities of photographers and photography into one place.

Nowadays we get hundreds of requests for these photos as the archive continues to grow beyond one million records. The collection now ranges from African American photographers to the 1960s farmworker movement in California, the history of the Mexican border, and the freedom and peace movements in San Francisco.

Before entering academia, you had a career in the music industry. Would you say this past experience has fed into your archival and historical practice today?

KR: My interest in archival work grew out of my experience in music. I didn’t realize how much I liked history until I was on the road, traveling to over 30 countries with Al McKay [American guitarist, former Earth, Wind & Fire band member] as his sound engineer. In every country I went to, I always visited museums to try and learn more about the culture. In Moscow I visited Red Square and Lenin’s tomb, and I realized I didn’t know anything about Lenin. So I came back home and took a class.

My cousin had just gone back to college and was pushing me at the time to go, saying I would enjoy it. I was 50 at this point, thinking I was too old, but she kept pushing until I decided to go back and get my history degree.

I now relate archival work to music: when you record in a studio, you are capturing a moment in time, documenting history with each performance. Even if you do that song again five minutes later, it’s not going to be exactly the same. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but in a way I was already documenting history, even thinking back to the shows I recorded on the road—in Italy, in Lithuania, all over. Some of these players have since passed on, but I have them recorded.

Due to this background in music, I was able to digitize the director’s collection of interviews, recorded on cassettes, when I started at the Bradley Center. We have since evolved to more of a television production studio, recording everything on video and working with the film students at the university to mix and put these histories together. It’s all the same kind of work—photography, music, interviews—documenting a moment in history that’ll never happen again.

Could you talk about the specific works on loan from the CSUN collection in Getty’s exhibition? Can you select a photo that speaks to the Black Arts Movement here in Southern California?

KR: The movement was about a lot of things––music, filmmaking, photography––it was really just about documenting Black culture in whichever way it came. If you want to select one, I would say the Calvin Hicks photo of the two Black bodies. I remember when Black wasn’t a beautiful thing. I was a kid in the ’60s––you didn’t see this. You didn’t see bodies like this until you started seeing Afros and young people protesting what was going on. This is the perfect example that Black is beautiful, and that’s probably one of the most powerful statements to come out of that time period.

Can you discuss the importance of museums in teaching history, or other ways to reach people beyond the classroom, especially a younger generation?

KR: I’m always dealing with this question. I think museums and galleries can do as much as a classroom, so I try to make exhibitions interesting to young people. Whenever I curate an exhibition, I make it a point of having a cocurator, somebody young, on that team. Right now I have six student assistants and four interns working with me at the Bradley Center. But they’re not only working for the Bradley Center, they’re also showing and teaching me new things. It is definitely a two-way street, because they force you to keep up in a particular field. For instance, I now embrace TikTok, as we put some archival video clips up and got 17,000 hits in a couple of days!

You’ve mentioned that “as with many movements, the history is often told by nonparticipants.” How does this relate to your work as a historian?

KR: Part of my whole reason for doing oral histories is that people get to tell their own stories with their own voices, about their lives, their families, their work, or whatever they want to talk about. So if you want to know what photographer Harry Adams’s process is, you’ve got to talk to Harry Adams. Or you’ve got to have an audiotape or video of him speaking about these things. Without this material, you get a nonparticipant writing a book. They may look at a bunch of secondary sources or speak with people who might have known the individuals, which is valid, but when possible, you’ve got to talk to them to write about them. As a historian of the 20th-century African American resistance movement, I interview photographers and the Black community––I put myself in their place.

Finally, can you tell us about the upcoming publication on Black photography in Los Angeles you’re working on?

KR: It is about Roland Charles and the significant impact he had on minority groups in Los Angeles as a photographer, gallerist, and cofounder of the Black Photographers of California group. The idea came from Mazie’s visit to the archives, where she encountered the breadth of material that we have on Roland and his work. Developed as a collaboration between Getty and the Bradley Center, the publication brings together multiple strands of research. I am writing the chapter on Roland's work photographing members of the entertainment industry. In parallel, we are also working on a related exhibition that will open in 2028 at the Californian African American Museum.