Claude Mac Presents is the documentary side of this brand, and in the order that actually matters it comes first. The objects fund the films. That is the whole arrangement, stated plainly, and it does not run the other way.

The men we film are in their eighties and nineties, and most of them have never had a camera pointed at them by somebody willing to wait out the answer. The arithmetic on that is not kind and it does not slow down for a production schedule. So we shoot long, and we go to the man rather than asking the man to come to a studio — the porch, the shop, the church basement, the block he has lived on for fifty years. A room that made somebody will get more out of him in ten minutes than an hour of good questions ever will.

It is black and white, always, and never as a filter applied at the end. It is the tradition the work is being done inside: Gordon Parks’ patience, Roy DeCarava’s refusal to light his people brighter for an audience that was not looking carefully, Charles “Teenie” Harris and his tens of thousands of ordinary, dignified afternoons. Color would tell you the year. We would rather you looked at the man. Everything under this banner answers to the same three things — honor the elder, preserve the wisdom, carry it forward — and if this company sells nothing else, the recordings still exist and the work still counted.