Photo By Jon Hughes/photopresse.com

Photographer Melvin Grier, the 2004 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence at the Taft Museum of Art, is in Cincinnati's brotherhood of black artists. He's been a photojournalist for 37 years, including three decades with The Cincinnati Post.

George Clinton's newish P-Funk plays in photographer Melvin Grier's Subaru tape deck as he makes his way to Union Terminal on a nearly failed mission to shoot the holiday train display -- which is actually being erected in the Cinergy lobby.

Talking above Clinton in his trademark cottonmouth growl, Grier, 62, recounts boyhood summer train trips to Georgia. Suddenly, driving through the newly finagled West End listening to Grier talk about his former self against Clinton's imitation of his former self is like déjà vu all over again.

"My father would bring me to the terminal and put me on a segregated train," he says, pausing on segregated. "And they'd pack these lunches in candy boxes, old candy boxes. Fried chicken. Some kind of pound cake. The grease from the fried chicken would soak through the white bread," he says. "Oh, God! It was so good."

At just that moment Clinton sings: "I'm gonna throw my hands up in the air," in synchronicitous mimicry of Grier's elation. It's this same hey! to the ho! the old to the new, this rhythmic right place/right time that's informed and directed not only Grier's career as an active and curious photojournalist 37 years in, but also his life beginning as a little black boy in the West End to wise black man in South Avondale and beyond.

Grier's 30-year tenure as a Post staff photographer has outlasted 14 photo editors. That experience, plus his travels to Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, Kenya, Puerto Rico, Somalia, Vietnam and the 2001 riots, has converged in a 2004 Taft Museum of Art Duncanson Artist-in-Residency.

Named for black muralist Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872), the award supports community-based field work promoting deeper understanding of black art and artists.

As the 18th Duncanson artist, Grier keeps superb company along with the city's other chocolate geniuses; past honorees include poet Nikki Giovanni, Jazz singer Kathy Wade, Jazz pianist William Menefield, visual artist Tyrone Geter and poet Michael Harper.

"What it really does for me is it gives me an opportunity to interact with the public and say things about the people bringing these things to you. If you didn't have the visuals, what would you have? You'd have radio."

Besides a "multimedia exploration" of his work, at the foundation of Grier's residency is the exhibition 15 Retro/15 Active. Grier is in the city's brotherhood of black visual artists, Thom Phelps and Jymi Bolden among them, comprising an ad hoc group of photographers and painters. Many of them Vietnam veterans, they've traveled the world and resettled here. Though omnipresent and productive, they're largely overlooked by the white art establishment in favor of art-school irony.

"We all know we're all going through the same thing," Grier says. "It's not so much a brotherhood; it's an awareness of the day-to-day process."

Grier latches onto mature relevance, elevating his oeuvre to art status. He recoils against snapping the expected shot.

"When I went to Somalia, it was far easier to find photographs than it was working here in Cincinnati," he says. "It's like a riot. Oh my God! A riot! You look around and there's so much to see. I don't care how wonderful Music Hall will look this evening. I've shot it before."

Kids in fire hydrants in the summer? "I've shot it before. You have to constantly fight against the easy way."

Listening to Grier is like grown-up show and tell. Before he came to his life's work, Grier says Cincinnati was a town without pity. As he reminisces, Grier clutches a folded downbeat magazine. He looks comfortable but not slouchy in his Papa Hemingway vest over a striped, long-sleeved shirt, an ever-present embroidered kufi fitted to the top of his head, leaving a gray wreath of curls.

When he was a young man, returning home in 1965 from England after a stint as an Air Force medic, no one would publish his work. He banded with other photographers and they printed and hung their own work. Today, he still rallies other photojournalists to publicly show their work and considers Richard Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eddie Adams his idols.

"I try to encourage newspaper photographers to show their work the way it was meant to be shown," he says in the rear photo department of The Post, sorting the morning's mainly West-side assignments. "I decided I wanted to put some photos up on the wall but I never thought of it as art."

The L-shaped space is a grown-up frat house, as most male-dominated news photo departments are. Empty soda bottles line a wall, old papers are strewn about and smart-ass captions are handwritten beneath photos ripped from the paper. The stench of developing chemicals is startling, considering this digital era.

Likewise incongruous, Grier peacefully coexists with both halves of himself -- the artist doubling as a utilitarian workhorse who shoots elementary schoolchildren, train displays and Friday night high school football.

Grier, in repose at The Post before the train assignment mishap, takes it all in stride -- as only a sage cat who listens to George Clinton on the way to assignments can.

"Seeing the same type of photograph of the same thing at the same time of year is an affirmation that everything is OK," he says. "If it's trains in Cincinnati, it must be the holidays. The good thing about the job is every day's different."