photo essay 1960s

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The Picture Show

Daily picture show, 'black in white america:' revisiting a 1960s photo essay.

Claire O'Neill

More than 40 years after the original publication date, The J. Paul Getty Museum has reissued Black In White America , a book by photojournalist Leonard Freed. The release corresponds with a new exhibition opening later this month; "Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since The Sixties" showcases the work of nine renowned photographers.

In the 1960s, Freed traveled the country providing in-depth coverage of America's race issues. But, rather than gravitating to violent outbursts and moments of tension, Freed photographed weddings and football practices and church services. Curator Brett Abbott explains in the book's foreward that Freed "found that his interests lay not in recording the progress of the civil rights movement per se but in exploring the diverse, everyday lives of a community that had been marginalized for so long."

The photographs are accompanied by Freed's diary-like text. And while many of the photos lack captions, that doesn't seem to matter. Freed was less interested in each individual instance, and more concerned with capturing the essence of an issue and a culture — a time and place. Somehow, even 40 years later, the photos still feel relevant.

W. Eugene Smith: Master of the Photo Essay

100 years since the birth of W. Eugene Smith, we take a look at the work of a remarkable talent who described his approach to photography as working “like a playwright”

W. Eugene Smith

W. Eugene Smith’s membership with Magnum may have been brief, spanning the years 1955-58, but his work left left a deep impression on many of Magnum’s photographers, as it has upon the practice of photojournalism generally. Smith is regarded by many as a genius of twentieth-century photojournalism, who perfected the art of the photo essay. The following extract from Magnum Stories ( Phaidon ), serves as a pit-stop tour through his most enduring and affecting works.

With “Spanish Village” (1951), “Nurse Midwife” (1951), and his essay on Albert Schweitzer (1954), “Country Doctor” is first of a series of postwar photo essays, produced by Smith as an employee of Life magazine, that are widely regarded as archetypes of the genre. The idea to examine the life of a typical country doctor, at the time of a national shortage of GPs, was the magazine’s, not Smith’s. Though it was preconceived and pre-scripted, with a suitable doctor cast for the role before Smith got involved, he was immediately attracted to the idea of its heroic central character. He left to shoot the story the day he first heard about it – and before it was formally assigned, lest his editors decide to allocate the job to a different photographer.

Country Doctor

He described elements of his approach in an interview for Editor and Publisher later the same year:

“I made very few pictures at first. I mainly tried to learn what made the doctor tick, what his personality was, how he worked and what the surroundings were… On any long story, you have to be compatible with your subject, as I was with him.

I bear in mind that I have to have an opener and closer. Then I make a mental picture of how to fill in between these two. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I’ll lie in bed and do a sketch of the pictures I already have. Then I’ll decide what pictures I need. In this way, I can see how the job is shaping up in the layout form.

When a good picture comes along, I shoot it. Later I may find a better variation of the same shot, so I shoot all over again.”

"When a good picture comes along, I shoot it. Later I may find a better variation of the same shot, so I shoot all over again."

- w. eugene smith.

Central to his method was his seeking to fade “into the wallpaper”. De Ceriani, the subject of the story and the one constant witness to his working approach, recalled in an interview with Jim Hughes, Smith’s biographer, that after a week Smith “became this community figure. He may not have known everybody, but everybody knew who he was. And you fell into this pattern: he was going to be around, and you just didn’t let it bother you. He would always be present. He would always be in the shadows. I would make the introduction and then go about my business as if he were just a doorknob.”

Smith set about what might have been a straightforward assignment with a demanding intensity. “I never made a move where Gene wasn’t sitting there,” Ceriani explained; “I’d go to the john and he’d be waiting outside the door, so it would seem. He insisted that I call when anything happened, regardless of whether it was day or night… I would look around and Gene would be lying on the floor; shooting up, or draped over a chair. You never knew where he was going to be. And you never knew quite how or when he got there. He would produce a ladder in the most unusual places.”

For a four-week shoot, Smith selected 200 photographs for consideration by Life , and while he clearly had some influence over the layout, he did not control it. It did not live up to his expectations; in the interview with Editor and Publisher, Smith stated that he was “depressed” thinking about just how far short it fell. It’s not clear how different it might have been had he done the layout himself. We know that the prints he made were rejected by Life ’s art director, on the grounds that they were too dark and would not reproduce well on the magazine’s pages. Smith’s vision was darker in other regards too. Photographs not featured in Life’ s layout, but reproduced or exhibited later, include a powerful series of 82-year-old Joe Jesmer being treated following a heart attack – an old man whose face terrifyingly reveals the apparent consciousness of his imminent death. Smith also chose, for his own exhibitions, troubling photographs of Thomas Mitchell prior to his leg amputation, as well as other images more baroque than those selected by Life . But the two brilliant images between which the layout hangs – his opener of the stoical doctor on his way to the surgery under a brooding sky and his closer, showing Ceriani slumped in weary reflection with coffee and cigarette – clearly reflect Smith’s won intentions for how the story should appear.

It is in the sophistication of its narrative structure that Smith’s innovation lies. In recorded conversations between Smith and photographer Bob Combs in the late 1960s, he elaborated on the ingredients of his approach (referring here to another story, “Nurse Midwife”):

“In the building of a story, I being with my own prejudices, mark them as prejudices, and start finding new thinking, the contradictions to my prejudices, What I am saying is that you cannot be objective until you try to be fair. You try to be honest and you try to be fair and maybe truth will come out.

Each night, I would mark the pictures that I took, or record my thoughts, on thousands of white cards I had. I would start roughing in a layout of what pictures I had, and note how they build and what was missing in relationships.

"In the building of a story, I being with my own prejudices, mark them as prejudices, and start finding new thinking, the contradictions to my prejudices, What I am saying is that you cannot be objective until you try to be fair."

I would list the picture to take, and other things to do. It began with a beginning, but it was a much tighter and more difficult problem at the end. I’d say, ‘Well, she has this relationship to that person. I haven’t shown it. How can I take a photograph that will show that? What is this situation to other situations?’

Here it becomes really like a playwright who must know what went on before the curtain went up, and have some idea of what will happen when the curtain goes down. And along the way, as he blocks in his characters, he must find and examine those missing relationships that five the validity of interpretation to the play.

I have personally always fought very hard against ever packaging a story so that all things seem to come to an end at the end of a story. I always want to leave it so that there is a tomorrow. I suggest what might happen tomorrow – at least to say all things are not resolved, that this is life, and it is continuing.”

Smith refers to working “like a playwright”. Elsewhere he compared his work to composing music, but perhaps it is the literary reference that is most relevant to “Country Doctor”. His doctor is the emblematic hero of a drama that unfolds through several episodes – literally, acts. His opening and closing tableaux have all the content of soliloquies: single moments loaded with psychological detail and environmental description that frame the play. Unlike the experience of a play in the theatre where we watch it once, from beginning to end – we read the magazine essay back and first, at the very least reviewing the images again once we have read through it. The details of the doctor’s actions lend weight to the opening and closing portraits, and vice versa, so that the depth of its characterization reveals itself across the images as a group. It would not work if it were not wholly believable as a record of a real man, and real events. As such, its strength and its place in the history of the genre lies in the manner in which it combines a record of reality within an effective dramatic structure; in short, as a human drama.

Smith’s essay-making technique was not something he developed independently of the media that published his pictures. It began with essays produced in the early 1940s for Parade , where photographers were encouraged to experiment with story structure (without the tight scripting Smith later encountered at Life magazine) and where stories often focused on an attractive central character achieving worthwhile goals against formidable odds. Although Smith is on record as being in constant struggle with Life over its scripts – as well as its layouts, the selection of photographs, and the darkness of his prints – it seems appropriate to view his achievement as the product of a dialogue with the needs and practices of the magazine. The battles were over the details of particular decisions rather than over the mission or purpose. In fact, Smith wholly identified with the Life formula, taking and refining it to a new level of sophistication.

After Smith left life in 1954 – after several prior resignations, his final departure was over the editorial slant given to his essay on Albert Schweitzer – he embarked on his ambitious Pittsburgh essay. Working for the first time outside the framework of a magazine, with only a small advance from a book publisher, and encouraged by Magnum’s reassurance that he would find a worthwhile return from serial sales of independently executed essays, he believed that he was positioned to produce his best work yet. He wrote to his brother that he Pittsburgh essay would “influence journalism from now on”, and described in an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship that he “would recreate as does the playwright, as does the good historian – I would evoke in the beholder an experience that is Pittsburgh.”

It did not really work. Becoming a landmark in the ambition of the photo essay, and including some of his strongest photographs, the Pittsburgh essay nevertheless failed to be the symphony in photographs for which Smith strove, After four years of work, it was finally published in the small-format Popular Photography Annual of 1959 , run as a sequence of “spread tapestries” – as he described his intended layout to the editor of Life . He titled the essay Labyrinthian Walk, indicating the story was less about the city than a portrait of himself locked in a life-or-death struggle with a mythical demon. Although he himself was responsible for the layout, he judged it a failure. The dream – or necessity – of Magnum failed also. He did only two minor assignments in the time he was a member, and he left completely broke, his family in poverty, with Magnum itself smarting from the investment it too had ploughed into the Pittsburgh project.

After the “Country Doctor” story was published, Smith declared that he was “still searching for the truth, for the answer to how to do a picture story”. Later, in 1951, he stated in a letter to Life editor Ed Thompson, “Journalism, idealism and photography are three elements that must be integrated into a whole before my work can be of complete satisfaction to me.” In 1974, 20 years after embarking on the Pittsburgh essay, Smith was vindicated with the triumphant artistic and journalistic success of “Minamata”, his story about the deformed victims of the pollution by the Chisso chemical plant in Japan. The story became a new paradigm for the possibilities of photojournalism, in part because of its unambiguous moral purpose.

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Magnum On Set: Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight

The Battle of Saipan

W. Eugene Smith’s Warning to the World

In Pictures: 75 Years Since the Start of the Pacific War

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The Pacific War: 1942-1945

Past Square Print Sale

Conditions of the Heart: on Empathy and Connection in Photography

The New York Times

Magazine | the rooms they left behind, the rooms they left behind.

Photographs by MITCH EPSTEIN DEC. 21, 2016

After the deaths of these 10 notable people, The New York Times photographed their private spaces — as they left them.

Photo Essay

Quiet places.

Reno’s mother began building the family home, near the Florida Everglades, in 1949, long before Miami’s suburban sprawl crept into the area. Reno moved here at age 14, and — apart from stints in Tallahassee and as U.S. Attorney General — lived here for the rest of her life. The bed and other antiques once belonged to her maternal grandparents. ‘‘I don’t know how old they are,’’ says her sister, Maggy Hurchalla, ‘‘but I’ve known them for as long as I remember, and I just turned 76.’’

Across the length of 2016, the photographer Mitch Epstein — known for making careful large-format images that draw rich meaning out of places and objects — arranged to visit the living and working spaces of some of the monumental figures we lost this year. The goal was to arrive not long after each person’s death, in those days when a person’s spirit can still seem palpable somewhere among their rooms and their things — as in his photograph of the writer Jim Harrison’s studio, where the items on a bedside table seem as if they were set down only moments ago.

As he took in each space and created these subtle, multilayered photographs, Epstein was especially struck by the number of rooms that felt like places of freedom, with each figure creating his or her own unique interior world. “They’re not just spaces,” he says. “They’re actually sanctuaries. That’s the word that comes to mind.” TEXT BY NITSUH ABEBE

Marisol’s sculpture, with its Pop Art vibrancy and folk-art intimacy, made her a one-name celebrity in the 1960s art world, and she purchased her TriBeCa loft and studio in 1979, before the neighborhood’s rapid redevelopment. With shades drawn, the stillness of this sitting area now stands in contrast to the bustle and gleam outside. In the center is a flat file for smaller drawings; at left, a preliminary drawing for the 1989 sculpture ‘‘John, Washington and Emily Roebling Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge for the First Time.’’

‘‘He also had an upright bicycle out there,’’ says Shandling’s friend Bruce Grayson of this nook in the comedian’s Brentwood home. But Shandling’s great love was boxing: He co-owned a gym in Santa Monica and sparred, when in good health, multiple times a week. In interviews, he’d compare the sport to his career in comedy. ‘‘It’s getting over that fear,’’ Grayson says. ‘‘He used to make that metaphor all the time — boxing taught him how to bob and weave onstage, to be agile and not get back on his heels.’’’

After a stroke in 2009, the self-taught artist began working in the back of Dial Metal Patterns of Bessemer, Ala., a fabrication company owned by two of his sons. Dial, who grew up in the Depression-era South, spent much of his adult life laboring in factories and used industrial materials and other castoffs in many of his artworks. When his sons first opened the studio after Dial’s death, unfinished work still hung under fluorescent lights on one of the pressed-wood walls.

‘‘Jim liked naps,’’ says Joyce Harrington Bahle, who assisted the celebrated writer for 37 years — hence the bed in the small writing studio he kept behind his Montana home. On one wall hangs ‘‘A Correlated History of Earth,’’ charting the planet’s development over 4.5 billion years; on another, a painting, by Harrison’s friend Jill Eggers, of a thicket. Bahle says Harrison always saw thickets as places of refuge. Outside, looking out toward the Absaroka mountains, is the solitary bench where he liked to begin each workday.

It was some months after the musician’s death that this photo was taken, in the Galaxy Room of his Paisley Park Studios — a lounge space attached to the studio’s production facilities. The astronomical images are painted on the walls and lit by blacklights in the ceiling fixtures; throughout the studio space are copious candles, incense burners and other mood-setting flourishes.

Wiesel’s home study in Manhattan is packed with plenty of mundane, familiar needs — books and files, staplers and tape dispensers, papers and pens — but here, the eye is drawn to a sacred object: Wiesel’s personal Torah scroll, housed in its own bookshelf cabinet.

‘‘I always felt when I was visiting that I was getting to hang out with Edward and be in this great museum at the same time,’’ says Sam Rudy, Albee’s longtime friend and publicist. The playwright was a passionate collector of art, and filled his Manhattan loft with countless pieces — like Walt Kuhn’s ‘‘Helen’’ (1929), the striking portrait seen here. This nook was where Albee read and took phone calls; Rudy also recalls arriving for appointments and finding the ‘‘notoriously punctual’’ writer on his worn leather chair, jacket draped over one knee, ‘‘in full waiting mode.’’ ‘‘There was always tremendous still and quiet and calm in the loft,’’ he says, “except when there was a party. It was not unlike a museum in that regard.’’

The historian and anthropologist — one of the last living people to have spoken with anyone present before the Battle of the Little Bighorn — kept a second office in the garage of his home on the Crow Indian Reservation. The items and archives inside track both the history of the Crow Tribe of Montana and the life of Medicine Crow himself. Portraits on the left depict Crow warriors and leaders, including Bull Chief, Medicine Crow’s great-grandfather, believed to have been born in 1825. A single bare bulb hangs over the desk.

The Connecticut home where Wilder spent the last decades of his life was owned first by his third wife, Gilda Radner, who left it to him after her death. He and his next wife, Karen B. Wilder, made many renovations, including some whimsical designs in the garden. This past May, as Wilder struggled with Alzheimer’s disease, a tree sculptor was invited to leave this portrait on the grounds, working in concert with the actor himself. ‘‘Really,’’ his widow says, ‘‘it was the last artistic collaboration of his life.’’

Mitch Epstein is a fine-art photographer based in New York City. His forthcoming book, “Rocks and Clouds,” will be published by Steidl in the spring.

What you learn when you ride shotgun with the former attorney general.

C entral Florida is the in-between you make go away by pressing a little harder on the gas. Orange groves at dusk, sky full of pastel color, and Janet Reno is driving the car, a rental. It’s 2002, Reno is running for governor of Florida, and I’ve spent days riding shotgun with her, reporting for this magazine, accompanying her to various campaign events — most of them populated by older women, bright and warm women with structures of freshly coifed hair, who fawn over Janet Reno, who knew her mother, an investigative reporter for The Miami News. To them, Janet Reno is the daughter who left Florida to fix America, serving eight controversial years as attorney general under Bill Clinton, and has now returned to fix the Sunshine State.

Edgar Mitchell

An astronaut goes to the moon and makes it most of the way back.

There is a photograph of the astronaut Edgar Mitchell emerging from the Apollo 14 capsule, a ragged cone of scorched metal and shredded foil bobbing in the South Pacific 880 miles off the coast of American Samoa. A wetsuit-clad Navy swimmer is helping him out of the access hatch and into an inflatable raft. Mitchell, dressed in an olive-drab flight suit and a biological mask, steadies himself with his left hand on the door frame. He is 40, with the receding hairline and blandly gentle affect of a family dentist. It is Feb. 9, 1971, and he has just had an epiphany.

Late at night, she offered advice to the anxious and the lovelorn.

You had to have a little bit of patience and a lot of luck to catch Miss Cleo. She appeared on TV only late at night, after the second round of reruns and right before the white fuzz took over the screen. Miss Cleo was usually sitting at a table, draped in a glorious amount of fabrics, a stack of tarot cards in front of her, candles and incense burning behind her. “You have questions, I have the answers,” she would intone knowingly in her Jamaican patois, before singing out the words that would become her signature catchphrase: “Call me now!”

David Bowie

Extracts from an endless list of reasons to appreciate an endlessly restless artist.

... and it is a collaboration that makes me additionally thankful for this splendid enigma: What did you and Eno chat about in between takes? Your favorite Hammer films? Is a hot dog a sandwich, yes or no?

Jack T. Chick

The fundamentalist zealot whose cartoons also inspired underground comics.

He drew inspiration from a painting he kept on display in his studio, a depiction of souls plummeting into hell — a constant reminder of the multitudes that even his pen, wielded by a cartoonist for Christ, could not save from eternal fire. Still, Jack T. Chick did what he could, illustrating and mass-marketing his palm-size booklets that told different stories with the same message: If you do not accept Jesus Christ as your savior, you are hellbound.

Pedals the Bear

By walking on two legs, he made us rethink the divide between human and animal.

In 2003, the State of New Jersey allowed a black-bear hunt for the first time in 33 years. The resulting controversy, still smoldering today, seemed irresolvable: Depending on whom you asked, the hunt was either sadistic blood sport or noble tradition. Two sociologists, Dave Harker and Diane C. Bates, scrutinized 10 years of clashing regional newspaper editorials and letters to the editor and concluded that the two sides did not even seem to be arguing about the same animal. Actual bears had been replaced by “competing social constructions” of bears. Those in favor of the hunt imagined the animals as “menacing threats” that needed to be controlled; those against saw them as docile and benevolent creatures that just wanted to “live in peace.”

William A. Del Monte

What do we lose when the final survivor of a mass disaster dies?

When the shaking stopped on April 18, 1906, William A. Del Monte’s mother bundled him in a tablecloth and carried him out of the house and into the street, where her husband waited in a buckboard wagon. Amid San Francisco’s chaos — broken water and gas mains, shattered windows, twisted telegraph wires, six-foot chasms in the fissured earth — a horse began hauling the family from their North Beach neighborhood to the ferry terminal by the Embarcadero. Dawn was breaking. Small fires were beginning to burn. Houses, tipped diagonally, seemed on the verge of collapse. The city’s power was down, and its supplies of fresh water were mostly gone.

B. 1944 & 1953

Frank sinatra jr. & ricci martin.

When you sing well — but not as well as your dad.

In 1963, the 19-year-old Frank Sinatra Jr. sang with the Tommy Dorsey band, just as his father had two decades before, though now Dorsey was seven years dead and The New York Times referred to the musicians performing under his name as a “ghost band that has become the nucleus of a ghost show.” The younger Sinatra was praised for how close his mannerisms and phrasing were to his father’s, but he was damned for lacking his father’s “creative presence.”

Natalie Cole

Every time she hit it big, something knocked her down.

T he song came gushing out like an open hydrant on a hot summer day, but for Natalie Cole, it was a complicated kind of high. Minutes before she heard her breakthrough hit, “This Will Be,” on the radio for the first time in 1975, she had scored a heroin fix and was tripping down 113th Street in Harlem. Drugs were a recent mainstay; she started using heavily in college, during the substance-fueled psychedelic era (she still managed to get her degree, in psychology). Music, meanwhile, was her birthright — after all, she was the daughter of Nat King Cole, one of the most beloved singers of the 20th century. Growing up in the exclusive Hancock Park section of Los Angeles, she could wander into the living room and find the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Sinatra gathered round the family piano. Now that she had a big hit of her own, fame was proving to be a stronger stimulant. She kicked heroin, married one of her producers, had a son, had more hits, appeared on “The Tonight Show.”

Kimbo Slice

A sports star is born in brawls.

In the online video that started Kimbo Slice on his way to bare-knuckle fame in 2003, two heavily muscled black men, each smooth-headed and stripped to the waist, square off in a backyard in Florida. Behind them you can see a grill, a satellite dish, palm trees. The web address of a porn site appears on the screen. Kimbo lowers his guard and taunts his opponent, Big D, who strikes Kimbo’s heedlessly exposed chin with no visible effect. Kimbo lands a blow that drops Big D to all fours in the sere grass. Staggering to his feet, Big D holds out open hands in a pacific gesture and says, “Chill, dawg, just chill.”

Zerka Moreno

She had little doubt that acting out experiences and feelings could save people — and help with child-raising.

When Zerka Moreno gave birth to her son, Jonathan, in 1952, she saw his arrival as a “golden opportunity.” How much more fun and creative might his life be, she wondered, if he were raised using therapeutic techniques like role-playing or talking to an empty chair? Each was pioneered by J.L. Moreno, Zerka’s husband and the founder of psychodrama, a form of therapy in which people act out their experiences and feelings in an effort to gain insight or achieve catharsis.

Antonin Scalia

He claimed objectivity when it came to originalism, but he was a skeptic about science.

I n 1981, the Louisiana Legislature passed a law that forbade public schools to teach evolution without also instructing students on “creation science.” The Creationism Act was challenged in court for breaching the constitutional wall between church and state, in a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1986. For seven justices, the decision involved a simple constitutional question. They saw the law as an effort to force religious belief into the science curriculum, and they struck it down.

Josephine Del Deo

She fought to preserve public land – and also some tarpaper shacks.

One day in the summer of 1953, Josephine Couch went with her boyfriend, Salvatore Del Deo, on an overnight trip to the dunes outside Provincetown. They’d been invited by a friend, a former chorus girl who went by Frenchie Chanel, to stay with her at her tar-paper shack by the water. That day, amid the compass grass and rose hips, Josephine, 27, felt the rest of the world vanish: Birds cried, but the white noise of surf and wind enforced a hush. At night, the moonlight caused the dunes to glow. Josephine fell asleep in the arms of Salvatore, whom she married that fall, to the cooing of a dove.

Ruth Hubbard

She was grateful simply to be a female biologist — until she got mad about needing to be grateful.

She was lucky , she believed, to be taught by “Harvard’s great men.” At 17, Ruth Hoffman was freshly enrolled at Radcliffe, the women’s college affiliated with Harvard, and keen on studying biochemistry. It was 1941. The two institutions had separate campuses but shared a faculty. Harvard professors lectured their male students and were then obliged to repeat it all to the smaller, all-female classes at Radcliffe. That teaching women was a chore, even an insult, was something Hoffman read on their faces. Her professors did little, she felt, to hide their disdain.

Sirdeaner Walker

Her son’s suicide turned her into an activist.

At 11, a boy is a dangerously ideal target for bullying: His horizons are limited, his sensitivity is ripe, his reactions are hot.

His talent — and his persona — may have been heaven-sent.

F amous and influential musicians die every year, but 2016 was bewildering. David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Leon Russell, Phife Dawg ... it’s as if we walked out to look at the stars and found major constellations gone. Who had even gotten over Lou Reed yet?

Afeni Shakur

Long after her son was killed, she became a source of comfort for other grieving mothers.

On the second day of the first Circle of Mothers retreat, in 2014, Afeni Shakur approached the stage to speak to the assembled crowd. Some days, it felt as if America was brimming with grieving mothers, so the event’s founder, Sybrina Fulton, wanted to gather many of them together in the hope that they could help one another move forward. Her son, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed two years earlier. Shakur’s son, the rapper Tupac Shakur, had been dead for almost 20 years.

Katherine Dunn

She couldn’t have guessed how passionately misfits would embrace ‘‘Geek Love.’’

Carnival proprietors taking drugs and poisons to intentionally breed baby freaks: That’s the unvarnished core of Katherine Dunn’s third novel, 1989’s “Geek Love.” The Binewski Carnival Fabulon needs a boost, and Aloysius and Crystal Lil Binewski hatch this twisted plan to turn things around. Lil births a boy with flippers, beautiful Siamese-twin sisters joined at the waist, an albino dwarf hunchback and a boy with telekinetic powers. It hardly sounds like a universal cipher, the kind of humanist tale that attracts readers over time. Yet somehow this strange, singular book has spent the 27 years since its publication doing just that, speaking clear and true to a certain kind of reader.

Alisa Bellettini

The outsider whose “House of Style” brought high fashion to a generation of clueless teenagers.

The year 1989 was a good time to be 13 and have your MTV. The channel gave you the recipes for being chicer, more alternative, more you; for being gayer, blacker, more confrontational; for being cooler , basically. Perhaps it was your meal plan: “Yo! MTV Raps” for breakfast, “120 Minutes” for a midnight snack. And for dessert, “House of Style.”

Dana Raphael

Investigating why American women did — and did not — breast-feed.

On the 7:02 a.m. commuter train from Fairfield, Conn., to Manhattan, a woman with scarlet lipstick and chestnut hair slid beside a businessman reading his newspaper. “May I ask you a question?” she said. “What do you think about breast-feeding?” This was the mid-1950s. The woman was Dana Raphael, an anthropologist, a protégée of Margaret Mead and an outspoken feminist who, a decade before Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” refused to take her husband’s name and shunned the conventional wedding her mother planned. She initially also had no intention of following the de rigueur practice of bottle feeding. But after she tried but mostly failed to nurse her firstborn son, she began an anthropological quest that would end up spanning decades: Why was breast-feeding more successful in some cultures than in others?

Muhammad Ali

A fighter who showed us confidence — beautiful, astonishing, superheroic, infectious levels of confidence.

T here’s a story about Muhammad Ali that might have been lost to history, disappearing among all the other Ali esoterica, but for The Los Angeles Times photographer Boris Yaro. On Monday, Jan. 19, 1981, Yaro heard reports of a suicidal jumper on the radio. His editor wasn’t interested, but Yaro drove over to Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile regardless, where he found a young black man in flared jeans and a hoodie, perched on an office-building fire escape nine floors above.

She was an inspiration to female journalists, even middle schoolers.

Role models often appear with a thunderclap, a bright flash on a dark horizon, but can feel remote and evaporate just as quickly. Gwen Ifill was different. I didn’t know her, but I did get to know her influence, how it entered the lives of my students, especially girls and young women of color, whom I taught in Newark, N.J. For those like Jephtane Sophie Sabin and Isabel Evans, who watched Ifill on PBS over many years and eventually had the opportunity to meet her, Ifill created a warm and welcoming climate in which their aspirations had the chance to take root. Her impact wasn’t instant but played out slowly over time, like the rain of a wet season.

B. 1928 & 1940

Jacques rivette & abbas kiarostami.

Born years (and worlds) apart, they were philosophers of cinema.

Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1” — a 12-hour film, completed in 1971 and all but impossible to see in its entirety until very recently — begins with an extended sequence that combines artlessness and high artifice. The members of an experimental theater troupe (one of two such entities in the film) participate in an exercise that consists of writhing and squirming on the floor while wordlessly moaning and keening. It’s the primordial soup from which the film’s elaborate and elusive narrative will evolve, a reminder that every story begins in chaos and noise. Cinema, like other art forms, imposes a capricious kind of order on the mess of human experience, and “Out 1” illustrates this principle with a characteristically Rivetteian blend of intellectual rigor and anarchic whimsy.

Michel Butor

A pioneer of the French new novel, he wrote in just about every genre.

When you hear that a writer you first came to know in your youth is still writing in his advanced old age, you are at first surprised, as though he has risen from the tomb to write the poem you are reading. Then, once you absorb this fact, you go on to believe, quite illogically, that he will not die after all — certainly not soon.

Coca Crystal

An idiosyncratic host who brought surrealism to public-access TV.

For nearly 20 years, Coca Crystal’s weekly public-access show began with her smoking a joint. The show’s title was a scrap of messy poetry, as unwieldy as the program itself: “If I Can’t Dance, You Can Keep Your Revolution.” It was a no-fi interview show featuring scribbled title cards and minor downtown celebrities; regular guests included a singing dog and a disheveled poet who recited his work in a tapioca-thick mumble. She dedicated one episode to “the second anniversary of the first nonstop balloon crossing of North America.” The show isn’t easy to characterize, but Crystal probably described it best: “an hour of talk, telephone and technical failure.” Every episode ended with her dancing to groovy music — a little shoulder sway, some finger snaps.

Pat Summitt

She made her statement about the power of women by relentlessly pursuing every victory.

D uring a Final Four basketball game against the University of North Carolina, on April 1, 2007, Pat Summitt, the coach of the University of Tennessee Lady Vols basketball team, found her team down by 12 points with 8:18 to go. She was fuming — her gold rings were dented from being banged on the parquet floor. Summitt was a screamer. She loved to win. Over 38 years at Tennessee, she won 1,098 games — more than any other coach in N.C.A.A. Division 1 history. She also understood winning as a far more potent and radical act than even the most rabid male football fans would understand while pounding their painted chests.

Bill Cunningham

‘I just wish I could do what he does.’

“Ran into Bill Cunningham on his bike, I just wish I could do what he does, just go everywhere and take pictures all day.” From “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” entry dated Thursday, May 17, 1984

Reader Stories

The lives they loved.

As part of the magazine’s annual The Lives They Lived issue, we invited readers to contribute a photograph and a story of someone close to them who died this year.

More on NYTimes.com

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African Americans at Work

From enslaved workers in the 19th century to agricultural, industrial, and professional workers in the 20th and 21st centuries, African Americans have always been a vital part of the American workforce. The photographs from the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture below document African Americans at work from the 1860s to today.

Before and During the Civil War

Few photographic images of early American workplaces exist. After all, photography was not invented (in France) until the 1820s, was not introduced in America until the 1840s, and did not become an affordable amateur hobby until the 1880s. Most photographs of African Americans at work before and during the Civil War depict enslaved or recently emancipated workers on farms or plantations

No. 24: A Plantation Scene In South Carolina , ca. 1860. Photograph by S.T. Souder.

Women and children in a cotton field, 1860s. Photograph by J.H. Aylsworth.

Enslaved women and their children near Alexandria, Virginia, December 2, 1861, to March 10, 1862. Photograph by James E. Larkin.

Charleston Slave Hire Badges

From 1800 to 1865 in Charleston, North Carolina, slave hire badges were worn by enslaved individuals who were hired out by their enslavers to work for others. The enslaver paid an annual fee for the badge, providing revenue for the city of Charleston. Wages earned by the enslaved were often kept by the enslaver, but sometimes were shared with the enslaved. The badges served to identify those African Americans who were allowed to move about the city and to ensure that they only worked at jobs for which they were qualified, thus limiting competition with white workers. While some enslaved individuals learned skilled trades (“Mechanic”) useful to their enslavers in the plantation economy, a more common occupation was “House Servant.” These badges were public symbols of the hiring out system which allowed enslavers to allow their slaves a sense of autonomy, while maintaining control over them and profiting from their labor.

Charleston slave badge from 1812 for Fisher No. 103.

Charleston slave badge from 1811 for Porter No. 27.

Charleston slave badge from 1800 for House Servant No. 354.

Charleston slave badge from 1816 for Mechanic No. 39.

Civil War Soldiers

During the Civil War , approximately 179,000 African American men served in the Union Army as U.S. Colored Troops and over 20,000 in the Union Navy. Although Black soldiers were involved in forty major battles and hundreds of skirmishes—and 16 were awarded the Medal of Honor—a disproportionate amount of Black soldiers were assigned work as laborers, digging ditches, building fortifications, and burying the dead.

Carte-de-visite of a sailor named Jim, late 19th century. 

Tintype of a Civil War soldier, 1861–1865.

Photograph of members of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, 1863–1865.

Colored Pickets on Duty Near Dutch Gap , 1864. 

The Era of Jim Crow

The American nation was fundamentally changed—reconstructed—by three major social process in the century following the emancipation of four million enslaved individuals and the end of the Civil War. Each of these processes of change took decades to be completed and each changed the world of work for both Black and white workers.

First, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution—the so-called Reconstruction Amendments—abolished slavery across the nation, established the notion of “due process of law,” defined citizenship to include everyone born in the United States, extended voting rights to all Black men, and empowered the federal government to protect these rights for all citizens. Newly emancipated African Americans quickly understood that they needed to participate in both the federal legislative system and the court system to enlarge and protect their employment opportunities as integral to their civil rights. While some African Americans found success as professionals in the areas of law, education, and business, by far the great majority were forced into restrictive labor contracts as sharecroppers, while some were even forced into labor as convicts.

W. A. Neely's blacksmith shop in Laurinburg, North Carolina, January 1, 1910.      

Four unidentified men in cooks’ uniforms on a porch, 1941–43.

J. J. Cotten Barbershop, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, ca. 1910.

Convict Labor

According to the Prison Policy Initiative , the United States houses more prisoners than any other country, of whom 38.5% are Black. Within these prisons, many are forced to work, contributing to a multibillion-dollar industry. Yet this form of labor is not included in official employment statistics of Black workers, causing a sector of Black labor to be heavily ignored.

After the passage of the 13th Amendment, involuntary servitude was abolished, “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Soon after, states began passing laws, known as Black Codes, leading to mass incarceration of Black individuals. The system of convict leasing, where prisoners or prisons could legally be purchased to perform labor, began shortly after the Civil War. In some cases, this led to prisoners working on the same lands and for people that previously enslaved them. The impacts of these systems cannot be understated—in 1898, 73% of Alabama’s annual state revenue reportedly came from convict leasing. Many protested and spoke out against this system, calling it slavery under a different name. 

Convict leasing was abolished in all states by the 1930s. However, with the fall of one form of prison labor came a new one—chain gangs. This form of incarcerated labor involved having chains wrapped around the ankles of multiple prisoners while they worked, ate, and slept outside of prison walls. These incarcerated workers labored at gunpoint or risked whipping—leading again to many protesting its use. By the 1950s, chain gangs were abolished in all states due to its violation of the 8th Amendment's “cruel and unusual punishment” clause. 

Today, prison labor continues to be prevalent. In 1934, Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order #6917 to establish the Federal Prison Industries, now called UNICOR. This program allows the use of incarcerated labor for the government. Incarcerated workers in prison, jails, and even immigration centers work to support their operations and maintenance of prisons. They also work in state-run prison factories, producing common goods and services.  

Convict laborers at Swannanoa Cut, Asheville, North Carolina, ca. 1885. Photograph by Thomas H. Lindsey.

The second fundamental change in African American labor came through the laws and social customs that reinforced white supremacy and a system of “separate but equal” segregation—Jim Crow society. This also created a new hierarchy of occupations: those that were reserved for whites and those open to Black citizens.

Two unidentified women in uniform with toddler, Port Gibson, Mississippi, 1940. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott.

Beautician brushing an unidentified women’s hair in salon chair, mid-20th century. Photograph by Rev. Henry Clay Anderson.

Grocery Store, 14th & U Streets , ca. 1945. Photograph by Robert H. McNeill.

Barbershop , ca. 1945. Photograph by Robert H. McNeill.

Pullman Porters

Pullman Porters occupied a coveted position in Black communities in the late 19th and early 20th century. These workers, typically Black men, would assist with luggage, maintain sleeping quarters, and serve passengers in the Pullman Palace Car Company’s luxury sleeping cars. The pay was higher than most other employers at the time, travel was possible, and many were able to move on to better jobs in hotels and restaurants.

However, the position did not come without discrimination and racism. George Pullman wanted Black porters, specifically those who were formerly enslaved, because he believed they would work under harsh conditions and would attend to every need of passengers. Porters were often called “boy” or “George” instead of their own names, and they were commonly berated or harassed by customers in the cars.

The Pullman maids were a lesser-known employee of the company: Black women who would clean Pullman cars and cater to guests. They typically worked with women, the elderly, and the infirmed. They often received lower wages from tips than Pullman Porters who worked in cars with businessmen and politicians.

Pullman Porter T.R. Joseph in uniform, ca. 1930s.

Preparing Dinner in the Dining Car Kitchen , mid-20th century.

Pullman Porter James Bryant in uniform, 1973.

Historically, a major sector of work for Black women was midwifery . This practice included caring for mothers and infants during childbirth. Black midwives often used tactics derived from African tradition and were seen very highly in their communities. Midwives were also incredibly important to enslaved communities, as they could keep records of ancestry and community ties. After the Civil War, Black midwives continued to be incredibly important, especially in rural Southern states. Notably, they did not just work for Black mothers, they also supported white mothers in their communities.

With the medicalization of childbirth, the practices of midwives began to be questioned and delegitimized. Maternal and infant mortality rates began to rise, and many blamed midwives. However, midwives had fewer instances of maternal and infant mortality than medical doctors. The passage of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 made traditional midwifing more difficult with increased regulations, mandatory trainings, and supervision necessary to continue working in the field. Black midwives were often being taught by nurses with less training than themselves.

While leading to better health outcomes of mothers and infants, these regulations led to increased barriers for Black midwives to work in professional maternal healthcare. In particular, requirements to receive state licensing became an obstacle for many. In 2021, only 7% of certified nurse-midwives and certified midwives were Black . Some believe that these historical systemic barriers to Black midwives have contributed to the prominent Black maternal mortality rate seen today

Midwife standing next to woman in bed with bassinet to her left, mid-20th century. Photograph by Rev. Henry Clay Anderson.

Collection of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Robert Galbraith, © 1987 Robert Galbraith

Midwife Susie Carey, 1940–1953.

The third change in Black labor that came about during the Jim Crow Era was the Industrial Revolution. This transition from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one, was driven by new technologies in manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, and communication, that created entirely new occupations and work processes.

Workers outside the Grendel Textile Mill, 1923–1924.

Student working a printing press, ca. 1935. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Workers at the International Harvester tractor works, 1946–1948. From the series The Way of Life of the Northern Negro. Photograph by Wayne F. Miller.

Postal Workers

The United States Postal Service (USPS) plays an important role in Black labor history. As of 2022, almost 29% of the USPS was Black, making it one of the top employers of African Americans in the United States. The history of Black workers in the postal service can be traced to the institution of slavery, with many enslaved persons working as transportation contractors. However, rebellions in Haiti sparked fear in Southern whites, leading to Congress prohibiting African American mail carriers in the postal service until 1865. During the Civil War, the first known Black post office clerk was appointed, William Cooper Nell, in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also believed to be the first Black civilian employee of the federal government.

In 1914, the Civil Service Commission issued a new order requiring applicants for federal jobs to submit a photograph. These policies led to the founding of the National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees (NAPFE) an independent, African American controlled labor union with a mission to eliminate discrimination and injustice in the federal service. The 1940s saw the passage of Executive Order #8802, which created the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to oversee claims of discrimination. By the 1960s, Black representation in the Postal Service was seen at higher leadership levels, with the three biggest post offices in the country having Black Postmasters. In 1971, the Postal Service adopted an Equal Employment Opportunity policy, which aided in the recruitment of minority and female applicants to the organization. Today, the USPS has the highest median annual and hourly wage within the top ten occupations with the highest proportions of Black workers. The wage gap is also narrower among postal workers than in the private sector.

A postal worker sorting mail into cubby holes, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1950. Photograph by Charles “Teenie” Harris.

A mailman outside of Rev. H.C. Anderson's photo shop, mid-20th century. Photograph by Rev. Henry Clay Anderson. 

The Post-Civil Rights Era

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics , in 2019, 29% of employed Black Americans worked in education and health services. Another 10% worked in retail trade and 10% in leisure and hospitality. Less than 1% worked in mining, gas, and oil and barely 2% in agriculture, forestry, and fishing.

Architect Norma Sklarek reviewing plans, ca. 1979. Photograph by Jasmin Photo.

Photograph of flight attendant Casey Grant working mid-flight on a 757, 1985–1987.

Bob Johnson, President and founder Black Entertainment Television, in his Georgetown office in the early days of B.E.T evolution , June 5, 1981. Photograph by Milton Williams.

We still have much to learn about the world of work that African Americans have faced over the past four centuries and how it has changed. Until the 20th century, agriculture occupied over 90% of Black workers and now it occupies less than 1%. The causes are many: civil rights activism, affirmative action policies, educational opportunities, entrepreneurial energy, international competition, and the shift from industrial to digital and finance capitalism.

As these photos demonstrate, it is too easy to simply apply labels: “agricultural worker,” “domestic worker,” “skilled tradesman,” “unskilled labor,” “professional,” “union worker.” African Americans are and have been an integral part of the American workforce for centuries.

VIEW PHOTOGRAPHS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS AT WORK

Written by Bill Pretzer, Senior Curator of History; Amira Dehmani, Summer 2023 Stanford in Government Afrofuturism Curatorial Intern; and Douglas Remley, Rights & Publications Manager. Published on September 1, 2023

A Rice Raft, South Carolina

A Rice Raft, South Carolina , captured 1895; printed 1904. Photograph by Strohmeyer & Wyman. Published by Underwood & Underwood. 

A woman with plow and oxen, Alabama

A woman with plow and oxen, Alabama, ca. 1875. Photograph by Russell Bros.

A Black nurse with two white children

A Black nurse with two white children, mid- to late 19th century. 

Picking Strawberries, Plant City, Florida

PICKING STRAWBERRIES, PLANT CITY, FLA. , 1946. 

Weighing cotton, Thomasville, Georgia

No. 44, Weighing Cotton , ca. 1895. From the series Views of Thomasville and Vicinity . Photograph by A. W. Möller. 

A store clerk with a customer, Harlem, New York

A store clerk with a customer, Harlem, New York. Photograph by Lloyd W. Yearwood. 

Councilwoman Hilda Mason in her office, Washington, D. C.

Washington D. C. Councilwoman at Large Hilda Mason of the D. C. Statehood Party in her office in the District Building , July 25, 1983. Photograph by Milton Williams. 

Men outside the United Steelworkers of America, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Men outside the United Steelworkers of America, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 1946. Photograph by Charles "Teenie" Harris. 

A coal miner, Library, Pennsylvania

A coal miner, Library, Pennsylvania, ca. 1947. Photograph by Charles "Teenie" Harris. 

Two young men in wood shop, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Two young men in wood shop, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1930–1950. Photograph by Charles "Teenie" Harris. 

A construction worker, Washington, D.C.

Construction Flag Person , 1978. Photograph by Milton Williams. 

A policeman, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

A policeman in a motorcycle with a sidecar, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, mid-20th century. Photograph by Charles "Teenie" Harris. 

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, Arlington, Virginia

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray Esq. (1910-1985), civil rights lawyer and Episcopal priest was an activist who fought to dismantle segregation and end discrimination through the courts and on the streets , December 21, 1977. Photograph by Milton Williams. 

Shrimpers on boat, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

Shrimpers Eugene Orage and Diogenese Miller on boat, Hilton Head Island, SC , 2004. From the series  Shadows of the Gullah Geechee . Photograph by Pete Marovich. 

A construction worker, Harlem, New York

A construction worker operating a front end loader, Harlem, New York, 1987. Photograph by Lloyd W. Yearwood. 

Salt-N-Pepa recording at Bayside Studios, Queens, New York

Salt-N-Pepa recording at Bayside Studios, February 6, 1989. Photograph by Al Pereira. 

A porter from the Hotel Palomares, Pamona, California

A porter from the Hotel Palomares, Pamona, California, 1885–1899. 

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Photos From the Civil Rights Movement

From rosa park's arrest to the freedom rides, high museum of art.

I Am a Man/ Union Justice Now, Martin Luther King Memorial March for Union Justice and to End Racism, Memphis, Tennessee (1968/1968) by Builder Levy High Museum of Art

The High Museum of Art holds one of the most significant collections of photographs of the Civil Rights Movement. The works in this exhibition are only a small selection of the collection, which includes more than 300 photographs that document the social protest movement, from Rosa Parks’s arrest to the Freedom Rides to the tumultuous demonstrations of the late 1960s. The city of Atlanta—the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—was a hub of civil rights activism and it figures prominently in the collection. Visionary leaders such as Dr. King, Congressman John Lewis, and former mayor Ambassador Andrew Young are featured alongside countless unsung heroes. The photographs in this collection capture the courage and perseverance of individuals who challenged the status quo, armed only with the philosophy of nonviolence and the strength of their convictions.

Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama (1956/1956) by Gordon Parks High Museum of Art

This photograph was originally published in a groundbreaking Life Magazine photo essay by Gordon Parks, which exposed Americans to the effects of racial segregation. Parks focused his attention on a multigenerational family from Alabama. His photographs captured the Thornton family’s everyday struggles to overcome discrimination.

Department Store, Mobile, Alabama (1956/1956) by Gordon Parks High Museum of Art

Gordon Parks's choice of subject matter sets his series of photographs of a family living under segregation in 1956 Alabama apart from others of the period. Rather than focusing on the demonstrations, boycotts, and brutality that characterized the battle for racial justice, Parks emphasized the prosaic details of one family’s life. His ability to elicit empathy through an emphasis on intimacy and shared human experience made them especially poignant.

Rosa Parks Being Fingerprinted, Montgomery, Alabama (1956/1956) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

This photograph was made at the time of Rosa Parks’s second arrest, and was widely reproduced in newspapers and magazines. Civil rights leaders quickly understood the power of photography to help stimulate awareness of their cause and raise funds for their effort to overthrow segregation laws.

Elizabeth Eckford Entering Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas (1957-09-05) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

One of the most iconic images of the civil rights era, this photograph shows 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford walking alone in front of Little Rock High School while being taunted by a menacing, hateful mob. Eckford was alone because she failed to receive notification that the date for desegregating the school had been postponed by a day.

National Guardsman, Montgomery Bus Station, Alabama (1961/1961) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

Members of SNCC Praying at Burned-out Church, Dawson, Georgia (1962/1962) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

March on Washington, D.C. (1963/1963) by Builder Levy High Museum of Art

Builder Levy frequently focuses on social issues, reflecting his personal commitment to causes he has embraced during his thirty-five year tenure as a teacher of at-risk adolescents in a New York inner-city school. This image documents one of the many historic marches on Washington, D.C., that took place during the civil rights era.

Cleaning the Pool, St. Augustine, Florida (1964/1964) by James Kerlin High Museum of Art

The man seen here pouring cleaning agents into a swimming pool occupied by men and women engaging in a “swim-in”, is James Brock, manager of the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida. Like most other white business owners, he banned blacks from his establishment. While the protestors floated in a pool of chemicals, off-duty policemen dove in and arrested them.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, John's County Jail, St. Augustine, FL, 1964 (1964/1964) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

Dr. King and his fellow Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leader Ralph Abernathy led a ten-person contingent to the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, in June 1964. King engaged the owner, James Brock, in a discussion that grew long and heated. King explained the kinds of humiliations blacks endured daily, to which Brock replied – smiling into the television cameras – “I would like to invite my many friends throughout the country to come to Monson’s. We expect to remain segregated.” The police arrived to arrest King and his group. They were held without bail in St. John’s County jail for several days.

Firemen Hosing Demonstrators, Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama (1963/1963) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

CORE Demonstration, Brooklyn, New York (1963/1963) by Leonard Freed High Museum of Art

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Baltimore (1964/1964) by Leonard Freed High Museum of Art

In October 1964, King learned that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. At thirty-five he was the youngest ever recipient. On his way back from Oslo, Norway, to receive his prize he stopped off in Baltimore, where he was thronged by supporters offering congratulations on this landmark honor.

State Troopers Break Up Marchers, Selma, Alabama (1965/1965) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

Civil Rights Demonstrators and Ku Klux Klan Members Share the Same Sidewalk, Atlanta (1964/1964) by Unknown Photographer High Museum of Art

The Ku Klux Klan was picketing a newly desegregated hotel a few doors down from a segregated restaurant where a group of young civil rights workers were protesting. The lettering on a sign held by one of the young demonstrators, bearing the slogan “Atlanta’s Image is a Fraud”, has been enhanced by newsroom staff, presumably to read more effectively in newspaper print. Reflected in reverse in the storefront window behind the protestors is the signage for a Cary Grant movie being screened in a theater across the street.

Coretta King and Family around the Open Casket at the Funeral of Martin Luther King Jr., Atlanta (1968/1968) by Constantine Manos High Museum of Art

Coretta Scott King, Poor People's Campaign, Washington, D.C. (1968/1968) by Larry Fink High Museum of Art

Larry Fink, best known for his portraits of high society reproduced in magazines such as Vanity Fair, was also very engaged with the civil rights cause. He was on hand in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1968 – a month after Dr. King’s assassination - to photograph Coretta Scott King’s arrival at Resurrection City. Fink skillfully framed Mrs. King’s face in the doorjamb of the car, as she is greeted by Fred Bennette, a member of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Garbagemen's Parade, Memphis, Tennessee (1968/1968) by Dennis Brack High Museum of Art

The tenacity and courage of members of the Civil Rights Movement - including those on both sides of the camera - continues to inspire social justice activists today. With protests and cries for equality happening across the United States, images like this one resonate more than ever.

Incredible, Innovative, and Unexpected Contemporay Furniture Designs

Bill traylor's drawings of people, animals, and events, 6 atlanta-based artists who explore place, belonging, and heritage, how iris van herpen transformed fashion, 13 contemporary artworks by atlanta-based artists.

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Photo Essay - The 1963 March on Washington

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Organized by such leading lights of the American civil rights movement as Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin, and A. Philip Randolph, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom drew some quarter of a million demonstrators to the nation's capital. A landmark event among landmark events in an era of fundamental cultural and social change, the March on Washington brought the civil rights movement to a wider public consciousness and helped bring about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Though perhaps less immediately recognizable than his more visible peers in the movement, it was Bayard Rustin (1912–1987) who was perhaps most directly responsible for organizing the massive 1963 demonstration. He's seen here in a photograph by Warren K. Leffler at a press conference concerning the March at the Statler Hotel on 27 August 1963.

This image of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was captured immediately before he delivered his classic, transformative "I Have a Dream" speech in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial on 28 August 1963.

The Calypso singer, musician, actor, and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte (b. 1927) has a long history of involvement with the American civil rights movement, including helping to fund the Freedom Rides. This photograph was taken on 28 August 1963.

James Baldwin (1924–1987), author of Go Tell It on the Mountain , poses for a photograph with the movie star Marlon Brando (1924–2004). Brando financially supported the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), and Baldwin returned from his self-imposed exile in Paris to take part in the struggle for civil rights in his native country.

Political scientist, author, and the first African American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (1950), Dr. Ralph Johnson Bunche (1904–1971) lived a life dedicated to the principles of nonviolence and an untrammeled hope in the capacity of human beings to peacefully coexist.

Many notable entertainers performed for the crowd on the Washington Mall, among them the folk musicians Joan Baez (b. 1941) and Bob Dylan (b. 1941). For many young people of the 1960s Baez's and Dylan's music was the soundtrack of the movement.

Among his many contributions to the American civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, widely considered the first African American labor union in the United States.

When Jackie Robinson (1919–1972) broke Major League baseball's color line in 1947 he forever changed the landscape of American professional sports and popular culture. He appears in this image with his son.

The multitalented Ossie Davis (1917–2005), actor, writer, and director, struggled throughout his long and dignified career to force Hollywood to change its view of African American actors and to offer them roles outside the stereotypes that had trapped earlier performers.

A member of the so-called Rat Pack with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and others, Sammy Davis Jr. (1925–1990) helped to integrate once-segregated nightspots by refusing to perform in them.

Actress and singer, the great Lena Horne (b. 1917) spent much of her film career on the cutting-room floor, at least in the American South. Since southern theaters often refused to show scenes featuring African American performers, many of their scenes or numbers were simply edited out.

Gordon Parks' (1912-2006) photographs graced the covers of Life magazine for nearly two decades and included images of some of the civil rights movement's most important figures. Among the first mainstream African American motion picture directors, as well, Parks helmed such movies as The Learning Tree (1969) and Shaft (1971).

To those who are only familiar with the film actor Charlton Heston's (b. 1923) late political persona, in particular his role as president of the National Rifle Association and liberal bete noi , it may come as something of a surprise that in his younger days he was a strong advocate of gun control, an enemy of segregation, and an outspoken and passionate champion of civil rights for African Americans.

President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) came slowly to the idea of advancing civil rights through mass public demonstration, fearing the reaction of southern politicians and the effect on his own political fortunes. In this image by Cecil Stoughton, the president meets with the leaders of the 1963 March.

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date: 01 August 2024

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Photo Essay: Supporting Minority Enterprise in the late 1960s

In 1968, the ford foundation began to fund minority enterprise and other social investments using a new tool, the program-related investment ( pri ). the breadth of activities that pris funded extended to both inner city and rural environments..

Civil rights leader Rev. Leon Sullivan spearheaded the creation of the Progress Plaza shopping center in Philadelphia — the first minority-owned and developed shopping center in the US.

Local residents contributed the start-up capital for Progress Plaza via Sullivan’s Zion Non-Profit Charitable Trust. Ford Foundation PRI funds gave the project a final boost.

Progress Plaza included the neighborhood’s first grocery store, a much-needed addition to this area, which had been overlooked by white investors and developers.

Ford PRI funds supported the construction of a commercial center in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

The Inner-City Business Improvement Forum financed this minority-owned lumber yard in Detroit. The Forum received $500,000 in PRI funds from Ford to create a loan pool for minority businesses.

San Francisco Gold Co. produced women’s apparel. Ford invested in the company with its PRI funds through an intermediary, the Urban National Corp.

PRIs funded manufacturing businesses such as Hubbard and Co., a hardware producer in Emeryville, California

Trans-Bay Engineers and Builders, an association of minority contractors, built this commercial building in Oakland, California with help from PRI funding.

PRIs were not limited to urban initiatives. A $400,000 Ford investment in the Southern Cooperative Development Fund helped support minority-owned agricultural enterprises in the rural South.

The Grand Marie Vegetable Co-op in Lafayette, Louisiana received financial and technical support from the Southern Cooperative Development Fund.

Supporting Economic Justice? The Ford Foundation’s 1968 Experiment in Program Related Investments

How the largest US foundation began supporting market-based projects in the late 1960s.

In the fall of 2020, the Rockefeller Archive Center launched a new oral history and research project called I nvesting in the Good: Program-Related Investments and the Birth of Impact Investing . Directed by Dr. Rachel Wimpee, the assistant director of Research & Education at the Archive Center, the oral history project will include interviews with pioneers in the field. The book, coauthored by Wimpee, Eric John Abrahamson, and Alec Appelbaum will be developed as a resource for professionals and students in the fields of philanthropy, nonprofit management, and public policy.

• Civil Rights Movement
• Economic Inequality
• Financial Sustainability
• Ford Foundation
• Philanthropic Strategies
• Philanthropy & the Private Sector
• Self-Sustaining Initiatives
• United States

Explore Further

“A very small number of men control all the money and the ideas”: Women Revolutionize Population Programs in the 1970s

Women and technocratic elites clashed at the 1974 World Population Conference. At stake was women’s control over their own bodies.

New Research: Neuroscience Funding, Colorado Coal Strike, Population Control Debate, and the Politics of Crime

The reports featured in this installment draw on several personal papers as well as the archival collections of the Commonwealth Fund, the Population Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others.

New Research: Bat Echolocation, Women’s Reproductive Rights, Tropical Medicine, and Blanchette Rockefeller

In our New Research series, we highlight recently published reports written by researchers who have received RAC travel stipends to pursue their studies in our archival collections.  In this edition of the series, the authors have studied materials in a number of collections of personal papers.  They include the papers of Donald R. Griffin, Joan…

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion?

You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Photography in postwar america, 1945-60.

Le Tricorne

Alexey Brodovitch

Fort Peck Dam, Montana

Margaret Bourke-White

Feet, Wall Street

Lisette Model

New York, N.Y.

Louis Faurer

Irving Penn

William Klein

Rodeo, New York City

Robert Frank

Marian Anderson, contralto, New York

Richard Avedon

Lisa Hostetler Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

“A photograph is not merely a substitute for a glance. It is a sharpened vision. It is the revelation of new and important facts.” This sentiment, expressed by the Photo League photographer Sid Grossman ( 1990.1139.1 ), encapsulates photography’s role in America in the 1940s and ’50s. The era saw the apotheosis of photojournalism and few photographers were unaffected by its rise, whether they joined the bandwagon or reacted against it.

Ushering the age of the image into American culture was Margaret Bourke-White’s Fort Peck Dam, Montana ( 1987.1100.25 ), which appeared on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine in November 1936. For the next three decades, magazines ( Life foremost among them) told the world’s news stories through pictures. World War II was the first major widespread conflict covered extensively by photojournalists, who earned reputations as heroes for risking their lives to visualize the events. W. Eugene Smith was perhaps the most famous postwar photographer to earn his stripes on the battlefield, and, after the war, his photo essays—a form that he perfected in stories such as “Country Doctor” (1948), “Spanish Village” (1951), and “A Man of Mercy” (on Albert Schweitzer, 1954)—were as unrelenting as his war photographs, making the viewer experience the world as the subjects did and demanding a sympathetic response. Smith’s work created this effect both through individual pictures, and by sequencing the photographs in order to create a sense of narrative through mood. His insistence on producing his own layouts made for a tempestuous relationship with the publications for whom he worked, however, and he joined the Magnum photo collective in 1955 in order to work more freely.

The fast-paced world of the photojournalist invaded photography from the late 1930s through the rest of the century, even finding parallels in the fashion magazine. Art directors such as Vogue ‘s M. H. Agfa and Harper’s Bazaar ‘s Alexey Brodovitch ( 2005.100.295 ), who emigrated to America just prior to the war, brought the freedom of small-camera photography developed by photojournalists like Felix H. Man and Martin Munkacsi in Europe to the pages of American fashion magazines. They also brought fresh visual concepts directly from the avant-garde in Paris and incorporated those ideas into their graphic designs. Brodovitch was particularly innovative in this regard; not only did he invent a new visual language for the fashion magazine, but he also hired fashion photographers according to new criteria: he wanted to be “astonished” by radical images and was willing to neglect the display of the merchandise, so he evaluated photographers based on their personal work done outside the fashion studio. His bet was that mood was a better seller than description when it came to fashion. Whether their specialty was elegance or attitude, he encouraged photographers like Irving Penn ( 2002.455.5 ) and Richard Avedon ( 61.565.2 ) to mine their imagination for new images, regardless of whether their interests seemed directly related to fashion. It was principles like these that allowed artists to pursue their own work without compromising their artistic integrity. Two of his most successful protégés made some of their best photographic art during the years they were primarily engaged in fashion photography: Penn made voluptuous nudes and Avedon devoted himself to making stark portraits of cultural figures that interested him.

In the years around World War II, other photographers transcribed documentary photography and photojournalism into personal statements inspired by contemporary social life. Some of them were associated with the Photo League, an organization founded in 1936 when Sid Grossman ( 1990.1139.1 ) and Sol Libsohn broke away from the Film and Photo League to form an organization dedicated to documentary photography and social change. During the McCarthy era, the group increasingly distanced itself from politically sensitive subjects, moving from the model of Lewis Hine to that of Helen Levitt ( 1996.2.1 ) and Lisette Model ( 1988.1029 ), before its dissolution in 1951. Working outside the Photo League were photographers like Louis Faurer ( 1987.1055 )—whose focus on the outcasts and marginal elements of urban life became both a projection of his own complicated experience of the city and a dissenting voice in the increasingly conformist culture of postwar America—and William Klein ( 1989.1038.2 ), whose aggressive, hard-hitting photographic style mimicked New York’s defiant heterogeneity. The culmination of the period was Robert Frank’s photographs in The Americans (such as Rodeo [ 1992.5162.3 ]) and from the late 1950s (such as Fourth of July, Coney Island [ 2002.273 ]), which penetrated the country’s sunny facade to discover a newly powerful yet vulnerable nation overwhelmed by its own importance and struggling with internal strife.

Hostetler, Lisa. “Photography in Postwar America, 1945-60.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phev/hd_phev.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Livingston, Jane. The New York School: Photographs, 1936–1963 . New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1992.

Additional Essays by Lisa Hostetler

• Hostetler, Lisa. “ Photography in Europe, 1945–60 .” (October 2004)
• Hostetler, Lisa. “ The New Documentary Tradition in Photography .” (October 2004)
• Hostetler, Lisa. “ Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography .” (October 2004)
• Hostetler, Lisa. “ Group f/64 .” (October 2004)
• Hostetler, Lisa. “ International Pictorialism .” (October 2004)
• Hostetler, Lisa. “ Pictorialism in America .” (October 2004)
• Hostetler, Lisa. “ The Structure of Photographic Metaphors .” (October 2004)

Related Essays

• Early Documentary Photography
• Kodak and the Rise of Amateur Photography
• Photojournalism and the Picture Press in Germany
• The Structure of Photographic Metaphors
• Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography
• American Ingenuity: Sportswear, 1930s–1970s
• Anselm Kiefer (born 1945)
• Design, 1950–75
• Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004)
• Modern Storytellers: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold
• The New Documentary Tradition in Photography
• Paul Strand (1890–1976)
• Photography in Europe, 1945–60
• Pictorialism in America
• The Pictures Generation
• The Postwar Print Renaissance in America
• Walker Evans (1903–1975)

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Artist or Maker

• Avedon, Richard
• Bourke-White, Margaret
• Brodovitch, Alexey
• Faurer, Louis
• Frank, Robert
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• Hine, Lewis W.
• Klein, William
• Levitt, Helen
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• Arts & Culture

Narrated Photo Essay: Patricia Borjon Lopez on Police Surveillance of Activists During the 1960s and 70s

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Artbound "La Raza" is a KCETLink production in association with the Autry Museum of the American West and UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center .

In the 1960s and 70s, a group of young idealists-activists came together to work on a community newspaper called La Raza that became the voice for the Chicano Movement. With only the barest resources, but a generous amount of dedication, these young men and women changed their world and produced an archive of over 25,000 photographs. Hear their thoughts on the times and its relevance today, while perusing through some photographs not seen in public for decades in this series of narrated slideshows . 

Click right or left to look through the images from the 1960s and 70s. Hit the play button on the bottom right corner to listen to the audio.

Patricia Borjon Lopez

My name is Patricia Lopez. My maiden name was Borjon. At the time that the Chicano movement and La Raza started, I had already moved up to go to university at University of California at Berkeley. Watching all the activity and being somewhat a part of it, I felt like I needed to go back to my own community. I also met Joe Razo, Raul Ruiz, Risco — just really felt like that was home, that I could do something with this people, like I had something to give. We would take our film to be developed in the beginning, until we noticed that so many of our images were lost and we knew we had them. During the time, we were really being surveilled. I mean the surveillance and the infiltration was incredible. I think that was a waste of resources because we weren't doing anything illegal.

Hear more from the other photographers here .

More La Raza stories

Narrated Photo Essay: The Two Sides of Maria's Activism

Narrated Photo Essay: La Raza's Enduring Importance

Narrated Photo Essay: A Time of Many Revolutions

Top Image: LA County Sheriff's Department officer with a rifle on the street during Marcha Por La Justicia | La Raza photograph collection. Courtesy of UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center

Audio mix by: Michael Naeimollah

Do You Know These Photos? Help KCET and UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center

La Raza: The Power of the Paper Unfolds in the Chicano Movement

How a Small Lincoln Heights Church Energized the Chicano Movement

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Photo Essay Cork life in the 1960s

What it is about photographs that can shake the foundations of the present moment so thoroughly?

This is the city of my childhood, where light, poverty, voices and rain flickered through all-too-solid streets, where people seemed dense and solid, too, in ways that would fade away over the years until most of what I remember seems to me now no more substantial than … a photograph, an image snatched in light from the flow of darkness.

– Theo Dorgan  (foreword of ’Cork in the 1960s, Photographs by Anthony Barry’)

ANTHONY BARRY WILL be best known to Cork people for his famous blend of Barry’s Tea, which he created and sold in his shop in Prince’s Street in Cork. He will also be known for his political contribution to Cork, serving in the Dáil and Seanad Éireann and also as Lord Mayor of Cork from 1961 to 1962.

What may surprise some is his artistic vocation, which he pursued throughout his career in both tea blending and politics. Anthony Barry was consumed with the art of photography and never left the house without either his Leica or Rolleiflex camera round his neck. His mission was to record the architecture and people of Cork city.

Every day, as he walked from his home in York Terrace (where he lived from 1944) to the tea shop in Prince’s Street, he would photograph Cork citizens going about their daily business: the commercial and social aspects of the city, but also all the labour of the city, from the ships on the quayside to the shawlies trading on the Coal Quay. His aim was to capture his subjects unaware, thus recording the true goings-on of a city, whether it be the idle musings of those waiting in a bus queue or the smartly turned out family on a trip into the city.

– Orla Kelly (co-complier of ’Cork in the 1960s, Photographs by Anthony Barry’)

“The Irish Independent office at 35 Patrick’s Street when the Cork Examiner had competition from its Dublin rivals. A poster for the Sunday Independent focuses on the birth control debate, a hot topic in 1960s Ireland following the marketing of the pill, and sport and wedding photographs adorn the window. Outside, the chrome-plated Silver Cross pram was the essence of comfort for small babies.”

“A friendly conversation on the South Mall with a garda. The Edinburgh Assurance Co. and Royal Insurance Co. are in the background of this image. The South Mall was the commercial heart of the city – home to banks, stockbrokers, auctioneers, members of the legal profession and insurance companies. Parked beside the tree is an Austin Maxi.”

“Two women wait in the doorway of Fred Archer, silversmith and jeweller, at 67 Patrick’s Street, also home to Stephen J. Scully, a  Chartered Quantity Surveyor.”

“Waiting for a bus on Patrick’s Street. The shop in the background was once owned by Liptons and later became part of the Five Star supermarket chain.”

(1/2) “These two pictures show the contrasting sides of life in 1960s Cork. In one two nuns in their traditional garb stop for a chat with a friend outside Egan’s ecclesiastical department, while in the other… ”

(2/2) “…we see two ladies dressed in the very height of fashion – one with a plaid skirt complete with matching wide tie, the other in designer tights, although she still sports the more traditional headscarf.”

“Queuing for a bus outside the limestone façade of the National Bank, South Mall, which also had a branch on Patrick’s Street.”

“Two women, who appear to be wearing the West Cork cloak, make an ethereal silhouette while walking down Patrick’s Street. Parked near the old post box is a Ford Anglia car.”

“Handing over the bag of customary Thompsons cakes outside this 1-hour dry cleaners. Thompsons had been the most popular cake manufacturers in the city since 1894 – snowballs, chocolate tarts, long doughnuts, custard slices and apple turnovers were just some of the selection available. On the left is Patricia O’Brien, with her sister, Chrissie, on the right.”

“Messenger boys bikes were a common sight in Cork; many a young lad delivered messages to the more opulent addresses in Douglas, Blackrock and Montenotte. Some of these daredevils raced down Patrick’s Hill at breakneck speed with little regard for life or limb. In the background are the Cactus Chinese Restaurant, Burton’s, Fitzgerald’s and McKechnie’s cleaners and dyers.”

“The heat in Kinsale on this day out appears to be having a soporific effect on day-trippers.”

“A young girl digs with her shovel as the steeple of Shandon, Cork’s most iconic building, towers behind on Eason’s Hill.”

“White gloves at the ready, directing traffic near the Gas Consumers Co. store at the top of Patrick’s Street.”

“No traffic jams on this quiet shopping day on Patrick’s Street. A garda stands talking to a man alongside a Ford Cortina Mark I. The Ever Ready vehicle parked across the road is a Commer van, in front of the van is an Opel Record estate, and the taxi parked at the end of the street is a Ford Consul.”

These are just some of the incredible photographs featured in ‘Cork in the 1960s: Photographs by Anthony Barry’ (compiled by Orla Kelly, Terry Kelly and Michael Lenihan), due to be released in November 2014.  Preorder now through  Mercier Press .

A break in the rain: Peaceful scenes in Killarney before storm clouds roll in

Here’s how beautiful dublin looked this morning.

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‘Who is the Enemy Here?’

The vietnam war Pictures That Moved Them Most

While the Vietnam War raged — roughly two decades’ worth of bloody and world-changing years — compelling images made their way out of the combat zones. On television screens and magazine pages around the world, photographs told a story of a fight that only got more confusing, more devastating, as it went on. As Jon Meacham describes in this week’s issue of TIME , the pictures from that period can help illuminate the “demons” of Vietnam.

And, in the decades since, the most striking of those images have retained their power. Think of the War in Vietnam and the image in your mind is likely one that was first captured on film, and then in the public imagination. How those photographs made history is underscored throughout the new documentary series The Vietnam War , from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. The series features a wide range of war images, both famous and forgotten.

But few people have a better grasp on the role of photography in Vietnam than the photographers themselves, and those who lived and worked alongside them. With the war once again making headlines, TIME asked a number of those individuals to select an image from the period that they found particularly significant, and to explain why that photograph moved them the most.

Here, lightly edited, are their responses.

—Lily Rothman and Alice Gabriner

Don McCullin

Don McCullin— Contact Press Images

My picture of the U.S. corpsman carrying an injured child away from the battle in Hué is a rare occasion to show the true value of human kindness and the dignity of man. The child was found wandering the previous night between the North Vietnamese and the American firing lines. His parents had probably been killed.

They took the child into a bunker, cleaned him up and dressed his wounds under candlelight. These hard Marines suddenly became the most gentle, loving persons. It was almost a religious experience for me to record this extraordinary event.

The following morning, this corpsman took the child to the rear of the battle zone where he could be handed over for more medical attention. He carried the child as if it were his own, wrapped into a poncho, because it was quite cold. A naked limb is hanging from the poncho. Looking back today on this picture I took so long ago I can see that there is an echo here of the famous Robert Capa image of the woman whose head had been shaved at the end of WWII because she was considered to be a Nazi collaborator and had a child — whom she hugs to her chest — with a German soldier. I didn’t think of Capa when I pressed the shutter, but I believe both images share an emotional impact because they involve children. Though Capa’s illustrates cruelty, my corpsman illustrates humanity, almost saintliness — a man carrying a child away from the sorrow and injuries of war.

Howard Sochurek

Tania Sochurek, widow of photographer Howard Sochurek:

The conflict in Vietnam spanned almost 20 years. Howard was a staff photographer for LIFE in the early 1950s, when he was first assigned to cover the fighting in what was then Indochina. He was there on the ground for the brutal — and historic — fall of Dien Bien Phu that marked the end of the French involvement in the region.

It’s insane to think that these three young children with grenades were going off to fight the Viet Minh army. Sadly, they probably died quickly in the war. This is a photo that Howard felt was very powerful.

In 1954, Howard was again on assignment in Vietnam when he was called home to Milwaukee to be with his mother, who was terminally ill. The acclaimed photographer Robert Capa came in to take his place and cover the fighting. A short time later, Capa was killed by a land mine while out on a mission with the U.S. troops. Over the years, Howard would often tell this story and recall sadly that Capa had died covering his assignment. He was immensely proud to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award for “superlative photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise abroad” from the Overseas Press Club in 1955.

Gilles Caron

Robert Pledge, co-founder of Contact Press Images:

Who is the enemy here? The soldier, seen from the back, facing a Vietnamese woman hugging a baby, with a half-naked boy by her side? Or is it the young woman and her two children being confronted by an American GI? Are there not always two sides to a coin?

We are in a small hamlet near Dakto late in 1967, barely two months away from the Têt Offensive. The turning point of the five-year-old war, the offensive by elusive Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces failed in military terms but constituted a political victory in the arena of international public opinion. America was losing the war at home; David was defeating Goliath.

Gilles Caron’s atypical vertical image of a face-to-face encounter exposes deep cultural divide and distrust. Fear, tension and uncertainty are visible in the contained defiance of the mother and the awkward posture of the young warrior clutching his automatic rifle. Other locals and American military are nearby; the anxious glance of the child indicates as much. The contact sheets from that day reveal that the straw roofs would be set ablaze and the hamlet burnt down because of the suspicion that the villagers were harboring communist guerrilla forces by night.

In 1970, Caron would be captured by the Khmer Rouge, in neighboring Cambodia, never to be seen again. He had just turned 30.

Still images rarely give straightforward answers but they do offer illuminating clues for those who take the time to delve into them. Caron’s career in photography was very short — 1966 to 1970 — but his exceptional talent, intelligence, commitment and ubiquity leave us with an unmatched visual legacy.

Philip Jones Griffiths

Philip Jones Griffiths—Magnum Photos

Fenella Ferrato, daughter of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:

Philip Jones Griffiths was born in a small town in the North of Wales in 1936, before the start of the Second World War. When American GIs landed on British shores they exuded generosity to their allies, giving away candy, nylons and cigarettes. I remember him telling the story of being lined up in the playground and being handed a Mars bar by a tall GI. He was instantly suspicious. A Mars bar was a very special thing indeed. Why were these uniformed men just giving them away?

This was Philip’s first glimpse into the efforts of an American army trying to win over “hearts and minds.” When he got to Vietnam he instantly recognized the same tactic being used there. This image perfectly shows the seductive and corrupting influence of consumerism on the innocent civilians of Vietnam.

Katherine Holden, daughter of photographer Philip Jones Griffiths:

This picture was taken by my father, Philip Jones Griffiths, in Vietnam in 1968 during the battle for Saigon. This is not a normal “war” photograph. It is not often you see “enemies” cradling each other. However, the American GIs often showed compassion toward the Viet Cong. This sprang from a soldierly admiration for their dedication and bravery — qualities difficult to discern in the average government soldier.

This particular Viet Cong had fought for three days with his intestines in a cooking bowl strapped onto his stomach. Francis Ford Coppola was so inspired by this image that he included a scene in his 1979 film Apocalypse Now with the famous line, “Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped on him can drink from my canteen any day.”

Hal Buell, former photography director at the Associated Press, who led their photo operations during the Vietnam War:

In all wars, the battlefield medic is often the stopgap between life and death. AP photographer Henri Huet, under heavy enemy fire, saw that role through his lens and captured the uncommon dedication that medic Thomas Cole displayed in this memorable photo. Cole, himself wounded, peered beneath his bandaged eye to treat the wounds of a fallen Marine. Despite his wounds, Cole continued to attend the injured in Vietnam’s central highlands in January, 1966. This photo was only one of several Huet made of Cole that were published on the cover and inside pages of LIFE magazine.

A year later Huet was seriously wounded and was treated by medics until evacuated. In 1971 Huet died in a helicopter shot down over Laos.

War Zone ‘C’ – Ambush of the 173rd Airborne, 1965. Tim Page

It was Larry Burrows who had to teach me how to load my first Leica M3; I got it as a perk having just had this image run as a vertical double truck in a 5-page spread in LIFE in the fall of ’65.

At the same time that Hello Dolly opened at Nha Trang airbase, a company of 173rd Airborne had walked into an ambush in Viet Cong base zone, known as the Iron Triangle. The sign had read “American who read this die.”

A class of prime youth shredded in seconds.

The dust-offs started coming within 30 minutes. I got a ride back to Ton San Nhut and was downtown in Room 401 of the Caravelle in another 30. Mostly, I remember carrying a badly wounded grunt whose leg came off and he almost bled out. The shot was made one-handed as we carried him out of the fire cone.

Dirck Halstead

We rarely see images of Armies in full retreat.

Generally, the photographers who might have shot some of those images have long since bugged out, or have been captured or killed.

In mid-April of 1975, a small group of American journalists were invited to fly into the small provincial capital of Xuan Loc, South Vietnam, 35 miles north of Saigon, by commander Le Minh Dao. A siege by a massive North Vietnamese force was about to take place. The helicopter Dao sent to Saigon to pick us up deposited us just outside the town. Neither we, nor General Dao, had expected the tide of advancing communist forces to so quickly and completely surround the town.

General Dao, however, was full of vim and eager for the battle. Slapping a swagger stick along his leg, he quickly loaded the two journalists who had accepted his invitation, myself and UPI reporter Leon Daniel, into a Jeep and barreled into the town. At first, we thought it was deserted. Then slowly, and one by one, South Vietnamese troopers began to stick their heads out of foxholes they had dug in the streets. Dao yelled that they were prepared to fight the enemy, come what may. However, we noted with more than a little trepidation that none of them were budging from their holes as Dao led us down the dusty street. Suddenly, a mortar shell landed in the dust no more than 10 feet from us. It was followed by a barrage of incoming automatic weapon and artillery rounds.

Dao wisely called an end to his press tour. We tore back to a landing zone that we had arrived at less than an hour later. Dao called in a helicopter to evacuate us, but suddenly, the ARVN troops who had been seated alongside the road broke and ran for the incoming helos. In less time than it takes to tell, the panicked soldiers swarmed into the helicopter, which was to be our only way out. Crewmen tried to turn them back, but the helicopter lurched into the air with two soldiers hanging from the skids.

At that moment, Leon and I had a sinking feeling that we were going to be part of the fall of Xuan Loc. For us, the war looked like it was about to be over.

However, Dao had one more trick up his sleeve, and he called in his personal helicopter behind his headquarters. As we made a run for it, the General grabbed me by the arm, and said, “Tell your people that you have seen how the 18th division knows how to fight and die. Now go — and if you are invited back, don’t come!”

Joe Galloway

Joe Galloway—UPI/Getty Images

I snapped this photo at [the Battle of la Drang], LZ X-Ray, on Nov. 15, 1965. At the moment I hit the button I did not recognize the GI who was dashing across the clearing to load the body of a comrade aboard the waiting Huey helicopter.

Later I realized that I had shot a photo, in the heat of battle, of my childhood friend from the little town of Refugio, Texas. Vince Cantu and I went through school together right to graduation with the Refugio High School Class of 1959 — a total of 55 of us. The next time I saw Vince was on that terrible bloody ground in the la Drang. Each of us was terribly afraid that the other was going to be killed in the next minutes.

When my book about the war, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, came out in 1992, Vince Cantu was driving a city bus in Houston. His bosses read the papers and discovered they had a real hero pushing one of their buses. So they made Vince a Supervisor and all he did from then to retirement was stand in the door with a clipboard checking buses in and out.

A story with a happy ending.

Larry Burrows

Russell Burrows, son of photographer Larry Burrows:

The fraction of a second captured in most photographs is just that: a snapshot of a moment in time. Sometimes, even in war, that moment can tell a whole story with clarity, but it can be ambiguous too.

The photograph that ran in LIFE in late October 1966 of Gunnery Sergeant Jeremiah Purdie, bleeding and bandaged, helped down a muddy hill by fellow marines, didn’t really need a caption. The written account around the photograph and a dozen others that brought Operation Prairie to LIFE’s readers told of infiltrating troops and of efforts to thwart them — of hills taken and given up. The detail not given was that Gunny Purdie’s commanding officer had just been killed on that hill, the radio operator “cut in half.” Neither did the article mention that the CO had called in artillery fire on his own position. Purdie was being restrained from turning back to aid his CO.

A few frames later, Larry Burrows took another photograph: Purdie is still being held back, but in front of him is another wounded man and Purdie’s arms are outstretched. The scene is as wretched as the other. Purdie, wounded for the third time in the war, was about to be flown to a hospital ship off the Vietnamese coast and leave that country for his last time. This photograph has come to be known as “Reaching Out.”

My father, Larry Burrows, selected that frame himself, but it wasn’t until more than four years later, after he was shot down and killed, that it was published for the first time. The composition of the photograph has been compared to the work of the old masters, but some see it more cinematically: as if you could run a film backwards and forwards to view more of the story. Exhibiting museums have found in it Christian iconography. And at least one psychiatrist treating war veterans has used it in his practice.

My father didn’t know that Jeremiah Purdie had enlisted in a segregated Marine Corps 18 years earlier, that cooking in the mess and polishing shoes were the limits placed on his service. He didn’t know that before Purdie’s persistence finally earned him a transfer to the infantry, he had taken courses at the Marine Corps Institute, confident that the transfer would come and he would be ready. Unknowable then was also the life Purdie would live after his 20 years in the Marine Corps, or how important to him faith would become.

At Jeremiah Purdie’s packed funeral, there wasn’t a man or a woman with a story to tell that didn’t mention how, in some way, he had reached out.

David Hume Kennerly

Long-forgotten photographs sometimes leap out at me and I am stunned by certain moments that I documented that were so routine when I made them, but are now infused with new emotion and meaning. This picture of a haunted-looking young American GI taking refuge under a poncho from monsoon rains in the jungles outside of Da Nang while on patrol in 1972 is one of them. The soldier’s eyes reveal, and you don’t need a caption to explain it, that he most likely experienced hell along the way.

During the time I spent with him and his platoon they didn’t come into direct contact with the enemy, but there was always a common undercurrent that ran through them, a palpable anxiety and fear about what could come their way in a split second. These men had seen buddies cut in half by shrapnel from an incoming round, or watched a friend’s head explode from a bullet between the eyes that earned him a one-way ticket home in a body bag. Many had that intense blaze of realization when a comrade was suddenly, violently, unexpectedly gone, and marveled at still being left intact. Some experienced a flash of guilt when in a starkly honest millisecond they thought, “Glad it was him, not me.” That big ugly candid moment was immediately pushed down, but it would creep back every now and then, especially back in the world when they gave a hug to their new child, the one their dead buddy would never have.

This image of the sheltering soldier is particularly compelling to me for what I don’t know. What was his next act, and what happened after he returned from Vietnam? The photo didn’t win any prizes, might not even been published, but as a flash forward it represents every soldier who returns from any war after the battles were history, guns silenced and the odds of getting killed beaten.

Paul Schutzer

Bernice Schutzer Galef, widow of photographer Paul Schutzer:

Paul got carried away with all the emotions that happen in war, and he was right in there with the soldiers in battles. He saw everything; he saw the fatigue of the American soldiers, their fear, the prisoner’s fear. There was one photo of prisoners being guarded by an American soldier about 18 years old. The captives were young children and old women and one woman is nursing her baby. Unfortunately the young soldier was later killed but this image conveyed the senselessness and horror of how the human condition was playing out. The soldiers were very sympathetic to the civilians and one medic befriended them. The last photo in the photo essay shows the medic and a child walking away together, holding hands, and the child’s head is burned from napalm. It was the first time that Americans saw and learned that we were using napalm. Paul received many letters saying “thank you for what you showed us.”

David Burnett

David Burnett—Contact Press Images

In the days before “embeds” — this generation’s enforced melding of photographer and military unit — there was a certain sense of freedom we owned as photographers, being able to go directly to where the story was. In Vietnam in the early 1970s, the only real limitation was finding a ride. But nearly until the end of the U.S. war, if a helicopter or truck had a seat available, they would take you along.

We would often “embed” ourselves with a platoon or squad, but it was more of a gentleman’s agreement than any kind of official policy, based in the main on the idea that we, the photographers, were there to tell their story, and they, the soldiers, realized that unlike them, we didn’t have to be there. It was by choice. It created a sense of mutual respect that in many ways is challenged by the new “embed” ethos. That said, it was often a world of anonymous photographers spending time with anonymous soldiers. So while we would talk with the troops about what was happening that day, there were many moments where in the course of making photographs, I would just keep moving along. I usually knew the unit but looking back now, so much I wish I had noted was simply never written down. It was forever a search for a picture, and you never knew, sometimes for weeks, whether you had that picture or not. My film had to make it all the way to New York before it could be processed and edited.

One morning near the end of the unsuccessful Laos invasion of early 1971 (an attempt to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail), I wandered into a group of young soldiers who were tasked with fixing tanks and track vehicles which were regularly being rocketed by North Vietnamese troops just down the road. This soldier and I exchanged pleasantries the way you would in the dusty heat. He went back to work after reading a letter from home, and I moved on to another unit. But for that fraction of a second, in his face, his posture, was all the fatigue and despair of a young soldier who is surely wondering what in the hell he’s doing there, so far from home.

Catherine Leroy

Catherine Leroy—Dotation Catherine Leroy

Fred Ritchin, Dean Emeritus of the School at ICP:

There is something both surreal and strikingly sad in this photograph by Catherine Leroy. An empty helmet — is its owner still alive? — is shown front and center, resting on the ground in the soft gray light like a discarded soup bowl or a cleaved skull. It is photographed as if forming the center of a broken compass, one without arms, pointing nowhere. In the fairly rendered background a soldier, probably wounded, is seen surrounded by comrades who, somehow, form an awkward Pietà. The violent spectacle has temporarily receded, and the reader, in this previously unpublished photograph, is given its remains, both the sacred and the partly absurd.

Leroy went from France to Vietnam in 1966 at the age of 21, with a single camera, no assignments and $150 in her pocket; she would stay until 1968. She managed to get accredited by the Associated Press, covered numerous battles, was seriously wounded by shrapnel that would remain in her body, parachuted into combat (small and thin, she was weighed down so as not to be blown away), was taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese (which she used as an opportunity to produce a cover story for LIFE Magazine), and remained obsessed by the war until her death in 2006.

Consumed by a ferocious anger at the hypocrisies of politics at various levels, in her last years Leroy created a website and then a book, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam , paying homage to her colleagues 40 years after the war had ended.

Released prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. Sal Veder—AP

I had photographed POWs returning home time and again, and been in Vietnam on two tours myself, as a photographer. On that day, There were 30 or 40 photographers boarded on a flat-bed, including TV. I was photographing a different family and out of the corner of my eye saw the action and turned. I was lucky to get a break. It was a great moment for Americans! The joyousness of the reunion and the coming together of the family as a visual is outstanding because it was the end of the war. We were glad to get it over with. I’m thankful that this is my picture. I feel it’s symbolic, but I’m conflicted about it, knowing what I know. The picture is there and it comes back up again. There is no way to avoid it.

My older brother Huynh Thanh My, who was killed covering the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, always told me that an image could stop the war and that was his goal. I was devastated when he died. I was very young. But there and then, I decided to follow in his footsteps and complete his mission. A few years later on that fateful day in 1972 on the Trang Bang road, my brother’s goal was accomplished. No one was expecting people to come out of the bombed-out burning buildings, but when they did, I was ready with my Leica camera and I feel my brother guided me to capture that image. The rest is history.

Yoichi Okamoto

As tens of thousands of anti-war protestors rioted in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, President Johnson and his family watched from the bedroom at his ranch in Stonewall, Texas. Yoichi Okamoto—LBJ Library

Pete Souza, former White House photographer for Presidents Reagan and Obama:

This is truly an incredibly intimate picture. The caption provides pertinent information about the circumstance: the who, what and where. But I’m fascinated by the photograph because of the man behind the camera: Yoichi Okamoto. The first civilian hired as Chief White House Photographer, Okamoto also became the first one to truly document the Presidency for history. It’s obvious looking at this photograph that he had unfettered access to LBJ and that everyone was comfortable with him being in the room — even when the room was the President’s bedroom.

Raymond Depardon

Richard Nixon campaigns in Sioux City, Iowa, October 1968. Raymond Depardon—Magnum

(Translated from the French)

After I photographed the Democratic Convention in Chicago, which was very turbulent and contested, I wanted to photograph the future President. I worked for a little cooperative French agency, Gamma, which we had created a few years earlier. I arrived from Miami on the press plane that accompanied the candidate. We were positioned at a little airport in Sioux City. It was the morning. It was windy. Nixon left the plane.

I almost did not make the photo — the man with the flag and Nixon on top of the aircraft stairs. It was too much.

Art Greenspon

Art Greenspon—AP

Excerpted from a 2013 interview with Art Greenspon by Peter van Agtmael, a Magnum photographer who has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“As the first medevac chopper hovered overhead I saw the First Sergeant with his arms in the air. I saw the medic shouldering wounded and then I saw the kid on his back in the grass. I have got to get all this in one picture , I thought. My heart was pounding. Was 1/60 fast enough? Screw it. Shoot pictures. I got three frames off, and the moment was gone.

I knew what was in the camera, but when I went to wind back the film, I couldn’t. The film in my Nikon had become stuck to the pressure plate from all the moisture. My Leica was soaked, too, and I wasn’t sure what kind of pictures it was producing.

The weather closed in again. I had given all of my food away so I didn’t eat for two days. I wrapped my cameras in a damp towel and put them in my pack. I guarded that pack like a mother hen.

I flew out with the second chopper loaded with body bags. A kid headed out for R&R and a floor stacked with KIAs [killed in action]. War sucks.”

Alice Gabriner , who edited this photo essay, is TIME’s International Photo Editor.

Lily Rothman is the History and Archives Editor for TIME.

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Afghanistan in the 1950s and ’60s

• Alan Taylor
• July 2, 2013

Fractured by internal conflict and foreign intervention for centuries, Afghanistan made several tentative steps toward modernization in the mid-20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, some of the biggest strides were made toward a more liberal and westernized lifestyle, while trying to maintain a respect for more conservative factions. Though officially a neutral nation, Afghanistan was courted and influenced by the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War, accepting Soviet machinery and weapons, and U.S. financial aid. This time was a brief, relatively peaceful era, when modern buildings were constructed in Kabul alongside older traditional mud structures, when burqas became optional for a time, and the country appeared to be on a path toward a more open, prosperous society. Progress was halted in the 1970s, as a series of bloody coups, invasions, and civil wars began, continuing to this day, reversing almost all of the steps toward modernization taken in the 50s and 60s. Note: This post originally mischaracterized life expectancy in Afghanistan in the 1950s. We regret the error.

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Picture taken in 1962 at the Faculty of Medicine in Kabul of two Afghan medicine students listening to their professor (at right) as they examine a plaster cast showing a part of a human body. #

Men stroll past roadside vendors as a painted truck makes its way through the busy street in Kabul, Afghanistan, November, 1961. #

The modern new (completed 1966) government printing plant in Kabul, on June 9, 1966, which houses Kabul Times. Most of its machinery was furnished by West Germany. #

Architecture in Kabul, Afghanistan, seen on May 28, 1968. #

Street scene in Kabul, Afghanistan in November, 1961. #

Afghan boys, men, and women, some in bare feet, shop at a marketplace in Kabul, Afghanistan, in May of 1964. #

Motorcade for President Eisenhower's visit to Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 9, 1959. Eisenhower met briefly with the 45-year-old Afghan king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, to discuss Soviet influence in the region and increased U.S. aid to Afghanistan. #

Residents of Afghanistan line the route of U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower's tour in Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 9, 1959. #

Dancers perform in street of Kabul, Afghanistan, December 9, 1959 following President Eisenhower's arrival from Karachi. After a five hour stay in Kabul, Ike flew on to New Delhi. #

Afghan Air Force Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 fighters and Ilyushin Il-28 bombers in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the visit of the U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, in December of 1959. #

A shopfront display of fruits and nuts in Kabul, in November of 1961. #

Children in a Kabul street, November, 1961. #

A modern traffic light stands incongruously amid burqa-clad women sitting on a Kabul street corner with their backs to their men on May 25, 1964. #

Afghan women, men, and child in traditional dress ride in a cart through an arid, rocky landscape, November, 1959. #

An Afghan worker checks a Russian-made truck in the Kabul Janagalak factory in an unspecified date. The factory situated in the center of the city as the only firm for making vehicle's chassis was plundered, like other public properties in the Afghan capital, during the Afghan mujahedin rule from 1992 to 1996. #

The entrance to the Karkar coal mine around 12 kilometers northeast of Pulikhumri, the provincial town of the Northern province of Baghlan. The Karkar coal deposit at one time met the needs of Kabul city. #

A caravan of mules and camels cross the high, winding trails of the Lataband Pass in Afghanistan on the way to Kabul, on October 8, 1949. #

In Washington, District of Columbia, Afghan King Mohammad Zahir Shah talks with US President John F. Kennedy in the car that took them to the White House on September 8, 1963. #

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (black hat), and Marshal Nikolai Bulganin review an Afghan honor guard wearing old German uniforms, on their arrival in Kabul, Afghanistan, on December 15, 1955. At left is the Afghan Prime Minister Sardar Mohammed Daud Khan, and behind, in cap, the foreign minister, Prince Naim. #

Street scene in Kabul, in November of 1966. #

Activity in a city park in Kabul, on May 28, 1968. #

This photo shows the now-destroyed Kabul-Herat highway, that linked the Afghan capital to the Iranian border city of Mashad. Built in the early second half of the 20th century, the highway has been virtually destroyed through decades of warfare. #

Modern new Finance Ministry building in Kabul, on June 9, 1966, with a public, western-style cafeteria and sidewalk restaurant, facing a water fountain which is illuminated in color at night. #

Kabul, Afghanistan, November 1961. #

Scene inside the modern new government printing plant in Kabul on June 9, 1966, which houses Kabul Times. #

Tajbeg (Queen's) Palace, the Palace of Amanullah Khan in Kabul, photographed on October 8, 1949. Amanullah Khan, King of Afghanistan in the early 20th century, attempted to modernize his country and make many reforms to eliminate many age-old customs and habits. His ambitious plans and ideas were based on what he had seen during a visit to Europe. Click here to see a present-day view of the palace, now an abandoned wreck. #

A quiet scene in a street through the bazaar of Kabul, on December 31, 1969. #

A panoramic view showing the old and new buildings in Kabul, in August of 1969. The Kabul River flows through the city, center right. In the background on the hilltop is the mausoleum of late King Mohammad Nadir Shah. #

Afghan man leading laden camels and donkeys through an arid, rocky landscape, in November, 1959. #

The King of Afghanistan, Mohammad Zahir Shah rides in his limousine on Kabul's central road Idga Wat in this 1968 photo. Zahir Shah, the last of King of Afghanistan lived in exile in Rome since a 1973 coup, returning to Afghanistan in 2002, after the removal of the Taliban. He passed away in Kabul in 2007, at the age of 92. #

Afghan boys play with kites as men walk past, in November of 1959. #

Vendors sell various fuits and nuts at an outdoor market in Kabul, in November of 1961. #

Women, wearing traditional burqas and Persian slippers, walk alongside men, cars and horse carts, in a street in Kabul, in 1951. At the time, this street was one of only three paved streets in the capital city. #

A view of one of the new mosques erected in the suburb of Kabul, in November of 1961. #

Afghan boys, men, and a woman walk through a street in Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 26, 1954. #

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How to Create an Engaging Photo Essay (with Examples)

Photo essays tell a story in pictures. They're a great way to improve at photography and story-telling skills at once. Learn how to do create a great one.

Learn | Photography Guides | By Ana Mireles

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Photography is a medium used to tell stories – sometimes they are told in one picture, sometimes you need a whole series. Those series can be photo essays.

If you’ve never done a photo essay before, or you’re simply struggling to find your next project, this article will be of help. I’ll be showing you what a photo essay is and how to go about doing one.

You’ll also find plenty of photo essay ideas and some famous photo essay examples from recent times that will serve you as inspiration.

If you’re ready to get started, let’s jump right in!

Table of Contents

What is a Photo Essay?

A photo essay is a series of images that share an overarching theme as well as a visual and technical coherence to tell a story. Some people refer to a photo essay as a photo series or a photo story – this often happens in photography competitions.

Photographic history is full of famous photo essays. Think about The Great Depression by Dorothea Lange, Like Brother Like Sister by Wolfgang Tillmans, Gandhi’s funeral by Henri Cartier Bresson, amongst others.

What are the types of photo essay?

Despite popular belief, the type of photo essay doesn’t depend on the type of photography that you do – in other words, journalism, documentary, fine art, or any other photographic genre is not a type of photo essay.

Instead, there are two main types of photo essays: narrative and thematic .

As you have probably already guessed, the thematic one presents images pulled together by a topic – for example, global warming. The images can be about animals and nature as well as natural disasters devastating cities. They can happen all over the world or in the same location, and they can be captured in different moments in time – there’s a lot of flexibility.

A narrative photo essa y, on the other hand, tells the story of a character (human or not), portraying a place or an event. For example, a narrative photo essay on coffee would document the process from the planting and harvesting – to the roasting and grinding until it reaches your morning cup.

What are some of the key elements of a photo essay?

• Tell a unique story – A unique story doesn’t mean that you have to photograph something that nobody has done before – that would be almost impossible! It means that you should consider what you’re bringing to the table on a particular topic.
• Put yourself into the work – One of the best ways to make a compelling photo essay is by adding your point of view, which can only be done with your life experiences and the way you see the world.
• Add depth to the concept – The best photo essays are the ones that go past the obvious and dig deeper in the story, going behind the scenes, or examining a day in the life of the subject matter – that’s what pulls in the spectator.
• Nail the technique – Even if the concept and the story are the most important part of a photo essay, it won’t have the same success if it’s poorly executed.
• Build a structure – A photo essay is about telling a thought-provoking story – so, think about it in a narrative way. Which images are going to introduce the topic? Which ones represent a climax? How is it going to end – how do you want the viewer to feel after seeing your photo series?
• Make strong choices – If you really want to convey an emotion and a unique point of view, you’re going to need to make some hard decisions. Which light are you using? Which lens? How many images will there be in the series? etc., and most importantly for a great photo essay is the why behind those choices.

9 Tips for Creating a Photo Essay

Credit: Laura James

1. Choose something you know

To make a good photo essay, you don’t need to travel to an exotic location or document a civil war – I mean, it’s great if you can, but you can start close to home.

Depending on the type of photography you do and the topic you’re looking for in your photographic essay, you can photograph a local event or visit an abandoned building outside your town.

It will be much easier for you to find a unique perspective and tell a better story if you’re already familiar with the subject. Also, consider that you might have to return a few times to the same location to get all the photos you need.

2. Follow your passion

Most photo essays take dedication and passion. If you choose a subject that might be easy, but you’re not really into it – the results won’t be as exciting. Taking photos will always be easier and more fun if you’re covering something you’re passionate about.

3. Take your time

A great photo essay is not done in a few hours. You need to put in the time to research it, conceptualizing it, editing, etc. That’s why I previously recommended following your passion because it takes a lot of dedication, and if you’re not passionate about it – it’s difficult to push through.

4. Write a summary or statement

Photo essays are always accompanied by some text. You can do this in the form of an introduction, write captions for each photo or write it as a conclusion. That’s up to you and how you want to present the work.

5. Learn from the masters

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Making a photographic essay takes a lot of practice and knowledge. A great way to become a better photographer and improve your storytelling skills is by studying the work of others. You can go to art shows, review books and magazines and look at the winners in photo contests – most of the time, there’s a category for photo series.

6. Get a wide variety of photos

Think about a story – a literary one. It usually tells you where the story is happening, who is the main character, and it gives you a few details to make you engage with it, right?

The same thing happens with a visual story in a photo essay – you can do some wide-angle shots to establish the scenes and some close-ups to show the details. Make a shot list to ensure you cover all the different angles.

Some of your pictures should guide the viewer in, while others are more climatic and regard the experience they are taking out of your photos.

7. Follow a consistent look

Both in style and aesthetics, all the images in your series need to be coherent. You can achieve this in different ways, from the choice of lighting, the mood, the post-processing, etc.

8. Be self-critical

Once you have all the photos, make sure you edit them with a good dose of self-criticism. Not all the pictures that you took belong in the photo essay. Choose only the best ones and make sure they tell the full story.

9. Ask for constructive feedback

Often, when we’re working on a photo essay project for a long time, everything makes perfect sense in our heads. However, someone outside the project might not be getting the idea. It’s important that you get honest and constructive criticism to improve your photography.

How to Create a Photo Essay in 5 Steps

Credit: Quang Nguyen Vinh

1. Choose your topic

This is the first step that you need to take to decide if your photo essay is going to be narrative or thematic. Then, choose what is it going to be about?

Ideally, it should be something that you’re interested in, that you have something to say about it, and it can connect with other people.

2. Research your topic

To tell a good story about something, you need to be familiar with that something. This is especially true when you want to go deeper and make a compelling photo essay. Day in the life photo essays are a popular choice, since often, these can be performed with friends and family, whom you already should know well.

3. Plan your photoshoot

Depending on what you’re photographing, this step can be very different from one project to the next. For a fine art project, you might need to find a location, props, models, a shot list, etc., while a documentary photo essay is about planning the best time to do the photos, what gear to bring with you, finding a local guide, etc.

Every photo essay will need different planning, so before taking pictures, put in the required time to get things right.

4. Experiment

It’s one thing to plan your photo shoot and having a shot list that you have to get, or else the photo essay won’t be complete. It’s another thing to miss out on some amazing photo opportunities that you couldn’t foresee.

So, be prepared but also stay open-minded and experiment with different settings, different perspectives, etc.

5. Make a final selection

Editing your work can be one of the hardest parts of doing a photo essay. Sometimes we can be overly critical, and others, we get attached to bad photos because we put a lot of effort into them or we had a great time doing them.

Try to be as objective as possible, don’t be afraid to ask for opinions and make various revisions before settling down on a final cut.

7 Photo Essay Topics, Ideas & Examples

Credit: Michelle Leman

• Architectural photo essay

Using architecture as your main subject, there are tons of photo essay ideas that you can do. For some inspiration, you can check out the work of Francisco Marin – who was trained as an architect and then turned to photography to “explore a different way to perceive things”.

You can also lookup Luisa Lambri. Amongst her series, you’ll find many photo essay examples in which architecture is the subject she uses to explore the relationship between photography and space.

• Process and transformation photo essay

This is one of the best photo essay topics for beginners because the story tells itself. Pick something that has a beginning and an end, for example, pregnancy, the metamorphosis of a butterfly, the life-cycle of a plant, etc.

Keep in mind that these topics are linear and give you an easy way into the narrative flow – however, it might be difficult to find an interesting perspective and a unique point of view.

• A day in the life of ‘X’ photo essay

There are tons of interesting photo essay ideas in this category – you can follow around a celebrity, a worker, your child, etc. You don’t even have to do it about a human subject – think about doing a photo essay about a day in the life of a racing horse, for example – find something that’s interesting for you.

• Time passing by photo essay

It can be a natural site or a landmark photo essay – whatever is close to you will work best as you’ll need to come back multiple times to capture time passing by. For example, how this place changes throughout the seasons or maybe even over the years.

A fun option if you live with family is to document a birthday party each year, seeing how the subject changes over time. This can be combined with a transformation essay or sorts, documenting the changes in interpersonal relationships over time.

• Travel photo essay

Do you want to make the jump from tourist snapshots into a travel photo essay? Research the place you’re going to be travelling to. Then, choose a topic.

If you’re having trouble with how to do this, check out any travel magazine – National Geographic, for example. They won’t do a generic article about Texas – they do an article about the beach life on the Texas Gulf Coast and another one about the diverse flavors of Texas.

The more specific you get, the deeper you can go with the story.

• Socio-political issues photo essay

This is one of the most popular photo essay examples – it falls under the category of photojournalism or documental photography. They are usually thematic, although it’s also possible to do a narrative one.

Depending on your topic of interest, you can choose topics that involve nature – for example, document the effects of global warming. Another idea is to photograph protests or make an education photo essay.

It doesn’t have to be a big global issue; you can choose something specific to your community – are there too many stray dogs? Make a photo essay about a local animal shelter. The topics are endless.

• Behind the scenes photo essay

A behind-the-scenes always make for a good photo story – people are curious to know what happens and how everything comes together before a show.

Depending on your own interests, this can be a photo essay about a fashion show, a theatre play, a concert, and so on. You’ll probably need to get some permissions, though, not only to shoot but also to showcase or publish those images.

4 Best Photo Essays in Recent times

Now that you know all the techniques about it, it might be helpful to look at some photo essay examples to see how you can put the concept into practice. Here are some famous photo essays from recent times to give you some inspiration.

Habibi by Antonio Faccilongo

This photo essay wan the World Press Photo Story of the Year in 2021. Faccilongo explores a very big conflict from a very specific and intimate point of view – how the Israeli-Palestinian war affects the families.

He chose to use a square format because it allows him to give order to things and eliminate unnecessary elements in his pictures.

With this long-term photo essay, he wanted to highlight the sense of absence and melancholy women and families feel towards their husbands away at war.

The project then became a book edited by Sarah Leen and the graphics of Ramon Pez.

Picture This: New Orleans by Mary Ellen Mark

The last assignment before her passing, Mary Ellen Mark travelled to New Orleans to register the city after a decade after Hurricane Katrina.

The images of the project “bring to life the rebirth and resilience of the people at the heart of this tale”, – says CNNMoney, commissioner of the work.

Each survivor of the hurricane has a story, and Mary Ellen Mark was there to record it. Some of them have heartbreaking stories about everything they had to leave behind.

Others have a story of hope – like Sam and Ben, two eight-year-olds born from frozen embryos kept in a hospital that lost power supply during the hurricane, yet they managed to survive.

Selfie by Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer whose work is mainly done through self-portraits. With them, she explores the concept of identity, gender stereotypes, as well as visual and cultural codes.

One of her latest photo essays was a collaboration with W Magazine entitled Selfie. In it, the author explores the concept of planned candid photos (‘plandid’).

The work was made for Instagram, as the platform is well known for the conflict between the ‘real self’ and the one people present online. Sherman started using Facetune, Perfect365 and YouCam to alter her appearance on selfies – in Photoshop, you can modify everything, but these apps were designed specifically to “make things prettier”- she says, and that’s what she wants to explore in this photo essay.

Tokyo Compression by Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf has an interest in the broad-gauge topic Life in Cities. From there, many photo essays have been derived – amongst them – Tokyo Compression .

He was horrified by the way people in Tokyo are forced to move to the suburbs because of the high prices of the city. Therefore, they are required to make long commutes facing 1,5 hours of train to start their 8+ hour workday followed by another 1,5 hours to get back home.

To portray this way of life, he photographed the people inside the train pressed against the windows looking exhausted, angry or simply absent due to this way of life.

You can visit his website to see other photo essays that revolve around the topic of life in megacities.

Final Words

It’s not easy to make photo essays, so don’t expect to be great at it right from your first project.

Start off small by choosing a specific subject that’s interesting to you –  that will come from an honest place, and it will be a great practice for some bigger projects along the line.

Whether you like to shoot still life or you’re a travel photographer, I hope these photo essay tips and photo essay examples can help you get started and grow in your photography.

Let us know which topics you are working on right now – we’ll love to hear from you!

Check out these 8 essential tools to help you succeed as a professional photographer.

Includes limited-time discounts.

Ana Mireles is a Mexican researcher that specializes in photography and communications for the arts and culture sector.

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46 Fascinating Photos Of 1960s Afghanistan Before The Taliban

1960s afghanistan presents a stark contrast to the war-torn region we recognize today. take a peek at the way afghanistan was — and how it can be again..

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The peaceful mood and smiling faces that fill images of 1960s Afghanistan are a far cry from modern photos of a country struggling with war and vast corruption. In Afghanistan before the Taliban, the infrastructural investment and Western influence of the 1960s and early '70s created a sociopolitical climate much different than the one that's dominated the last several decades. See more of 1960s Afghanistan before the Taliban in the gallery above and dig deeper into the history below.

What Life Was Like In Afghanistan Before The Taliban

The 1950s and 1960s were a hopeful time for the inhabitants of Afghanistan. Internal conflict and foreign intervention had plagued the area for centuries, but recent decades had been relatively peaceful ones.

In the 1930s, the young and progressive king Amanullah Khan was determined to modernize Afghanistan and bring the social, political, and economic achievements he witnessed on his tours of Europe to his own land.

He asked the world's wealthiest nations for help bankrolling his projected reforms, and, seeing the strategic value in a modernized Afghanistan friendly to their own interests in the region, world powers agreed.

Between 1945 and 1954, the United States sunk more than $50 million in loans into the construction of the Kandahar-Herat highway. By 1960, U.S. economic aid to Afghanistan had reached $165 million.

Most of that money was improving the country's infrastructure; when it came to capital investments, American entrepreneurs were wary.

But the Soviet Union had no such scruples. By 1960, the U.S.S.R. had paid out more than $300 million in loans. By 1973, this number had risen to nearly $1 billion. They were also not shy of investing in the region's oil and petroleum industries, and as a result, Afghanistan received more financial aid (per capita) from the Soviet Union than any other developing country.

Kabul, the capital and largest city in Afghanistan, was first to see the changes. Modern buildings began to appear next to traditional mud structures, and new roads spanned the length of the city and beyond.

Women had more educational opportunities than ever before — they could attend Kabul University, and burqas were optional. Some pushed the boundaries of their society's traditionally conservative fashion and sported miniskirts.

The country attracted visitors from around the world, and its tourists returned home to tell their family and friends of beautiful gardens, stunning architecture, breathtaking mountains, and friendly locals.

The money from two emerging superpowers would, in the end, be so much kindling for a growing political firestorm — but for two blissful decades, things finally seemed to be going right.

The Golden Age Of 1960s Afghanistan Gives Way To The Violence Of The '70s

It all went wrong in the spring of 1978, when the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) staged a coup against the country's current president, Mohammed Daoud Khan. They immediately embarked on a series of reforms, including land redistribution and the overhaul of the largely Islamic legal system, that the country wasn't ready for.

By the fall, the eastern part of the country was rebelling, and the conflict escalated into a civil war between the Pakistani-funded mujahideen rebels and the new government.

The Soviet Union backed the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and with Cold War tensions running high, the U.S. quickly moved to counter what they perceived as Soviet expansionism, quietly supporting the mujahideen rebels.

When an internal schism within the People's Democratic Party resulted in the assassination of leader Nur Muhammad Taraki and the appointment of a new PDPA leader, the Soviet Union decided to get their hands dirty. They waded into the conflict themselves and set up their own regime.

The United States redoubled its support for the mujahideen rebels and sent billions in financial aid and weapons to Pakistan, the country funneling resources to the rebels next door.

The conflict, referred to as the Soviet–Afghan War , lasted ten years and left as many as 2 million Afghans dead. It displaced 6 million as air bombings destroyed the cities and the countryside — the very roads and buildings that 1960s Afghanistan had just begun to enjoy.

The developing country was gone and not even the end of the war could bring it back. Even after the Soviet Union withdrew, fighting continued, and some of the mujahideen rebels formed a new group: the Taliban. Afghanistan plunged deeper into chaos and terror.

How One American Doctor Captured The Mood Of 1960s Afghanistan

In 1967, Arizona State University professor Dr. Bill Podlich and his family swapped the stark, sultry summers of Tempe, Arizona, for the environs of Kabul, Afghanistan.

After serving in World War II, Podlich wanted to promote peace, and for that reason, he teamed up with UNESCO to work for two years at the Higher Teachers College of Kabul, Afghanistan. With him were his children, Jan and Peg, along with his wife, Margaret.

When not building relationships with his Afghan cohorts, Podlich developed something else: his Kodachrome film, which captured a modernizing and peaceful Afghanistan that stands in stark contrast to the harrowing images from the war-torn country we see today.

That is why, in Peg Podlich's eyes, her father's photos are so incredibly important. Says Podlich, these photos "can encourage folks to see Afghanistan and its people as they were and could be. It is important to know that we have more in common with people in other lands than what separates us."

In light of what has happened to Afghanistan since, it's more important than ever to remember the country that Bill Podlich captured in his photographs. According to Said Tayeb Jawad, the former Afghan ambassador to the United States, many today tend to think of Afghanistan as an ungovernable collection of competing tribes with differing viewpoints and a history of bloody grudges that can't be laid to rest.

Its critics say that the country's ethnic conflicts are intractable, perhaps to the point of being unsolvable. But Podlich's photos of Afghanistan before the Taliban show that this isn't true.

In the 1960s, Afghanistan before the Taliban experienced a period of prosperity unlike anything that had come before. Just because groups disagree doesn't mean resolution is impossible. After all, Mr. Jawad dryly points out , "Afghanistan is less tribal than New York."

For more information on life in Afghanistan today, consider watching this Vice series on Afghanistan since the American-led invasion in 2001:

If you enjoyed this post on 1960s Afghanistan before the Taliban, you might be interested in images of  Syria after years of civil war and staggering photos of Iran before 1979 . And before you leave, be sure to like All That's Interesting on Facebook !

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The Supreme Court Can’t Outrun Clarence Thomas’ Terrible Guns Opinion

In the late 1960s, when conservatives felt that the Warren court was tilting too far to the left, magicking up in their opinions a Constitution that did not exist, Robert Bork, the patriarch of originalism, took a revelatory position: The Constitution should be interpreted (and only interpreted) in the ways intended by the people who wrote it. This was necessary, he made clear, so that judges could not just impose their own views of what the Constitution was supposed to mean.

Bork’s idea was deceptively simple and deeply appealing to those of a conservative bent. Constitutions were precise legal documents meant to endure into eternity unless and until amended. Judges should and must be kept from imposing their own views on the document. And if you were a conservative, what understanding of the Constitution could be presumptively better than the one dating all the way back to the late 18 th century, when the Constitution and Bill of Rights were ratified?

As with so many things in life, the deceptively simple is often just that : deceptive. If this past Supreme Court term showed us anything, it is that originalism is a fig leaf, covering up the parts of right-wing jurisprudence most movement conservatives never wanted us to see. Which is to say that whatever else originalism is, it doesn’t limit judicial discretion an iota. Indeed, beyond the fact that it is not a theory of judicial humility, it turns out it may not have much content at all.

If any case made this clear, it was the fractured conservative majority in United States v. Rahimi , in which eight justices agreed that it does not violate the Constitution to keep guns out of the hands of those who are subjects of adjudicated domestic-violence restraining orders. But they seem to have agreed on little else. In particular, the six conservative justices gave us at least four different views of how originalism is even supposed to work. Some half-century into the great originalist project, which was intended to tether judges to a fixed original meaning and constrain their discretion, those justices cannot even agree on what originalism is.

Zackey Rahimi was indicted for violating a domestic-violence restraining order by keeping a gun, which he fired at pretty much anyone who pissed him off, even slightly. Picture a non-cartoonish Yosemite Sam . Fighting those charges, he argued he had a Second Amendment right to his pistol packing. Just three years ago, this claim would have been inconceivable, but in 2022, in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen , the six justices in the conservative supermajority decided that there was a constitutional right to carry a gun in public almost anyplace one wanted.

Bruen didn’t just dramatically alter the entire American gun-toting landscape; it also became the paradigm for a whole new way of interpreting the Constitution: the supposed big triumph for conservatives of their belief that originalism is the one true interpretive methodology. In the olden days (say, up till about 2015), the justices had used something called means-ends analysis to resolve most claims about individual rights. It worked like this: The world is divided into regular liberty and fundamental rights—things like free speech, the right to a jury trial, and, yes, apparently also carrying weapons to the Stop & Shop. If the government’s regulation infringed on a fundamental right, it bore the burden of showing two things: that the end —the reason for doing it—was “compelling,” i.e., something really important. And that the means —the way the law operated—actually accomplished that end. If the end was not important or the law didn’t accomplish the end, the government’s action was unconstitutional. Pretty simple and logical, right? This whole means-ends test was a cornerstone to doing constitutional law.

In Bruen , writing for an ostensible six-justice majority, Justice Clarence Thomas claimed to change all that. There would be no more of this messy means-ends analysis, which, as he understands it, ultimately encourages them to read the Constitution however they want or just bow down to legislatures. Hereinafter, we are going to do pure history —aka originalism. First, we must decide if something the government did affects a core constitutional right enshrined in the Constitution’s sparse and 230-year-old text. If so, we ask: Is this consistent with the sort of regulation that was contemplated when the Constitution was written? In other words, is the government just doing what we did back in the late 1700s, or is it doing some newfangled thing that burdens the people’s rights in new ways? If so, fuhgeddaboutit.

To do the Bruen test, judges were thus told to take the modern law and go searching for an “analogous” example from the founding era. Kind of like going to the paint store with a color swatch and looking around for something pretty similar. If the new regulation was cobalt blue and the regulation back then was sky blue, that would not cut it—the government was out of luck.

To do this historical paint-chart comparison, as Thomas painstakingly explained in Bruen , you must ask two different questions from “ends” and “means.” Instead, we must ask why did they pass the similar gun regulations in the 1700s? And how did those historical regulations operate back then? Only if the answers to these two questions matched up with historical practices was the modern action by the government constitutional.

It does not take a genius to recognize, of course, that the new “why-how” test is in fact just … a means-ends test with a historical color swatch. Why a law was passed is its end , and how it operates is the same as means . But in Rahimi , five conservative justices realized they actually hated that a strict application of this test would have let Zackey Rahimi keep his guns, and so their supposed new approach fell apart. What we learned in Rahimi is that the conservative justices don’t agree with one another on how to implement the new test, and that they definitely didn’t agree with what Thomas said about it for the seeming majority in Bruen . Which is why, by an 8–1 vote in Rahimi , the Supreme Court upheld taking a domestic abuser’s guns away, regardless of Bruen , leaving Thomas howling in dissent that this was all unfaithful to the one true historical tradition they supposedly had agreed on just three years earlier.

In Rahimi , Chief Justice John Roberts rushed to reassure the rest of us that despite what it seemed to say, Bruen was not meant to suggest that our law was “trapped in amber” as of the founding. “The Second Amendment permits more than just those regulations identical to ones that could be found in 1791,” he wrote for the majority. Instead of looking for a perfect match from the past, or even at least a pretty close one, as Bruen had suggested, we need only ask “whether the challenged regulation is consistent with the principles that underpin our regulatory tradition.” But principles, as we all know, are pretty broad and flexible things, and that is what they proved to be in Rahimi . And so Roberts’ opinion in Rahimi basically neutered the strict Bruen originalist test.

Let’s start with the “why” part of the Bruen test. What the chief justice said in Rahimi was that historically legislative bodies had restricted “gun use to mitigate demonstrated threats of physical violence.” That “from the earliest days of the common law, firearm regulations have included provisions barring people from misusing weapons to harm or menace others.” And, for that reason, “when an individual poses a clear threat of physical violence to another, the threatening individual may be disarmed.”

In other words, back then they regulated guns to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people and to make sure weapons were not used to menace people or threaten physical violence, which makes regulations done for the same reason kosher in modern times. But isn’t that the reason for many firearm regulations today? In justifying most of today’s gun laws, that understanding of the why is not going to change much.

The “how” part of the Bruen test required that the way a person is disarmed line up with similar methods from the founding era. In Rahimi , the majority relied on ancient “surety” laws for which, if you thought I was a threat to you, you could go to court and the court would make me put up a cash bond to guarantee I behaved. And it also relied on affray laws, which prohibited “riding or going armed, with dangerous or unusual weapons, [to] terrify [] the good people of the land.” The problem with this reasoning, of course, is that there was nothing remotely “unusual” about the weapons Rahimi was shooting irresponsibly all over the place. And he couldn’t just post bond to get his guns back—he went to jail for having them at all. But the chief justice’s opinion in Rahimi said that that was close enough for government work.

It turns out that sky blue is close enough to cobalt blue for these justices.

Don’t take our word for it that the chief justice took the sting out of Bruen ’s originalism in Rahimi : Thomas was absolutely scathing in his extremely lengthy solo dissent, stating, “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue.” He, at least, could clearly see that any blue is not every blue. He understood that the majority had changed his Bruen originalism test instead of applying it.

So, in the end, Roberts’ majority Rahimi opinion mutated Bruen into a pragmatic means-ends analysis. You may recall that analysis from the time before Bruen . But this is where the agreement about how to apply originalism to gun laws among the five non-Thomas conservatives ended. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a long exegesis to explain the right way to use founding-era history and “tradition,” which apparently means looking at history long past the founding. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote to disagree vehemently with Kavanaugh that we can look past founding-era history but also adopted her own pragmatic view of how to read that history. And frankly, it’s not clear at all what Justice Neil Gorsuch was saying in his opinion, except to try to tell listeners that there was no real disagreement among them at all, even though the opposite was obviously true.

Now, to be clear, what the five conservative justices in the majority in Rahimi did was not crazy. Quite the contrary. Why should we, having had more than 200 years to learn how to do things better, be stuck doing them exactly as they were done in the late 18 th century? The Rahimi court’s reasoning made sense, even if its treatment of originalism was a muddle.

Just don’t go telling us anymore that there is some newfangled “old” way of interpreting the Constitution that will keep judges in their proper place. As with much of what the conservative justices did this term, they are making it up as they go along, in just the ways they want. And sure, they are calling it originalism, but even Clarence Thomas knows that’s a lie.

Always Preparing: U.S. Coast Guard

Often in August, we remind readers that the entire U.S. Coast Guard manages 11 statutory missions and responsibilities that span the globe with about the same number of people as the New York City Police Department. This year, however, the Coast Guard’s ongoing manning shortage (a deficit of about 10 percent) means the service is covering from “polar bears to penguins” across the globe, with fewer people than NYPD Blue. That reality is reflected in the articles in this issue. 

The winners of the Coast Guard Essay Contest , sponsored by Susan Curtin and the Naval Institute, offer ways the service can make better use of personnel, technology, and command and control. The first-prize winners are Coast Guard Lieutenants Evan Twarog and Drew Cheneler . Their essay, “ Where the Coast Guard’s TechRev Fell Short—and a Path to a New One ,”  is about the service’s ongoing Technology Revolution program. According to the authors, it has made important strides in the past five years, but it is time to set new goals for software development, data analytics, the workforce, and the chief technology officer. Then-Cadet Twarog published his first Proceedings article in 2018, and it is great to see him continuing to write. 

Coast Guard Lieutenant Jacob Skimmons took second prize with “ How Smart Data Can Drive Smart Maintenance on Cutters . ”  We applaud the collaboration between a team of MIT researchers and a group of Coast Guard officers/graduate students who have figured out what data to collect and focused on enhancing maintenance efficiency in the cutter fleet. The anecdote about an electrical ground in a cutter’s dishwasher makes this essay very relatable, as well. 

Third-prize winner, Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander Craig Johnson , takes a big-picture perspective on the command-and-control structure of the service in “ There’s a Better Way to Organize the Coast Guard .”  He recommends eliminating district commands and adding new three-star commands to focus on areas of national interest. Instead of just having the Atlantic and Pacific area commands, Johnson’s proposal would include Atlantic, Pacific, High Latitude, Southern Border, and Littoral Surge Commands— all reporting directly to Coast Guard Headquarters. Today’s technology, argues Johnson, makes district commands largely redundant. 

In “ Make Jayhawks from Pave Hawks , ”  retired Coast Guard Captain Dave Cooper and three New York Air National Guard officers point to an opportunity for the Coast Guard to take up to 21 rescue-equipped HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters from the Air National Guard and convert them to MH-60T Jayhawks. This proposal would offer fiscal and operational relief for the Coast Guard’s overtaxed rotary-wing fleet. 

For the second month in a row, seaplanes make an appearance in our pages. This time, Navy Captain Matt Wright , Commander Tom Van Hoozer , and Lieutenant Commander Sam Calaway offer ways to “ Fix the Long-Range Combat Search-and-Rescue Deficit in the Pacific .”  Solutions include range improvements to current helicopters, lily-pad operations, and acquiring Japanese ShinMaywa US-2 flying boats. The Navy retired its last flying boats in the 1960s, but a growing number of experts see their utility in search-and-rescue, logistics, antisubmarine and antisurface warfare, and mobility for stand-in forces. If you agree or disagree with those points, or any others in these pages, please submit a letter to Comment & Discussion . Email up to 500 words to [email protected] . This is a vital part of the open forum, and we encourage you to share your thoughts and opinions. 

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