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.

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Photo Essay - The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s

• Featured Essay - African Americans and Civil Rights: Remembering Segregation
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In 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit relatives. While there he was abducted, tortured, and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. At his funeral, his mother Mamie Bradley insisted that his coffin remain open so that all could see the violence done to her child. Jet Magazine published pictures of Till's mutilated corpse, and Bradley traveled the country speaking about what had been done to her son. Outrage over the event was an enormous impetus for the modern Civil Rights Movement. In this photo, Mamie Bradley collapses as Till's casket arrives in Chicago

In 1957 Daisy Bates and the Little Rock, Arkansas National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) decided to test the Supreme Court's historic 1954 ruling on Brown v. Board of Education , which banned segregation in the schools. When the students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, tried to enter Central High School, Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent them from entering the building. After a stalemate that lasted almost two weeks President Eisenhower ordered Faubus to use the National Guard to protect the students instead. Faubus refused to comply and Eisenhower sent in paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division. Eight of the students completed the year, enduring constant threats and abuse. In this photo fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, who had a heart condition, braves an angry mob while trying to enter the school. That day the other African American students had been told that they should not attempt go to school, but Eckford's family did not have a phone. The woman with dark hair who is screaming at Eckford is Hazel Bryan, (now Massery). Not wanting to be "the poster child for the hate generation," Massery apologized to Eckford in 1963. Today, they travel and speak together about the events of that day.

While there had been a few sit-ins prior to 1960, the sit-in movement became part of the national strategy of civil rights groups after four freshmen at North Carolina A&T University staged a sit-in that year in Greensboro, North Carolina. Within months, sit-ins, pickets, and boycotts of segregated stores and lunch counters had spread throughout the country. The young woman pictured here is picketing segregated lunch counters at Neisner's McCrory's, F.W. Woolworth's, Walgreen's and Sears stores in Tallahassee, Florida. 6#x20147 December 1960.

Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in May 1961, two buses with black and white passengers set out on a "Freedom Ride" to challenge segregation in interstate travel and travel facilities in the South. Riders were attacked first in Anniston, Alabama, and later in Birmingham. Photos of the violence were seen all over the world. When CORE wanted to end the Freedom Ride, John Lewis and members of the Nashville Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) decided to continue. They were attacked again in Montgomery, Alabama. In response to the violence, civil rights organizations from all over the country began staging their own Freedom Rides. While this photograph is attributed to the 1950s, it is more likely a record of a later Freedom Ride. As a result of the Freedom Rides of 1961, President John F. Kennedy was forced (for the first time) to get involved in the Civil Rights Movement. In November of that year, the Interstate Commerce Commission prohibited segregated transportation facilities.

The 1963 March on Washington was a watershed event for the modern Civil Rights Movement with over 250,000 in attendance. Hollywood celebrities such as Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Lena Horne, and Charlton Heston were also there to hear Martin Luther King challenge the world with his "I Have a Dream" speech. Pictured here are some of the organizers of the March. From right to left: Mathew Ahmann, Cleveland Robinson, A. Philip Randolph, Joseph Rauh Jr., John Lewis, and Floyd McKissick.

A girl at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963. Many of the participants in the Civil Rights Movement were children and teenagers. In fact, it was the use of force against these young people that helped gain international support for the movement.

This image shows the only time Martin Luther King and Malcolm X ever met, and was taken before a press conference at the U.S. Capitol on 26 March 1964. For years, the two had represented opposite sides of the struggle: King was a leader of the southern Civil Rights Movement, while Malcolm X was recognized as a voice for urban African Americans; however, by 1964 they were moving closer. Tragically, Malcolm X was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on 21 February 1965. King was assassinated three years later by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee on 4 April 1968.

In 1964 the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was organized in order to create an alternative delegation of black Mississippians to attend the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Blacks in Mississippi were disfranchised and faced considerable violence if they attempted to register to vote. In order to protest these conditions the MFDP attended the Democratic Convention and demanded their place at the political table. Pictured here is Fannie Lou Hamer, an MFDP delegate, at a 22 August press conference. While the MFDP did not win its battle, the embarrassment they caused was instrumental in getting the 1965 Voting Rights Act passed.

In 1965 the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began a massive voter registration mobilization in Selma, Alabama. On 7 March six hundred marchers set out from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery to demand their voting rights. At the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside of Selma, the marchers were attacked by highway patrolmen and state troopers. Images of the attack were broadcast across the country. The following week Martin Luther King led a group of 1500 protesters, but they turned back when again faced by armed police. Later that day a white minister, James Reeb, was attacked and killed in Selma. The death of Reeb led President Lyndon B. Johnson to federalize the Alabama National Guard and bring in regular Army troops to protect the marchers. On 21 March four thousand people set out from Selma to march to Montgomery. When the group arrived at the capitol there were 22,000 marchers. Five months later, on 6 August, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. In this image, marchers are arrested by the Montgomery police.

By the 1970s the nonviolent southern-led Civil Rights Movement had been superseded by the more militant Black Power Movement which was influenced by the experiences of young African Americans from the urban inner cities. In this image taken on 19 June 1970 a man at the Black Panther Convention stands on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial holding a banner for the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention.

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date: 27 April 2024

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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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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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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.

The Black Lives Matter Movement: Learning Through Photography

What students will uncover.

Perspectives of mourning and inspiration in the Black Lives Matter movement

Essential Questions

• How might photography from the Black Lives Matter protests reveal different perspectives?
• In what ways does photography from the Black Lives Matter movement evoke the civil rights leaders of the 1960s?
• How is photography a form of activism?

Lesson Overview

Students explore the photo essay “ We Will Breathe ” by Sheila Pree Bright, taken in Atlanta, Georgia, after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. These photographs capture perspectives in the Black Lives Matter movement and evoke the civil rights era and its leaders. Students will engage in learning activities to consider the significance of Bright’s photographs at a societal, cultural, and personal level.

Photographic documentation of the Black Lives Matter movement provides a humanistic perspective by portraying the lived experiences of people working towards racial and social justice.

Lesson Objectives

• Understand how photography can foster empathy and inquiry
• Analyze the roles and responsibilities photographers have in society
• Analyze the importance of documenting historical events and creating social change through photography
• Identify connections between the Civil Rights era and its leaders and the Black Lives Matter movement

Putting the Photo Essay in Context

This section is intended for the educator and provides information about the photo essay, the photographer Sheila Pree Bright, and the connections between the Black Lives Matter movement and leaders from the civil rights era.

The Black Lives Matter organization, founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, was created with the "goal to build the kind of society where black people can live with dignity and respect." Black Lives Matter emerged as a space to highlight and protest the systemic racism and police brutality encountered by Black communities and individuals following the 2012 murder of 17-year-old Treyvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, a year later. [1]   

The #BlackLivesMatter social media hashtag helped to bring awareness and accountability to the problem of police violence as community members used their phones to document the encounters they witnessed with police. Protests in the summer of 2014 following the deaths of Eric Garner, who suffocated in a police chokehold while gasping “I can’t breathe,” and Michael Brown, an unarmed 18 year old shot by a police officer, invoked the Black Lives Matter slogan with hundreds of thousands demonstrating in the streets. [2] Protests continued as the violence against people of color at the hands of law enforcement gained more national attention and scrutiny. In the summer of 2020, between fifteen and twenty-six million people in the United States participated in demonstrations after the death of George Floyd. [3] Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes despite his pleas that he could not breathe. A teenage bystander, Darnella Frazier, recorded the fatal encounter with her cell phone, which allowed the world to bear witness to the cruel and unjust circumstances of his death. [4]  

In response to Floyd’s death, marches and rallies broke out in cities around the world calling for change, including police reform and attention to the injustices people of color face. The Black Lives Matter movement has been widely cited for helping to organize and document many of these protests and efforts.

Photographer Sheila Pree Bright, in her photo essay “We Will Breathe,” bears witness to the time of grief and reclamation that arose with the death of George Floyd, and only deepened  with the loss of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Georgia. Her photos highlight intimate moments of mourning and inspiration in the Black Lives Matter movement, which evoke the civil rights era and its leaders. She writes, “The images I photograph create contemporary stories about social, political, and historical contexts not often seen in the visual communications of traditional media and fine art platforms.” 

Bright’s book, 1960 Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests , includes black-and-white portraits of social justice activists from around the country. She writes, “As major movements have emerged in the past two years, I’ve also documented the tensions, conflicts, and responses between communities and police departments that have resulted from police shootings in Atlanta, Ferguson, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. I’ve observed young social activists taking a stand against continued injustice that closely resembles that which their parents and grandparents endured during the era of Jim Crow. By documenting this emerging social movement, I have been able to invite other communities into the ongoing conversation.” Bright’s work is part of a growing movement to address a longstanding history of racial inequities through art, which she sees as a form of activism to raise awareness and social change.

1. A.L, “ Black Lives Matter is not a terrorist organization. ” The Economist , August 9, 2018.  [^]

2. Aldon Morris, “ From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter .” Scientific American , February 3, 2021.  [^]

3. Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Jugal K. Patel, “ Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History .” The New York Times , July 3, 2020.  [^]

4. Rachel Treisman, “ Darnella Frazier, Teen Who Filmed Floyd's Murder, Praised For Making Verdict Possible .” NPR, April 21, 2021.  [^]

Setting the Stage: Lesson Introduction

Before viewing the photo essay, explore this exercise with students to learn how the medium of photography captures important historical and cultural moments.

Share with students that in 2016, The New York Times  photo editor Darcy Eveleigh, discovered unpublished photographs in The Times  archives. The untold stories were published in “ Unpublished Black History .”

Ask students to view the photographs. They reveal previously unseen/unpublished historic moments: a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (at a high school basketball game), Thurgood Marshall, Jesse Jackson, and James Baldwin, and young boys marching during the first Afro-American Day parade in 1969.

Share with students a quote from journalist and author Rachel Swarns that is a forward to the book Unseen: Unpublished Black History from The New York Times Photo Archives .

Ask students: How do these photographs document beauty, dignity, and the many accomplishments of black individuals throughout history?

Engaging with the Story

Introduce students to the photo essay and provide specific tasks of observation.

Tell students that they will view a photo essay titled “We Will Breathe” by photographer Sheila Pree Bright. This collection of 10 photographs captures perspectives of mourning and inspiration in the Black Lives Matter movement in Atlanta, Georgia, following the death of George Floyd in May 2020. (Note to educators: the Background section provides additional information for reference and context.)

Before viewing the photographs, ask students to share their thoughts about the title of the photo essay “We Will Breathe.” 

Ask students to read Bright’s photographer’s statement (3 paragraphs).

Ask students to view the photo essay “ We Will Breathe ” and read the corresponding photo captions.

Delving Deeper: Discussion Questions

Encourage students to examine the themes and issues raised in the photo essay.

Organize students in pairs or small groups. Ask students to use the note-taking sheet  to answer the following prompts. Have the pairs or small groups share their findings with the class. 

• Identify the location and event in each photograph. 
• Describe the people in the photographs. What are they doing? 
• Describe the significance and meaning of the signs held by the protestors. 
• Which photograph did you feel the most connected to? Why?

As a class, discuss the following questions:

• The photographer, Sheila Pree Bright, writes that after the acquittal of Zimmerman, “protests erupted around the country, and the hashtag #blacklivesmatter started a new civil rights movement. I felt compelled to be there on the ground and document what was happening in the communities of Atlanta, Baltimore, Ferguson, Baton Rouge, and Washington, D.C.” Describe how Bright in her photos captures the memories of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, who were killed weeks apart by Atlanta police.
• Two photographs reference Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. What does King symbolize in these photographs?
• Locate the two photographs that include the American flag. What do you think the flag represents in these photographs? ( Some answers could include identity, justice, or freedom .)
• “Rarely are the voices of mothers and women highlighted in American social protest imagery. There is a powerful presence of women in the Black Lives Matter movement,” writes Deborah Willis, Ph.D., professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. In what ways do these photographs convey the “powerful presence” of women?
• In an interview with the International Center of Photography, Bright said, “I want to show you the humanity of these black bodies; I don’t want to show you what traditional media is showing you.” Describe how Bright shows “the humanity” of the people she captures in her photographs. How are Bright’s photos unlike “traditional media”?

Ask students to read the following two quotes from Bright. Have students select a photograph from the photo essay that illustrates Bright’s point of view. Ask students: In what ways do you think Bright’s photographs are a “form of activism”? How does her art bring people and communities together? 

• “As a fine art photographer, I am interested in the [lives] of those individuals and communities that are often unseen in the world. My objective is to capture images that allow us to experience those who are unheard as they contemplate or voice their reaction to ideas and issues that are shaping their world…. My work captures and presents aspects of our culture, and sometimes counterculture, that challenges the typical narratives of Western thought and power structures.”
• “As an artist it is deeply rewarding to hear that in my work people see the beauty, complexity, and humanity of those I’ve photographed…. I feel art is a form of activism to create awareness and bring shared communities together.”

Reflecting and Projecting

Challenge students to consider the photo essay’s broader implications and to integrate their knowledge and ideas with various points of view.

Former Congressman John Lewis, author, activist, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was one of the leading forces behind the protests of the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis, seen in several iconic images from the Civil Rights Movement, was arrested more than forty times during the nonviolent movement for equal justice. 

• Share with students the following quote from Lewis after the death of George Floyd.

“It was very moving, very moving to see hundreds and thousands of people from all over America and around the world take to the streets to speak up, to speak out, to get into what I call good trouble, but to get in the way. And because of the action of young and old, Black, white, Latino, Asian-American and Native American, because people cried and prayed, people will never, ever forget what happened and how it happened, and it is my hope that we are on our way to greater change.”

• Do you agree with Lewis that “we are on our way to greater change”? Why or why not? What are some examples you have witnessed in your life? How have individuals spoken out and gotten into “good trouble”? Write a short essay (2-3 paragraphs).

Bright writes, “In the 1960s, there wasn’t social media to help us counter such depictions of how movements develop, evolve, and impact the political, economic, and social workings of a place.” Research how the Black Lives Matter movement has evolved. In what ways has social media acted as a catalyst? How has social media influenced your understanding of the Black Lives Matter movement? What role does social media have in holding people accountable for their actions, exposing truths that might have gone unnoticed? Write a short essay (2–3 paragraphs) or create a slideshow with illustrations using evidence from multiple sources. 

What's Happening Now

Provide students with resources to explore current events and information about Sheila Pree Bright’s work.

On April 20, 2021, former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, was found guilty on all charges related to George Floyd’s death.

Learn how the “ Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History .”

Learn how artists create murals in cities to bring awareness to the lives that have been negatively impacted by racial policing. View “33 Powerful Black Lives Matter Murals .”

Learn more about Sheila Pree Bright’s photography by visiting her website .

Take Action

How will you address issues of inequality.

The Black Lives Matter movement continues to support voices in the Black community and encourage more youths and adults to speak out about their lived experiences. 

View images from Black Lives Matter protests from countries around the world using online galleries, such as “ Images From a Worldwide Protest Movement ” from The Atlantic or “ Powerful Photos of Black Lives Matter Protests Around the World ” from Condé Nast Traveler . Describe what you notice. How are people addressing issues of inequality? Share your findings with others.

Sign up for Black Lives Matter , a member-led global network created by three Black organizers—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometti—in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer George Zimmerman. This organization helps to fight misinformation by reporting suspicious sites, stories, ads, social accounts, and posts about Black Lives Matter.

SDG 10: Reduce Inequality Within and Across Countries

Companion Texts

These texts are recommended by teachers who are currently using We Will Breathe in their classrooms.

• The Hate You Give  by Angie Thomas
• Dear Martin  by Nic Stone
• Between the World and Me  by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Bright, Sheila and Alicia Garza. #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests . (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2018).
• Light, Melanie and Ken Light. Picturing Resistance: Moments and Movements of Social Change from the 1950s to Today . (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2020). 
• Black Lives Matter .
• Google Arts and Culture: Photos From the Civil Rights Movement .
• Boissoneault, Lorraine, “ These Never-Before-Seen Photos From The New York Times Offer a New Glimpse Into African-American History .” Smithsonian Magazine , October 17, 2017.
• Swarns, Rachel L., Darcy Eveleigh, and Damien Cave, “ Unpublished Black History .” The New York Times , n.d.
• “ In Conversation: Sheila Pree Bright .” International Center of Photography (ICP).

Connections to National Curriculum Standards and Frameworks

Sel competencies (casel).

• Self-awareness.  The ability to accurately recognize one’s own emotions, thoughts, and values and how they influence behavior.
• Social awareness.  The ability to take the perspective of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds and cultures, to understand social and ethical norms for behavior.
• Relationship skills.  The ability to establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships with diverse individuals and groups.

College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework

• C3.D2.Civ.8.9-12.  Evaluate social and political systems in different contexts, times, and places that promote civic virtues and enact democratic principles.
• C3.D2.His.2.9-12.  Analyze change and continuity in historical eras.
• C3.D2.His.3.9-12.  Use questions generated about individuals and groups to assess how the significance of their actions changes over time and is shaped by the historical context.
• C3.D2.His.7.9-12.  Explain how the perspectives of people in the present shape interpretations of the past.
• C3.D2.His.8.9-12.  Analyze how current interpretations of the past are limited by the extent to which available historical sources represent perspectives of people at the time.

Common Core State Standards (CCSS

• CCSS.ELA-SL.9-10.1 and SL.11-12.1.  Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9-10 [or 11-12] topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
• CCSS.ELA-SL.9-10.5 and SL.11-12.5.  Make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understandings of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.1.  Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.
• CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.11-12.1.  Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

Choose a Different Grade Level

More to explore.

Photo Essay: Supporting Minority Enterprise in the late 1960s

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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…

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)

List of Rulers

• Presidents of the United States of America
• The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present
• 20th Century A.D.
• American Art
• Architecture
• Avant-Garde
• Beat Movement
• Gelatin Silver Print
• Modern and Contemporary Art
• North America
• Photography
• Photojournalism
• United States
• Women Artists

Artist or Maker

• Avedon, Richard
• Bourke-White, Margaret
• Brodovitch, Alexey
• Faurer, Louis
• Frank, Robert
• Grossman, Sid
• Hine, Lewis W.
• Klein, William
• Levitt, Helen
• Man, Felix H.
• Model, Lisette
• Munkacsi, Martin
• Penn, Irving

Online Features

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• MetCollects: “ Small Trades by Irving Penn”

• 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

8 Essential Project One Films From the L.A. Rebellion Film Movement

Last Punks in Print: Razorcake Has Been the Platform for Punks of Color For Over Two Decades

The Art of the Rope: How This Charro Completo is Preserving Trick Roping in the United States

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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 .

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The view from the front row: a history of the fashion show – photo essay

Once, photographers were banned from fashion shows, with designers suspecting they were spies. Today, fashion shows are a multimillion-dollar global business. As London fashion week begins, we chart the evolution of the fashion show, from secret salons to the snap-happy Instagram era

Most fashion shows last less than 10 minutes, but have the power to transport an audience to another world. There’s an intensity to a great show, a distillation of a designer’s extraordinary vision.

Once upon a time, though, things were a lot humbler. The intimate salon shows of Chanel in the 1950s bear no resemblance to Karl Lagerfeld’s fully-stocked supermarket in the vast Grand Palais in 2014. The main change is scale – along with location, set production, and budget. From John Galliano’s historical dramas at Christian Dior, to Hussein Chalayan’s theatrical impossibilities and the late Alexander McQueen’s gothic, heart-stopping wonders, we chart how the fashion show developed from low-key to king.

Haute beginnings

In a show in the 1860s, Parisian-based designer Charles Frederick Worth, the so-called “father of haute couture”, introduced the idea of presenting collections on live models. Li ke other couturiers of the age , he launched his collections at Longchamp Racecourse. Though not quite a fashion show, it was certainly good publicity.

Fashion parades

The early 20th century saw the advent of “fashion parades”. In London, leading British designer Lady Duff-Gordon regularly showed collections at her Hanover Street salon, giving her models romantic names in order to make them sound more exotic. In turn-of-the-century Paris, designer Paul Poiret staged fancy-dress balls where women could dress up in his eastern-inspired looks. He would also tour theatres and department stores in Europe with mannequins in tow. In New York, the Ehrich Brothers department store began hosting their own shows in-store. Others, including Wanamaker’s in Philadephia, followed suit from the 1910s-20s.

• A salon presentation in New York, 1925.

The 1920s saw the dawn golden age of haute couture in Paris, particularly with the dominance of powerful women such as Gabrielle Coco Chanel , Madeleine Vionnet, queen of the bias cut, and Elsa Schiaparelli.

• In Paris, clients would attend intimate couture salon shows, and place orders with their all-important vendeuse who would develop a close relationship with the clients.

During the Great Depression, fashion designers started selling patterns to be made at home as many incomes shrank. But somehow, haute couture continued to flourish. In 1931, Elsa Schiaparelli showed a collection on a catwalk at Saks in New York. Photographers were not allowed to attend, to stop designs being copied, so the collections were sketched by artists.

New York, New York

In 1943 saw the launch of what would become New York fashion week: under the umbrella of “Press Week”, fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert set up shows at the Pierre Hotel and the Plaza. Until then, US fashion had been dominated by European designers. But with American press unable to travel to Europe during the war, this became an opportunity to promote homegrown talent, including minimalist pioneer, Norman Norell.

New York’s shows continued from then on, interrupted only by the terror attacks of 9/11, which happened on the first day of New York fashion week.

New beginnings

After the war ended in 1945, the French fashion industry needed to be rebuilt. Couturier Nina Ricci’s son, Robert, had the idea of inviting fashion houses to create miniature versions of their designs, as a way of showing their potential without wasting valuable resources. It became known as Le Petit Théâtre de la Mode , or the miniature theatre of fashion.

On 28 March 1945, 200 mannequins, a third of human size, wearing scaled-down designs by couture houses such as Balenciaga and Jeanne Lanvin, went on show at the Louvre before touring around Europe. The following year, with a new set of immaculately made clothes, the mannequins were shown in America. It was a fashion show of sorts, a pragmatic solution using limited resources.

New Look, new rules

Before the war, couture shows were usually presented in small salon spaces, often at the designer’s headquarters, selling directly to the client, who would return for a series of fittings over a period of about six weeks. In those early days, before the advent of the catwalk, the emphasis was on the client rather than publicity. Photographers were not allowed in.

In 1947 Christian Dior became one of the first designers to allow photographers to document his first collection, which Carmel Snow, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, famously named “The New Look”.

The rise of Italy

The Italian shows began in Florence in the early 1950s, with couture houses from Rome, Turin, Milan and Capri – including Simonetta Visconti, Schuberth, and Emilio Pucci – showcasing collections at the grandiose Sala Bianca.

• Models in evening wear at a fashion show in Florence, 1951.

Founded by Giovanni Battista Giorgini, the shows were an attempt to compete with Paris, and rebuild Italy’s textile, fashion and craft ateliers after the war. They were promoted as a stop-off for American editors on the way back from the shows in Paris, when the European fashion season required a voyage from New York by ocean liner. Guests – a mix of store-buyers and society – were transported from Rome to Florence to be wined and dined in luxury as they immersed themselves in the grandeur of Italian fashion.

It was in 1958 that the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana was founded, and the shows moved from the windy streets of Florence to the more commercial business centre of Milan.

New model army

In 1952, Hubert de Givenchy showed his first collection. Givenchy’s relationship with Audrey Hepburn, who he dressed for her roles in Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, would become one of the first great celebrity fashion partnerships.

• Givenchy at a fashion show promoting his latest designs in Paris, 1970

Throughout the 1960s, fashion shows remained closed affairs. In his book, Catwalking, photographer Chris Moore recalls, “at that time, they did just think we were spies”.

In 1956, the pioneering designer Gaby Aghion, who founded Chloé, invited press to the Café de Flore in St Germain to view her first collection. It was an informal presentation that brought the models into an everyday cafe setting, away from the controlled environment of the designer’s salon.

The rise of pret-a-porter

• French couturier Pierre Cardin in 1963. Right: Yves Saint Laurent after a show in 1963.

Although couture dominated, in 1960, a group of couturiers including Carven and Nina Ricci began to show their pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) collections two weeks before the haute couture collections. In 1966, Yves Saint Laurent launched pret-a-porter his Rive Gauche boutique.

• Throughout the 1960s, the sexual revolution was also transforming elements of the fashion industry, with André Courreges slashing skirt lengths in 1965, and a new wave of designers including Pierre Cardin and Paco Rabanne designing for a more youthful customer.

Beginning of the modern runway show

In the 1970s, ready-to-wear took over from haute couture, and the catwalk became the new medium for designers’ collections. In Paris, so many designers were showing their collections twice a year that in 1973, the Chambre Syndicale du Prêt-à-Porter des Couturiers et des Créateurs de Mode, was founded to coordinate the shows. This was the birth of Paris fashion week .

• The main attractions of Paris fashion week included the Japanese designer Kenzo, Sonia Rykiel, and Chloé (designed by Karl Lagerfeld) with models including Pat Cleveland and Jerry Hall prowling the catwalks..

Europe’s renaissance

During the early 1980s, London became known as the capital of creativity. Vivienne Westwood burst on the scene with a mix of historically researched clothing, sex, and anarchy and a band of followers who were as fanatical about music as fashion. Westwood’s shows were irreverent, rude and raised a one-fingered salute to the grand traditions of the fashion show.

• In 1984 London fashion week launched.

A year after the British Fashion Council was founded in 1983, the British Designer Show and the London Designer Collections, which had been organising shows since 1975, were centralised under one roof. Shows took place in a tent in the car park of the Commonwealth Institute.

London became a key city for press and buyers looking for the Next Big Thing. Other key designers who reinvented the concept of the catwalk show included the progressive label BodyMap, which made a specialty of diverse casting in terms of age, size, colour and gender. The New York Times succinctly described the atmosphere of a BodyMap show in the 1980s: “as bizarre as any rock star’s video”.

• In Paris, Thierry Mugler, Claude Montana and Jean Paul Gaultier showed alongside the revolutionary Japanese designers, Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake, and the old-guard French houses, Dior, Chanel and Givenchy.

If London was the place to discover new talent, the 80s and 90s cemented Paris as fashion’s cultural heartbeat. In April of 1981, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto arrived from Tokyo with their debut show. Held in Paris’s Intercontinental Hotel, Comme des Garcons and Yamamoto brought a new more disheveled, asexual attitude to fashion, contrasting with the dominance of high-gloss power-dressing.

At the same time, New York’s show scene was given a shake up in the mid-1980s when Stephen Sprouse showed his edgy arthouse fashion in crowded lofts to a fashion/music/art crowd. Regulars included artist Keith Haring and Debbie Harry of Blondie.

The era of supermodels and slickness

In the 1990s, attention turned from the shows and the designers to the models, with supermodels gaining prominence. Versace’s autumn/winter 1991 show was the pinnacle of the phenomenon, with Linda, Cindy, Christy and Naomi singing the words to George Michael’s Freedom as the show’s final; a moment Donatella Versace relived in tribute to her brother for her spring/summer 2018 show.

Tom Ford’s Gucci upped the ante for a new style of slick, controlled show that was all about sex, status and glamour. The autumn/winter 1995 show used lighting like no other, a single spot following the model along the catwalk focusing the attention on the sheen of Amber Valletta’s velvet hipsters, the sensuousness of Kate Moss’s silk blouse, and – most importantly – the “It” bags that became the other stars of the show.

Location, location, location

The mark of a really edgy designer was the ability to attract the fashion crowd to see a collection in the most obscure, out-of-the-way venue. In 1989, Belgian designer Martin Margiela became one of the first to completely ignore the conventions of fashion shows (then largely held in a tent in a courtyard of the Musée du Louvre until they moved in 1993 to a series of purpose-built runway theatres under the Carrousel du Louvre) when he took over a rundown children’s playground on the outskirts of Paris. There was no seating plan, the locals and their kids were invited to watch. The models walked as they would normally down the street. The stage was set for a less hierarchical, more democratic approach.

• No designer understood the atmosphere of a show location more than Alexander McQueen.

In 1996, Alexander McQueen’s Dante show was held at Hawksmoor’s Christchurch in Spitalfields, a landmark moment when the fashion show became as much about the location, the atmosphere and the setting as the clothes.

The show setting was of utmost importance to John Galliano, too, particularly after his move to Paris in 1993. His first show was facilitated by society hostess Sao Schlumberger, who lent the designer her Left Bank home for his Japanese-inspired show. Five years later, for his spring 1998 Dior haute couture debut, he took over the Opera Garnier in Paris for the ultimate fashion show spectacular. Joan Juliet Buck, then editor-in-chief of French Vogue called it “an excess of beauty”. It was one of the most lavish shows ever, a serious statement of one-upmanship from one of fashion’s most powerful houses.

• In Hussein Chalayan’s Autumn/Winter 2000 collection, a table was transformed into a skirt

From internet to Insta show

Technology has had the biggest impact on the evolution of the fashion show, although at times, the conservative industry has had to be dragged into the digital age. In 1998 Austrian designer Helmut Lang was one of the first to embrace the internet, and presented his autumn/winter show online.

“I sensed at the time that the internet would grow into something much bigger than imaginable, so I thought it was the right moment to challenge the norm,” he said.

In 2010, Alexander McQueen became the first designer to livestream his show, Plato’s Atlantis. By the next year, designers at New York fashion week were livestreaming their shows. Now it is possible to watch most shows in real time, if not via livestream, through Instagram .

• With the advent of social media, fashion shows have arguably become more democratic spaces

Some designers seek to attract the public in real life, too: in 2015, Riccardo Tisci used a lottery to invite members of the public to his Givenchy show. For autumn/winter 2016, Tommy Hilfiger opened his Tommy Pier fairground show to around 1,000 guests who could access free tickets online.

They could also buy some of the collection there and then, part of the “see now, buy now” trend, designed to leverage the publicity around showtime into sales. This was a format that Burberry also launched in September 2016, making its shows into exhibitions open to the public. It is a model that Mulberry is taking for its presentation for AW18 when it takes over Spencer House .

Insta-nt fashion

In keeping with this revolution, Instagram has become the medium the fashion industry now most relies on. Hence the three-day resort-show “holiday” phenomenon, where designers take their audiences on all-expenses paid trips of a lifetime. Dior jetted off to the remote mountain Californian mountain resort of Calabasas for its resort 2018 show. Chanel has flown its international audience to Havana, Salzburg, Edinburgh and Los Angeles. Louis Vuitton travelled to Tokyo for its 2018 Cruise show, and to Rio the year before. These trips are designed to be Instagram frenzies. The clothes are almost an irrelevance.

• Whether it’s the size of the hair or the attention to detail, post Instagram, the shows are all about being insta-fabulous

The world of fashion might have become a more hard-nosed, commercial space, but it is no less extravagant for it. With livestreaming, (and endless opportunities for Instagram, fashion’s social media obsession) the scope is much grander – it is now possible for anyone to see the shows as they happen. But despite all this, there is no substitute for actually being there. A fashion show is a multi-sensory experience.

• Donatella Versace with Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Helena Christensen at the end of the show in Milan

The front row – or Frow as it is affectionately abbreviated – has become its own entity. In the early salon show days, guests sat in clusters around tables, permitting the creations and construction to be appreciated up close. As the industry got bigger, the number of invitations increased, forcing practical benches in neat rows to become the norm, and so a seating hierarchy formed.

Generally its a commonsense one: top magazine and newspaper editors, who can report and promote the collections, take precedence alongside head buyers for department stores and online boutiques, who will place orders after the show. In recent years, the rise of the internet and social media has meant bloggers and influencers are also guaranteed a spot on the Frow, as are celebrities, famous friends of the designer, and high-profile family members.

Undeniably, seating is a status issue . For example, at couture shows, clients are known to demand a front-row seat as close to the beginning of the catwalk as possible so that they can be the first to nip backstage post show and get first dibs on a one-of-a-kind gown to which they have taken a shine.

Some designers have been known to do away with the FROW entirely, as when Chanel created a Parisian neighbourhood for its Metiers D’Art show in 2015 and sat attendees on wrought-iron café tables or when The Row made showgoers stand around a New York loft to present its AW18 collection. Undeniably, however, there’s nothing quite like a front row seat.

• The Guardian picture essay
• Fashion weeks
• Alexander McQueen
• Karl Lagerfeld
• New York fashion week
• Paris fashion week

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Hubert de Givenchy, maker of style icons, dies aged 91

Fashion houses unveil plans for major shows behind closed doors

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IRELAND IN THE 1960s

‘Two Lives Lost to Heroin’: A Harrowing, Early Portrait of Addicts

Karen and John were the main subjects of a LIFE story on heroin addiction. Here Karen had her arms around John and his brother, Bro— also an addict—as they lay on a hotel bed.

Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Written By: Ben Cosgrove

‘We are animals in a world no one knows’

In February 1965, LIFE magazine published an extraordinary photo essay on two New York City heroin addicts, John and Karen. Photographed by Bill Eppridge, the pictures and the accompanying article, reported and written by LIFE associate editor James Mills were part of a two-part series on narcotics in the United States. A sensitive, clear-eyed and harrowing chronicle of, as LIFE phrased it, “two lives lost to heroin,” Eppridge’s pictures shocked the magazine’s readers and brought the sordid, grim reality of addiction into countless American living rooms.

To this day, Eppridge’s photo essay remains among the most admired and, for some, among the most controversial that LIFE ever published. His pictures and Mills’ reporting, meanwhile, formed the basis for the 1971 movie, Panic in Needle Park , which starred Al Pacino and Kitty Winn as addicts whose lives spin inexorably out of control.

Here, LIFE.com presents Eppridge’s “Needle Park” photo essay in its entirety, as it appeared in LIFE a portrait of two young people who have become, as they themselves put it, “animals in a world no one knows.”

[See more of Bill Eppridge’s work.]

Karen and John were the main subjects of a LIFE story on heroin addiction. Here Karen had her arms around John and his brother, Bro— also an addict—as they lay on a hotel bed. Bill Eppridge The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Needle Park, LIFE magazine, Feb. 26, 1965

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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

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!

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

Penelope G. To Ana Mireles Such a well written and helpful article for an writer who wants to inclue photo essay in her memoir. Thank you. I will get to work on this new skill. Penelope G.

Herman Krieger Photo essays in black and white

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Sophia Bush comes out as queer, confirms relationship with Ashlyn Harris

Actor Sophia Bush came out as queer in an emotional essay in Glamour and confirmed she’s in a relationship with retired U.S. Women’s National Team soccer player Ashlyn Harris. 

“I sort of hate the notion of having to come out in 2024,” Bush wrote in a cover story for the fashion magazine published Thursday. “But I’m deeply aware that we are having this conversation in a year when we’re seeing the most aggressive attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community in modern history.” 

Bush noted that there were more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed in state legislatures last year and said this motivated her to “give the act of coming out the respect and honor it deserves.” 

“I’ve experienced so much safety, respect, and love in the queer community, as an ally all of my life, that, as I came into myself, I already felt it was my home,” she wrote. “I think I’ve always known that my sexuality exists on a spectrum. Right now I think the word that best defines it is queer . I can’t say it without smiling, actually. And that feels pretty great.”

The “One Tree Hill” star filed for divorce from entrepreneur Grant Hughes in August. People magazine first reported in October that Bush and Harris were dating, but neither confirmed nor commented on the report. The pair later attended an Oscar’s viewing party together in March . 

In the essay, Bush addressed online rumors that her relationship with Harris began before Harris had officially divorced from fellow soccer star Ali Krieger, in September. 

“Everyone that matters to me knows what’s true and what isn’t,” Bush wrote. “But even still there’s a part of me that’s a ferocious defender, who wants to correct the record piece by piece. But my better self, with her earned patience, has to sit back and ask, What’s the f------- point? For who? For internet trolls? No, thank you. I’ll spend my precious time doing things I love instead.”

Bush said that after news about her and Harris became public, her mom told her that a friend called and said, “Well, this can’t be true. I mean, your daughter isn’t gay .” 

“My mom felt that it was obvious, from the way her friend emphasized the word, that she meant it judgmentally,” Bush wrote. “And you know what my mom said? ‘Oh honey, I think she’s pretty gay. And she’s happy .’”

Bush wrote that she felt like she was wearing a weighted vest that she could finally put down. 

“I finally feel like I can breathe,” Bush wrote. “I turned 41 last summer, amid all of this, and I heard the words I was saying to my best friend as they came out of my mouth. ‘I feel like this is my first birthday,’ I told her. This year was my very first birthday.”

For more from NBC Out, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Jo Yurcaba is a reporter for NBC Out.

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Roman Gabriel, Star Quarterback of the 1960s and ’70s, Dies at 83

In 16 seasons with the Los Angeles Rams and the Philadelphia Eagles, he played in four Pro Bowl games and was voted Most Valuable Player in 1969.

By Richard Goldstein

Roman Gabriel, one of the leading pro football passers of his time, who complemented his rocket arm with an imposing physique over 16 seasons beginning in 1962, died on Saturday at his home in Little River, S.C. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by his son, Roman Gabriel III, who did not specify a cause.

Playing for 11 seasons with the Los Angeles Rams and five with the Philadelphia Eagles, Gabriel, who stood well over six feet tall and weighed about 235 pounds — hefty for a quarterback in that era — had a build akin to that of many of the linebackers he faced.

He was voted the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player when he led the league in touchdown passes, with 24, in a 14-game season with the 1969 Rams.

He was also named the comeback player of the year by pro football writers in 1973, his first season with the Eagles. Coming off knee problems and a sore arm, he led the N.F.L. in touchdown passes (23), completions (270) and passing yardage (3,219) that season.

He played in four Pro Bowl games, three with the Rams in the late 1960s and another with the Eagles in 1973. But he reached the postseason only twice, and his Rams were eliminated in the first round both times.

Roman Ildonzo Gabriel Jr., was born on Aug. 5, 1940, in Wilmington, N.C. His father, a native of the Philippines, a railroad waiter and cook, had settled in North Carolina with his wife, Edna (Wyatt) Gabriel, who was Irish American.

Roman was a standout in football, baseball and basketball in high school and was offered a contract with the Yankees’ organization, but he decided to attend college instead.

Playing from 1959 to 1961 for North Carolina State football teams that emphasized a running attack, he threw for 19 touchdown passes, ran for another 15 and was a two-time all-American.

At a time when the American Football League, embarking on its third season, was competing for college talent with the N.F.L., Gabriel was selected by the Oakland Raiders as the A.F.L.’s overall No. 1 pick in the 1962 draft and chosen by the Rams as the second selection in the N.F.L. draft.

He signed with the Rams. But he started fewer than half their games in his first four seasons, when the team usually went with several other quarterbacks.

Named the Rams’ regular quarterback when George Allen became head coach in 1966, Gabriel took the team to an 8-6 record. It was the Rams’ first winning season since 1958.

“George Allen said, ‘I think you can play.’ He gave me hope,” Gabriel recalled in a 2018 video interview with Phil Boyd on YouTube, “The Book of Roman: The N.F.L.’s Original Gunslinger.’’

“He brought in Ted Marchibroda” — a former pro quarterback who became the Rams’ offensive coach — “and he taught me more about football than anybody else in my career.”

Gabriel had already put himself in prime shape, practicing martial arts and lifting weights.

“The rule prior to that was you don’t want to lift weights because you’re going to get musclebound and lose your flexibility,” Marchibroda, who was later a head coach with the Colts and Ravens, told The New York Times in 2005.

Gabriel threw for 2,779 yards and 25 touchdowns in 1967, when the Rams finished 11-1-2 but lost to the Green Bay Packers in the playoffs. Two years later, while he was en route to his M.V.P. award, his Rams won their first 11 games before losing to the Vikings. They finished at 11-3 but were beaten again in the playoffs, this time by Minnesota.

He was surrounded by players who were stars in their own right, among them the receivers Jack Snow and Bernie Casey ; the running back Dick Bass; the defensive linemen Merlin Olsen , Deacon Jones and Roger Brown; and the linebacker Maxie Baughan .

When Chuck Knox took over as head coach in 1973, the Rams obtained John Hadl from the San Diego Chargers, intending to make him their starting quarterback.

Gabriel asked to be traded. He was sent to an Eagles team that had gone 2-11-1 in 1972 and had a new head coach, Mike McCormack.

“Mike said that with my experience and leadership, he felt with a young football team that I’d feel like Moses,” Gabriel recalled in a 2015 interview for the Eagles’ website. But, he remembered, McCormack added, “We need your leadership and work ethic.”

The Eagles improved to 5-8-1 in 1973, when Gabriel connected with the 6-foot-8 Harold Carmichael, whose 67 receptions led the league; the 6-foot-4 tight end Charle Young, who was voted All-Pro as a rookie; and the 6-foot-3 Don Zimmerman.

The receivers were known as the Fire High Gang because, as the story went, one of them would say “Fire high, baby” when Gabriel called a passing play.

But Gabriel was still struggling with injuries, and the quality of his performance faded. He retired after the 1977 season, having passed for 29,444 yards and 201 touchdowns in his career.

He was later a pro football broadcaster, the head coach at Cal Poly Pomona, and a coach in the United States Football League and the World League of American Football. He was also president of two minor-league baseball teams in North Carolina.

He also dabbled in acting. He played a head hunter in an episode of the sitcom “Gilligan’s Island” and the adopted Native American son of an Army colonel portrayed by John Wayne in the 1969 western “The Undefeated.”

In his later years, Gabriel operated a sports marketing company and raised substantial funds for charities.

He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1989 but is not yet in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

In addition to his son Roman III, Gabriel is survived by three other sons, Ram Allen, Rory Jay and Brandon; a daughter, Amber Smigel; and 10 grandchildren. He was married and divorced three times.

Gabriel took pride in mixing it up with defensive players.

Marchibroda remembered that the Rams’ offensive linemen came up to him during one game and said, “Tell Roman not to take on the linebackers when he runs with the football, because we don’t want him to get hurt.”

He added that when he told Gabriel of their fears, Gabriel replied, “Coach, if I don’t run into those guys, I’m not doing my best.”

Emmett Lindner contributed reporting.

Because of an editing error, the headline with an earlier version of this obituary misstated Gabriel’s age. As the obituary correctly states, he was 83, not 84. The earlier version also misspelled the name of the quarterback the Los Angeles Rams obtained from the San Diego Chargers in 1973, prompting Gabriel to ask for a trade. He was John Hadl, not Hadle.

An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the given name of a former tight end who played for the Philadelphia Eagles when Gabriel was with the team. He is Charle Young, not Charles. The earlier version also misidentified the head coach of the Los Angeles Rams whom Chuck Knox replaced in 1973. He was Tommy Prothro, not George Allen.

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