Danny Lyon took his first photography gig when he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization of young activists that orchestrated sit-ins and carried on the Freedom Rides during the Civil Rights Movement. With leader James Forman and other photographers, Lyon helped make photography an important part of SNCC’s strategy by documenting the… Read More

In the winter of 1937 the Ohio River overran its banks and flooded the land between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cairo, Illinois, killing almost four hundred hundred people and displacing approximately one million. Communities in the path of the floodwaters were already struggling in the depths of the Great Depression, and few cities were more inundated… Read More

When the reporter and newspaper editor Jacob Riis purchased a camera in 1888, his chief concern was to obtain pictures that would reveal a world that much of New York City tried hard to ignore: the tenement houses, streets, and back alleys that were populated by the poor and largely immigrant communities flocking to the… Read More

Through the course of the nineteenth century, white photographers making portraits of Native American sitters generally framed their subjects in stereotypical ways that exoticized their culture. Many of these photographs augmented the myth that Native American populations could not assimilate into white society and were destined to disappear. Such parallel ideas were often evoked to… Read More