Race & Class

KKK Cross Burnings, the Garden of Eden and Florida Family Life in the 1950’s

Photographs from the area around Tallahassee, Florida in the 1950’s. A selection from the Red Kerce Collection. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

Walker Evans and African-American Flood Refugees in Forrest City, Arkansas (1937)

Walker Evans photographed flood refugees at mealtime, Forrest City, Arkansas, 1937. EXPLORE ALL WALKER EVANS ON ASX

Marion Post Wolcott – ‘Mississippi Delta Plantation Life’ (1930s)

Caleb Foote & Dorothea Lange: “Outcasts! : The Story of America’s Treatment of Her Japanese-American Minority” (1943)

Irrigator, who, with 595 persons of Japanese ancestry, is leaving this rural district this morning for an assembly center under Civilian Exclusion Order Number 34. Centerville, CA, 1942, Dorothea Lange Text by Caleb Foote, Photographs by Dorothea Lange The Tyranny of a Word Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco Chronicle said of the persons of […]

Photographing Resistance to the Menace and Alienation of Apartheid Transport – Santu Mofokeng’s ‘Train Churches’ (1996)

#1, From Train Church, 1986 By David Alvarez, excerpt from Alternation, 1996 I think that particularly in a country like South Africa where for centuries and particularly in the last four decades or so there has been an overt attempt to remove people’s identities or to make them something other than what they are there […]

Bruce Gilden – “Fort Myers”

In September of 2008, Bruce Gilden began a project that set out to document foreclosures in America. Beginning in Fort Myers, Florida — the foreclosure capital of the East Coast — Gilden, with his knack for shining both a literal and figurative light on the forgotten, set out to capture the fallout of the subprime […]

PAUL KWILECKI: “GEORGIA”

Paul Kwilecki’s Photograph Collection at Duke University contains 583 black and white prints made in and around the town of Bainbridge, Georgia from 1960-2008. A self-taught photographer, Kwilecki honed his craft by photographing the broad spectrum of daily life manifested in Bainbridge and the rural areas of Decatur County. From the Shade Tobacco workers in […]

JEFF BROUWS: “It Don’t Exist – The Impact of Sprawl and Suburban Build-out on Inner City America” (2009)

“It Don’t Exist”, The Impact of Sprawl and Suburban Build-out on Inner City America By Jeff Brouws (lecture delivered at SPE’s conference in Dallas), March 28, 2009 I’ve been photographing the American cultural landscape for the past twenty years. Utilizing different series that I’ve done involving the everyday urban and suburban places we encounter, I’ll […]

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE: “The Voices of the White South” (1956)

In the mid-1950s, LIFE magazine published a multi-part series that was titled “The Background of Segregation” exploring how the politically-violently-ethically charged issue was playing out from a Jim Crow South to the first fiery stirrings of the heroic Civil Rights movement. Today, here we sit, our cities crumbling – segregation (race, socio-economics, class, ideology) […]

CRYSTAL K.D. HUIE: “ARKANSAS” (1972)

ROBERT K. HOWER: “KENTUCKY”

A Conversation with Camilo Jose Vergara

“America was supposed to be a country of big buildings, of ever-growing construction of roads, and stuff. And it is; and it is. But in addition to that, there is another America that has all of these things left behind.” Conversation with Ilan Stavans and Camilo Jose Vergara STAVANS: Camillo Jose Vergara, you are a […]