Category Archives: Historical Photography
America’s Race Riots of the Sixties
In the early 1960s, African Americans in cities nationwide were growing frustrated with the high level of poverty in their communities. Since the years immediately following World War II (1939–45), middle-class white Americans had been leaving the cities for nearby suburbs. Businesses that had once provided jobs and tax funding in the cities were leaving […]
Lewis Hine: “Unfavorable Positions”
Walker Evans: “American Photographs” at MoMA, NYC” (1938)
Julius Born’s ‘Texan Portraits’: Cowboys, Immigrants and Animals
Photographer Julius Born took thousands of photographs of the people, land and community in Hemphill county located in the Texas panhandle. In thousands of portrait photographs taken during the first half of the twentieth century, Born forever documented Texas’ past, heritage, and humanity. In his images of cowboys and businessmen, well-composed ladies, and fidgety […]
Diane Arbus MoMA Exhibition Wall Label Text (1972)
She was not a theorist but an artist. Her concern was not to buttress philosophical questions but to make pictures. By John Szarkowski, Director, Department of Photography, NY MoMA Diane Arbus’s pictures challenge the basic assumptions on which most documentary photography has been thought to rest, for they deal with private rather than social […]
Bill Ray: “Hells Angels” (1965)
Explore more here: http://time.com/3506839/life-rides-with-hells-angels-1965/ (All rights reserved. Images @ Bill Ray and LIFE Magazine.)
MAX NATKIEL: “PARADISO STILLS” (1980-86)
As a frequent visitor to concerts at Paradiso, Amsterdam’s long-running music venue, in the early 1980s, Dutch photographer Max Natkiel encountered all manner of subcultures: punks, new-wavers, rockers, mods, Rastafarians, squatters, and metal- and skinheads. Eventually he decided to bring along his camera and started making portraits of the fascinating people he found; a collection […]
DAVID FREUND: “AT THE PUMP” (1978-1982)
(All rights reserved. Images @ David Freund and Courtesy of Joseph Bellows Gallery)
RUSSELL LEE: “AMERICANS”
Brassai: “Paris by Night”
Arriving in Paris in 1924, Brassaï rapidly became a shrewd observer of nocturnal Parisian life.
The Archive of Modern Conflict (2012)
Concealed within a west London house is a huge archive, largely made up of vernacular photographs but also including all manner of other unexpected objects with stories behind them. Timothy Prus and Edwin Jones explain the origin of the collection and pick out some randomly selected examples to give an impression of the extraordinary range […]