“Matt Herron a photojournalist who vividly memorialized the most portentous and promising moments from the front lines of the 1960s civil rights movement in the Deep South, died on Aug. 7 when a glider he was piloting crashed in Northern California. He was 89. A child of the Depression and a protégé of the Dust Bowl documentarian Dorothea Lange, Mr. Herron assembled a team of photographers to capture the clashes between white Southerners and Black protesters, aided by their white Freedom Rider allies, as they sought to claim the rights they had been legally granted a century before.” Read full story and watch video link to his oral history interview here.
Tag: Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange – Photographer
“With the Dust Bowl’s defining image as her massive claim to fame (you would be hard-pressed to find a high school history teacher’s 1930s PowerPoint that doesn’t include “Migrant Mother”), it’s perhaps too easy to forget that while Lange’s images have always spoken to us, her subjects weren’t always able to speak for themselves.
“As we were working on [the show], we read from Lange’s oral history, and she says that all photographs can be fortified by words,” Sarah Meister explains, “I thought, I totally disagree. But what an amazing statement from someone who dedicated their life to making images. It got us going on the question of whether it felt urgent, now, to look at Lange more deeply.
For full story click here. See Lange’s oral history here and here.