Ken Regan became a well-known photographer during the 1960s when he was only in his twenties. Born and raised in the Bronx, New York, he used the city to start his career as a teenager. Soon after he started his career, he was already getting published in prestigious papers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the first paper in which his photographs were published.

This photograph features two field workers in Fremont, California. By manipulating his camera lens, Owens produces an effect that focuses the audience’s attention on the front-most worker. This worker’s expression and posture allude to the poor working conditions in most of California’s agricultural valleys during the 20th century. Farm and field workers were among the most exploited and oppressed workers in the United States. In 1969, just a few years before this photograph was taken, the average salary for a field worker was $1,000. This was about one-tenth of the salary of the average American. Additionally, workers were denied toilet facilities, adequate sanitation, and health care. While some conditions improved because of the formation of unions, such as the United Farm Workers (UFW), many farm owners continued to treat their workers inhumanly.

Dirty Windows #5 is a black-and-white photograph from Merry Alpern’s beautifully disturbing series Dirty Windows that captures scenes of a low-rent brothel near Wall Street in New York City. For six months, Alpern frequently camped at her viewing point: a friend’s Manhattan apartment where she photographed this daily trade of human desire and everything in between—including drugs, violence, grace, and resilience. By using many full-frame compositions, where a single subject fills the entire frame, Alpern manages to purely focus on the identity of her subject as a “sex worker,” revealing to us the behind-the-scenes of sex work as a profession. Through her utilization of surveillance photography, she captures what it is like to work to simply please and be subjected to the male gaze.

In Liberty Day, Fourth of July, New York City, German-born artist Erika Stone captures people with varied backgrounds attending the New York City and New Jersey-wide celebration of freedom called Liberty Weekend. Her photograph shows those in Giants Stadium, New Jersey, for the closing ceremony, which was a four-day long event held on July 3–6, 1986, across both neighboring states. This event celebrated the restoration of France’s famous gift to the United States, the Statue of Liberty. This renowned 151-foot sculpture of the Roman goddess Libertas serves as a monument to the American ideal of “freedom and liberty for all.” July 4, 1986, also marked the two hundredth anniversary of the United States’ independence from Great Britain. Notably, the then-current US and French presidents Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand, respectively, were in attendance for this memorable affair.

The mystery of this small image leaves its meaning and context up to its viewers. One can only wonder: Who is this man? The photograph was plausibly taken during World War I, due to the style of uniform he wears, as well as the background artillery and helmet model, although this is speculation. The image captures a uniformed soldier cradling an artillery shell, grinning down at the weapon. The shell looks to be treated as a small child, with a careful grip and loving attention. He stomps his foot down on an identical shell, perhaps demonstrating his power and control over the weapon. Although the staged nature of this photograph may imply that this image was taken in good fun, might there be an underlying meaning? A greater societal issue? A view of what the US military might represent?

The core mission of photojournalist Stephen Shames is to raise public awareness of social issues, especially social issues pertaining to child poverty and race. His striking photo essays are created for “foundations, advocacy organizations, the media, and museums. Shames has been praised by the New York Times for following in the footsteps of esteemed “muckraker” photojournalists like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. One of Shames’s main areas of interest is the Black Panther Party, a political party that came into being in the late 1960s. The Panthers’ goal was to liberate Black Americans using violence and self-defense.

Erika Stone is an American photographer who focuses her work on documenting people, specifically children and families, in black-and-white photographs. Many of her photographs highlight the poor regions of New York such as Harlem and the Lower East Side. Stone grew up in fascist Germany and lived a very poor lifestyle. This past served as an inspiration for her photographs as she was drawn to document the poor lifestyle on the streets of New York. With her work, Stone hopes to document the unconventional individuals and tell their stories in her photographs. She shares that she “tried to photograph nature but it is nothing good … I am not interested in nature as I am interested in humans and their stories.”

A pivotal female photographer during the twentieth century, Erika Stone rose to fame for her renowned ability to document everyday life through her photographs. As the title of the piece describes, this photograph depicts children playing in an empty lot in East Harlem, New York. Much of Stone’s work focuses on portraying people’s lives and stories. After the birth of her two sons, Stone took particular interest in photographing children and families. Stone’s work centers on peoples’ struggles and asks the viewer to consider the story behind the camera.

This work features a male figure, Billy, cradling a baby. Larry Clark photographed this scene to convey “adolescent violence, sexuality, and drug use” after he watched a film of children coming of age in New York City engaging in drug use and early sexual behaviors.

Notice the juxtaposition of Billy’s hands embracing a baby while the other clings onto a cigarette. This image leads the audience to wonder, is this male figure Billy, the baby’s caretaker? What does the baby’s home life consist of, is there a mother? The blacks and whites are contrasting colors that emphasize the pure white eyes of the baby staring dazed at the camera. Might this relate to Americans’ notions of parenting and their impact on a child’s struggles, successes, and resiliency?

August Sander is one of the most important German photographers of the twentieth century. Sander is most famous for his portraits, but also has work depicting landscape, nature, architecture, and street photography. Some of his most pivotal photographs were taken during the Nazi regime. This greatly restricted the limits of his work: one of his photography studios was destroyed during the 1944 bombing raid and many of his in-progress work was ravaged in a 1946 fire. The Nazi regime also confiscated much of his work, and the release of many of his photographs did not see the light of day until after World War II. Sander’s main objective was to take photographs of people as they actually were, and that scared the Nazi regime, who viewed Sander’s work as a threat. Children Born Blind was taken in Germany at a home for the blind, depicting two children holding hands. Rather than naming the children or the institution, Sander relies on the viewer to see these children for their own humanity, and as part of different societal groups. Sander urges the viewer to understand their original judgements and perceptions about these groups and the power dynamics within.

Matt Herron was a magazine photojournalist who led a seminal photography project called the Southern Documentary Project to capture moments of the Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi: a campaign launched in June 1964 by more than 1,000 college students to teach and register Black voters who were restricted from voting due to barriers to voter registration and other legal sanctions. Their goal was to register as many Black voters as possible to help them gain power and amplify their voices to fight White supremist efforts to suppress the Black vote in the Jim Crow south.

The piece that I will be discussing is untitled and obscure. It was shot by an unrecorded photographer, leaving us with a critical absence of comprehension of setting, foundation, and verifiable histories. Regardless, we can accumulate significant data from the actual picture. The image at hand revolves around the notion of power imbalance and dynamics. The image showcases a winner’s trio leveled podium with a Black man in the middle exhibiting his muscles and dominance. While two Black women, both lower in platform rank, are under him and are looking up to his dominant being.

While not much is known about Bob Scott or his reasoning for taking this photograph, this image captures a crucial social justice issue that played out among many American cities in the mid-1970s. Local lawmakers advocated for Black and Indigenous students and students of color in cities to be bussed to suburban schools and vice versa to decrease school segregation. While decreasing school segregation itself is a legitimate action, bussing specifically was protested by all for its poor solution to modern segregation and systemic racism in the United States. However, the protesters captured here are aiming to stop busing to perpetuate school segregation and systemic racism. This policy ultimately passed and has had lasting negative effects on schools across the country including harsher political divides and wasted school funding. Together, these factors resulted in reducing any potential effectiveness of mandatory busing on segregation.

Danny Lyon is a self-taught photographer who chose to work within the prison systems of America in order to document the emotions and conditions of inmates within the United States. This photograph was taken in the cafeteria of Goree Unit, which is a prison in Texas that houses women inmates. In the cafeteria, inmates are not confined by bars, but are able to converse and move around freely among themselves. Lyon was troubled about his ability to come and go freely from the prisons within which he worked. Perhaps this is why he chose to take this photograph of inmates in locations outside of their cells, or where they had more freedom. Lyon’s photograph captures two women in a way that showcases the state of melancholy and sadness as a result of the situation these two women are in. It is important to note Lyon’s work consists mostly of photographs containing inmates of color, possibly reflecting the disproportional incarceration of different ethnic groups within a White-dominated America. This message is brought on strongly when combined with the sadness reflected by the women in this photo. Lyon’s ability to capture genuine emotion within his photographs shines within Two Inmates, and the goal of Lyon’s prison collection as a whole is just that, capturing raw emotion.

This photograph was taken on June 6, 2020, in Philadelphia. The image captures a scene in Philadelphia during the hectic summer of 2020 after the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd led to multitudes of Black Lives Matter protests across the United States. Amidst a global pandemic and outrageous acts of violence towards Black individuals, the people hit the streets. Protesters marched in cities across the United States, including in Philadelphia, for weeks during the summer to unite and take the first steps towards healing a divided nation.