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While President John F. Kennedy was talking by phone with his brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, on the morning of Tuesday, June 12, 1963, he suddenly exclaimed: “Jesus Christ!”

The president’s outburst had nothing to do with their conversation. Rather, he was responding to a photograph taken the day before, splashed on the front pages of the newspapers just delivered to him. The photo showed 73-year-old Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc engulfed in flames on a street in Saigon, South Vietnam while sitting calmly—it seemed—in the lotus posture. He hoped his drastic action might bring the world’s attention to what the Buddhists saw as the persecution against their religion by the Catholic regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Buddhist organizations had called for freedom from arbitrary arrest, the right to assemble in public, and an end to the supposed Catholic bias in appointing government officials.

Captured by Malcom W. Browne, the head of the Associated Press’s bureau in Saigon, the photo retains its ability to stop conversations to this day, making it an enduring symbol of the power of protest. Meanwhile, critics insist that the photo, and the reporting from Vietnam by Western newsmen including Browne, David Halberstam of the New York Times, and Neil Sheehan of United Press International, were responsible for Diem’s downfall and America’s ultimate defeat and humiliation in Vietnam.

But Browne had been determined, he insisted, only to provide his readers with a “continuous, honest assessment of the situation” in what he called “a puzzling war.” He believed that officials in Vietnam—Americans and South Vietnamese—should have tried to do the same. Browne thought that living in a free society meant a journalist had to “tell all of the people all of the truth all of the time. The newsman is obliged to fight forces that interfere with this vital process.”

Criticism continued to follow Browne. Later, when he reported on the war in the Persian Gulf in 1991, detractors back home accused him of harming the American cause in its fight against Iraq. “This is just silly, of course,” Browne said. “To the extent that America newsmen ‘took sides’ in either Viet Nam or the Persian Gulf, it was on the side of the United States.” For all societies at war, the important truth, he suggested, was the truth “that tells you ‘we are the good guys and we are winning,’ regardless of what team you’re on,” reflected Browne.

Yet as American involvement in Vietnam wound down, it no longer seemed possible “to believe in the goodness and rightness of our cause,” Browne noted. The public had been regularly promised by its government that there was “a light at the end of the tunnel”—yet victory never came. Instead of pointing fingers at the individuals who involved the country in the conflict, many in the United States decided to “blame the messengers—people like myself who had been sending back discouraging tidings of how bad things had been going,” Browne said.

The story of the monk’s self-immolation began on May 8, 1963, when South Vietnamese army and security forces had killed civilians protesting a new governmental decree outlawing the flying of the Buddhist flag on Buddha’s birthday in Hue. These killings sparked protests against the Diem government’s perceived anti-Buddhist policies.

Quang Duc’s fiery sacrifice was the latest of these protests. Thirty-two-year-old Browne captured it on a cheap, Japanese Petri-brand camera. Browne had arrived in Saigon on November 7, 1961. He had witnessed the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam grow from about 3,000 American military advisers when he arrived to more than 16,000 by the end of 1963. Tipped off about the demonstration the evening before, he was the only Western reporter on the scene to capture the horrific event on film.

The elder monk uttered no sound as the flames consumed his body, and did not change his position. But from his spot about 20 feet to the right and a little in front of Quang Duc, Browne could see that his “features were contorted with agony” and could hear moans from the crowd that had gathered to watch, as well as the ragged chanting from the approximately 300 yellow-robed monks and gray-robed Buddhist nuns who had joined the protest.

The newsman found himself “numb with shock” at the horrible scene. Though witnessing anyone commit suicide or suffer a violent death “is always a hard experience,” Browne later noted, “you can get used to it in war, but there was something special about this. It was kind of a horror.”

After about ten minutes, the flames died down and the monk “pitched over, twitched convulsively and was still.” Seemingly out of nowhere, a coffin appeared and fellow monks attempted to place Quang Duc inside. It was no use. The monk’s limbs, Browne recalled, “had been roasted to rigidity, and he could not be bent enough to fit in the casket. As the procession moved off toward Xa Loi Pagoda, his blackened arms protruded from the coffin, one of them still smoking.”

Browne’s film soon made its way from the AP bureau in Saigon to Manila with the aid of a “pigeon”—a regular passenger on a commercial flight willing to act as a courier to avoid censorship by South Vietnamese government officials. The photos were sent via the AP WirePhoto cable from Manila to San Francisco, and from there to the news agency’s headquarters in New York. There, the images were distributed to AP member newspapers around the world.

The reaction was immediate. While millions of words had been written about the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam, Browne’s pictures possessed what the correspondent later termed “an incomparable impact.”

A group of clergymen in the United States used the photograph for full-page advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post decrying American military aid to a country that denied most of its citizens religious freedoms. Vietnamese Buddhist leaders emblazoned the image on placards they carried during demonstrations. Officials in communist China used the image for propaganda purposes, distributing copies throughout Southeast Asia and attributing the monk’s death to the work of “the U.S. imperialist aggressors and their Diemist lackeys.”

When President Kennedy called Henry Cabot Lodge to the White House to discuss his ambassadorship to South Vietnam, the president had on his desk a copy of the monk photograph. “I suppose that no news picture in recent history had generated as much emotion around the world as that one had,” Lodge noted.

Browne’s photograph has become one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War, seared into the collective American conscience alongside two other AP photographs—Eddie Adams’s “Saigon Execution,” his graphic shot of a suspected Viet Cong guerrilla being summarily executed at point-blank range by a South Vietnamese police chief, and Nick Ut’s “Terror of War,” showing a naked, nine-year-old girl screaming as she runs down a road with her skin burned from a South Vietnamese napalm bombing that mistakenly hit her village.

Browne, who won a Pulitzer in 1964 for his reporting from Vietnam, was often asked if he could have done anything to prevent Quang Duc from taking his life. But Browne realized that it would have been fruitless to try to intervene. The monks and nuns gathered for the protest stood ready to block anyone who dared to interfere. When a fire truck appeared, some of the monks had leapt in front of their wheels to stop them.

Quang Duc’s sacrifice weighed on Browne, who died on August 27, 2012. “I don’t think many journalists take pleasure from human suffering,” he noted, but he did have to admit to “having sometimes profited from others’ pain.” Although by no means intentional on his part, that fact did not help, Browne noted. “Journalists inadvertently influence events they cover, and although the effects are sometimes for the good, they can also be tragic,” he said. “Either way, when death is the outcome, psychic scars remain.”

There were other deaths that Browne witnessed in Vietnam—losses that became mere “footnotes” in the history of the war compared to the “theater of the horrible” that Quang Duc’s sacrifice represented for his cause. Browne, however, never forgot them. He had learned during his career to deal with “the ugliest events of our times,” including keeping his wits as he observed the dead and wounded on a battlefield. Browne was able to do his job by “concentrating on the mechanics of news covering. I have the nightmares afterwards.”

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She has visited the country six times since 2016, reporting on the war there between its internationally recognized government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the Houthi militia, a religious and political movement alleged to be receiving military support from Iran.

Recently, Waguih went back again.

She wound her way through both Sunni-dominated government-controlled territories and Shiite-aligned Houthi controlled areas. She arrived in Seiyun, in Yemen’s government-controlled eastern region, on February 25. From Seiyun, she travelled 30 hours by road to Sanaa, Yemen’s traditional capital in the Houthi-controlled north, then to Mocha, where she visited a large camp for internally displaced people, and finally another day’s drive to the government’s entrepot capital, Aden.

Along the way she passed clusters of settlements across Yemen’s mountainous arid terrain, each distinguished by an array of hillside towers, archways, rainbow-colored windows, and earthen walls. Yemen is a landscape of small towns, villages, and a few larger cities, mainly along its coast. Roads across its desert expanses are often unpaved and remote. Waguih travelled in crowded, unreliable mini-buses.

Throughout her journey, she saw the impact of war and the fractured movement of civilians and goods. In much of the country, life carries on—fishermen cast their lines, bookstores sell their tomes, devotees go to mosque. But everything is under threat, anything that still works is fragile. And there are pockets of immense suffering.

Yemen is facing a humanitarian disaster. More than 377,000 deaths are attributed to the conflict, including 150,000 people who died as a direct result of military actions. Yemen’s people are starving. The United Nations is seeking $4.3 billion to stave off hunger and disease for an estimated 23 million people—nearly three-quarters of the population, including 2.2 million acutely malnourished children. Yemen imports nearly all its provisions; Ukraine and Russia supply 40 percent of its wheat. Food prices have risen approximately 150 percent since the invasion of Ukraine, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Despite the staggering scale of the seven-year catastrophe, Western news media describes the conflict (when it describes it at all) as a “forgotten” or an “invisible war,” tropes used to justify Western neglect of complex intrastate or proxy conflicts, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

So deep are divisions between the warring parties that each runs its own fiscal and administrative systems. Waguih had to carry two sets of Yemeni banknotes, or rials. Older and newer bills have different values, exacerbating runaway inflation.

In Yemen, women are rarely seen in public without a full abaya or burqa. The fact that Waguih is a journalist and an outsider afforded her more freedom than most Yemeni women enjoy. Even still, her movements were always negotiated. In Houthi areas evening trips to convenience stores and restaurants were accompanied by a Houthi agent.

Waguih visited Sanaa’s largest orphanage and hospital, a fuel station, a bank, and other businesses and institutions in the city’s UNESCO World Heritage-listed old city to gauge the war’s impact.

“Yemen is a place where it is very difficult to see actual conflict but impossible not to see its effects everywhere,” she said. “You will see, for example, a building that has been destroyed, and you don’t know how long it has been that way. Maybe it was recently. Maybe it was 10 or 20 years ago.”

There was no difference, she said, between the destruction she saw in government-controlled areas and that in Houthi areas. During her previous trips, she said, violence seemed to be localized around particular areas. Now, due to an estimated 25,000 air raids, Yemen’s ruined infrastructure is highly distributed.

And everywhere, Waguih said, from the streets in Sanaa to Yemen’s squalid camps for the internally displaced, she gazed upon the gaunt face of hunger.

There are some developments toward peace. The internationally-recognized government and the Houthis announced a two-month ceasefire in April, to coincide with the holy month of Ramadan. Many hope the truce will allow all sides to consider proposals for a permanent end to the war.

Nations at war are also nations at work, at school, at play, at rest—at all the places that make up daily life. War often occurs in places with vitality enough to sustain many years of degradation. Waguih’s photos show everyday reality in a nation experiencing one of the world’s longest running wars. The conflict may not be visible in every frame but it infuses all of the images.

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Sam is my family’s patriarch, the immigrant who made our branch of the Ravel family American. But he’s notable for a more provocative reason: It’s long been rumored that when Pancho Villa raided the village of Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, he was looking to kill Sam.

Who was Sam? And how did this Jewish immigrant from Lithuania land in a dusty border town and get tangled up with Villa, one of Mexico’s most notorious figures?

Sam Ravel arrived at the port of Galveston, Texas in 1905—one of millions of Jews escaping economic hardship and antisemitic persecution in Eastern Europe. He settled with relatives in El Paso before moving to Columbus in November 1910.

Sam’s arrival in Columbus roughly corresponded with the start of the Mexican Revolution, a decade-long, bloody struggle to end an era of dictatorship in Mexico and establish a constitutional republic. As the leader of the División del Norte, Villa was one of the Revolution’s most prominent, and, to the U.S., proximate leaders.

Sam operated two retail businesses in this town just north of the border: the Commercial Hotel and the Columbus Mercantile Company, which he renamed Sam Ravel & Brothers once his younger siblings, Louis and Arthur, joined him in America. The store sold ammunition, appliances, cleaning supplies, clothing, food, fuel, guns, hides—you name it.

Like their merchandise, their customer base was diverse: Americans, including the local Army troops from Camp Furlong, Mexican civilians, and Mexican revolutionaries jockeying for power. With war south of the border came a military buildup that spurred population growth, which generally made for good business. But on March 9, 1916, the Revolution spilled north onto U.S. soil.  Before dawn, Villa’s army galloped into town, guns blasting, shouting “¡Viva Villa!”

The assault that followed was audacious, and notorious—the only time in the 20th century that the continental United States was invaded by a major foreign army. The Villistas looted Columbus and set fire to several buildings, including the Ravel-owned Commercial Hotel, which burned to the ground. A gunfight erupted between the Villistas and the U.S. Army, and the Villistas retreated by daybreak. The casualties were substantial: Nine local military officers, 10 civilians, and approximately 78 members of Villa’s army lay dead in the streets.

Villa was likely motivated to attack by a constellation of reasons, among them anger that the U.S. had shifted their support from him to his rival, Venustiano Carranza. But more than 100 years later, in both popular narratives and history books, a rumor persists that Villa had come to Columbus because he was enraged at Sam over an arms deal gone wrong. Accounts relay that a contingent of Villistas scoured for Sam, even commandeering his teenage brother Arthur in the search. The revolutionaries never found Sam, because he was in El Paso for a medical appointment.

Was revenge against my grandfather really a motivation for the attack? This bizarre notion has intrigued me ever since I was a child.

To learn more, in March 2016—100 years after the raid—I joined family members in Columbus for the annual memorial commemorating the event. We listened to speakers, took a walking tour of the town, and had lunch across the border in Palomas, Mexico.

I returned home to California with even more questions about Sam, and began my search in earnest. I dove into research, and returned to Columbus to film 2020’s raid commemoration for a documentary I hoped to make. Over a few years, the fuzzy facts of my grandfather’s life came into greater focus.

Ultimately, one of the most fruitful sources of insight into my grandfather was neither scholarly archives nor family lore, but a gift Sam received long ago. It was a glorious, 101-year-old black-page photo album documenting a hunting trip he took with friends in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1921. This album brought me closer to Sam, revealing some of his authentic nature and interests. Over time, I’ve come to feel as if I know my ghostly grandfather in large part due to conserving, examining, and revisiting its photographs and captions.

I first saw the book years ago, during a visit to an aunt in my hometown, San Jose, California. As we reminisced about the Ravels, my aunt pulled the album from a shelf in the family room. The cover was embossed in gold with the words “Snap Shots.” It had likely sat unopened for some time, but it was falling apart. Pages were crumbling. Captions handwritten in white ink were fading.

At the time I worked at Getty Publications, so with my aunt’s permission, I brought the album to work and showed it to a conservator at the Getty Conservation Institute. My colleague advised me to carefully remove the brads that bound the book and were putting pressure on the page edges, to slide each leaf into a clear sleeve, and to store the album in an archival box in a dark closet. Once the album was stabilized, I could examine it more carefully, and frequently, without fear of it disintegrating. I pored over the images and transcribed the annotations.

Created and given to my grandfather by one of his travel mates, the album documents their two-week trip into Mexico in January and February of 1921, mere months after the Revolution ended and just five years after the deadly raid. Villa was still at large.

The book begins with streetscapes of nearby Texas cities, perhaps taken from the window of a westbound train: Main Street in Van Horn, Fort Hancock, and then tiny Yselta, which the unknown author ironically captions “another large town.” Next there is a glimpse of downtown El Paso. Model Ts are parked in front of the stately Hotel Paso del Norte, where people had flocked to the rooftop terrace to watch firefights across the border during the Mexican Revolution.

Sam comes into the picture, literally, on page five. Before studying the album, I had seen only two photographs of him, both studio portraits. In the earlier one—likely taken in Europe before Sam emigrated to America—he is seated next to his two younger brothers. They are somber, wearing dark suits, possibly mourning their mother’s death.

The only other photograph I had seen of Sam is similarly posed, self-conscious and formal. Set in a filigree gold frame that my father kept on his dresser, it now hangs in my house. In this one my grandfather is older, fatter, and with less hair. Again he dons a three-piece suit, but this time it’s accented with a spiffy botanical print tie, and he smiles slightly.

In contrast, the album presents pages of unguarded moments. And while posed—Sam and his friends certainly knew they were being photographed—these images are the antithesis of formal studio portrait photography: casual, spontaneous, even playful.

In one Sam is lined up with a group of men in front of an adobe in Palomas, looking like a still from The Magnificent Seven. It is January 25, 1921, the first night of their journey. In the next photo Sam and two buddies stand before the hut where they bedded down for the night. A cigarette dangles from his right hand; a chicken pecks in the foreground.

Photo by photo I am introduced to their hunting guide, their horses, even their first campsite, where my grandfather postures with a rifle at the ready. He seems unconcerned that Villa is on the loose.

Relatives reported that Sam was gregarious and audacious, and here is evidence: a photo of Sam and his companions stripped down and bathing in a hot spring, their faces plastered with toothy grins. In another shot he gamely cradles a live fox.

Was he hearty, as I imagined an immigrant forging a better life for himself and his siblings, would be? I turned a page and there was my answer, inscribed by the author beneath a scraggly headshot: “Sam Ravel alias cold blooded Sam. He slept comfortably in his underwear while we froze to death with our clothes on and shoes on … and some snorer.”

I eventually made my film about Sam, UnRaveling, and these photographs are the connective tissue—providing levity, context, nuance, and authenticity.  The album was meant as a gift to my grandfather whom I never met, but it was also an enormous gift to me. I have sat with this heavy album in my lap many times, studying its now-delicate pages, as I imagine Sam also did. I linger over the inscription:

With my best wishes to Sam Ravel

Remembrances of our Hunting Trip in Mexico

Jan. and Feb. 1921

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When I chatted on the phone with my father in California weeks before my trip to Oregon, he said that the roll-out overseas, as reported by friends, was chaotic. I could hear the frustration in his voice, and concern for those close to us. People with money and means were vaccinated, while our friends and family who are teachers continued to wait patiently for their shot. I began regularly scanning the global news headlines for public health updates, lingering over relatives’ social media postings, and direct messaging my cousins to get a read of the temperature on the ground.

As an American-born Taiwanese, it took me 20 years and five visits to develop my own relationship to Taiwan. After my first visit in 1998, I went back over and over again to better understand how Taiwan, an island that has continually been occupied by outside presences, has its own unique character as a country, and how all of this has shaped my parents’ identities, and in turn, my own.

Before my first visit, I knew Taiwan through photographs. Nearly 20 years passed between my father’s departure from Taiwan and his return to his hometown of Chingshui in the 1990s to make offerings at his parents’ gravesites. I was in high school at the time, and when he came back home to Southern California, he brought video footage of Chingshui and photographs of our living family members. I saw images of the ramshackle remains of the Japanese colonial-style home where my father grew up, and a black-and-white image of the rock-lined, communal washing pool where my grandmother took my father as a child to clean clothes for the family. In other photos, I saw the village columbarium and its urns filled with ancestor bones ready to be buried underground. These images came to hold emotional memories for me in photographs long before I ever set foot on Taiwanese soil.

Snapshot of the author’s father (wearing a cardigan sweater) at Queen’s Head Rock. Courtesy of Shin Yu Pai

During my first visit home in 1998, my cousin Paula pulled out a box of black-and-white snapshots I’d never seen before—images from my father’s young adulthood. A series of pictures captured my father and his third eldest brother, who gave me my Chinese name, picnicking on a beach with friends. My father wore a cardigan sweater over a button-down shirt and dark pants, while resting an umbrella over his shoulder. Two photos stood out. One is a candid image of the scene someone snapped before it was done being composed. My father, his brother, and their friend stand looking at the camera before they are fully arranged, paused in a moment of time as throngs of tourists, and even a small child in the arms of a visitor, crowd the frame. And then there was the final photo in the pile, in which the young men gaze steadily into the camera’s lens while posing in front of a distinctive rock shaped like a woman’s profile. Fascinated by the image of the pockmarked rock, I asked my relatives about its origins. I was told that the photo had been taken in Yehliu Geopark, and that the formation was called Queen’s Head Rock.

By the time I got to Yehliu to explore the headlands where my father walked, it was 2006. My cousin drove me to the northern coast to visit the popular geological park. In the years since my father’s visit, a wooden boardwalk had been built to redirect visitors and flow traffic away from Queen’s Head Rock to other hoodoo stones on the promontory. But on this day, the promontory was fairly unpopulated, and we didn’t have any difficulty moving from one stone feature to the next. Many of the rocks have whimsical names like “Fairy Shoe,” “Beehive,” and “Sea Candles,” though some of the names are quite a stretch of the imagination, and it takes some creativity on the viewer’s part to see the resemblance. But the connection between “Queen’s Head Rock” and its formation was unmistakable. Its mushroom-shaped form tapered into a neck-like structure—thinner now due to erosion than it was in my father’s photos—that radiated outward in the shape of a human head. The back of the head was elongated as if the woman wore a headdress, which made the rock feel almost Egyptian in its form.

I returned to see Queen’s Head Rock a second time, when my husband came from Texas to join me in Taiwan. I wanted him to see and know a place in my family history. We took photos in front of the personal landmark, and I filed them away with the vintage image of my dad that I’d digitized on my computer.

Then, in 2012, I accompanied my father back to Taiwan to visit relatives and to revisit an outlying island where he had carried out his military service. When my dad’s friends suggested a day trip up to Yehliu, I readily agreed to a third visit, as I wanted to photograph my father next to Queen’s Head Rock, as he had posed nearly 50 years before.

Ever since my years as a student at the University of Washington, the work of John Stamets, who taught at the university before his death in 2014, has continued to influence my eye as a photographer, even though I never studied with him personally. Stamets specialized in architectural photography and a method called “rephotography” in which he recreated historical scenes of past and present pictures. Through these images of then and now, the image-maker registers the evolution of a changing environment and the people in it.

When we arrived at Queen’s Head Rock in 2012, much had changed. To protect the site, the park had installed a ring of smaller stones around Queen’s Head Rock, so that visitors could no longer get close to her. And unlike my past visits, this time, hundreds of tourists crawled the headlands, queuing up on the wooden boardwalk for their turn to take a selfie. My father complained bitterly about the heat as he progressed through the line, but dutifully posed as I asked when it was our turn to take a photograph. A park attendant blew his whistle to signify when our time with the rock was over. Keep moving!

The author and her father with friends, Queen’s Head Rock. Courtesy of Shin Yu Pai

I already knew the images would not be the same, though I snapped photos of my father with his friends as well as pictures of him standing alone near the rock. That’s all I could manage before we were waved off the boardwalk. My father was too overheated to entertain posing as he had five decades before, and we were too pressed for time for me to properly compose the shot to mimic what had been photographed before. I felt weepy at being rushed off, disappointed that my father couldn’t understand why the act of photography in that moment should matter anymore than the usual tourist selfie. Traveling with my father is often fraught with unmet need and conflicting agendas. But I had imbued that unrealized photo with the qualities of an imaginative touchstone, a document of our relational continuity and evidence that my father and I were there together, walking through different histories and reaching across time and place to meet one another in the present.

Entering a John Stamets photo is a bit like going back in time. The eye and mind naturally look for the places of continuity, no matter what has changed in the foreground. As viewers, we gravitate toward what has stayed the same, while recognizing what has been lost forever, most often through human intervention. These images can be surprising, enduring, and an exercise in documenting something that by definition often eludes the eye: absence. When I look at my own archive and the places that I have revisited time and time again, I notice that a tree is missing, a pergola is gone, or that an iconic stone has been worn down by the decades.

Gazing out at the ocean from the western most point in the State of Oregon, I thought about my last remaining uncle, my cousins, and their children quarantining at home. I pictured, too, the marine debris from Japan’s 2011 tsunami that washed its way all the way to the Pacific Coast. These distances of place and time both are and aren’t as far as they seem. Sea water and wind conditions will continue to batter the geological formations at Yehliu, causing the neck of Queen’s Head Rock to continue to thin. Queen’s Head Rock will become so fragile that it finally breaks, or crumbles as a result of an earthquake or human touch. I grieved its impermanence as I stared at the sea stacks along the Pacific Coast, feeling the distance between.

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But the two-hour class, led by teaching artist Leah Hubbard, offered a space to channel that stress and anxiety. As the conversation—which transitioned seamlessly from ice breakers, like who the students would most like to grab a meal with (Dolores Huerta, AOC, and Robert Pattinson made the cut) to energetically discussing photography as art and a means for social change—moved forward, the gathering felt like something sorely missing in these times: an exhale.

That only three weeks into the semester of Digital Promotoras, the students were already starting to feel like a community—on Zoom, no less—is typical for Las Fotos Project. As the Los Angeles-based nonprofit’s executive director Lucia Torres said, “All of these conversations come up because you’re putting a camera in these girls’ hands, and you’re saying, ‘Go off and document your world.’”

For the past 10 years, Las Fotos Project has sought to inspire young women through photography and mentorship. As a nod to that decade milestone, this fall they’ve launched an “Era of Change” retrospective, a selection of which is pictured above.

When Torres and her team began digging through photographs from over the years, they realized their students past and present had captured a digital archive of Los Angeles, as told through the perspective of teenage girls from the Valley to Torrance. The result is a unique record of young artists exploring the ways they’re growing and finding their voice in the world, as their communities shift and change around them.

“It’s a celebration of what we’ve been able to accomplish in the past 10 years with all of the students who have walked through our door,” said Torres, “of all of the images that they did, and the stories they captured, and the girls themselves.”

Las Fotos Project didn’t initially set out to work with young women. In 2010, Los Angeles-based photographer Eric V. Ibarra was studying therapeutic photography, and put together a youth workshop hosted by Hollywood-based education nonprofit Para Los Niños. The class was open to everyone, but only one boy signed up, and he never attended. Ibarra noticed the girls getting comfortable with one another and expressing themselves in a different way than they might have if boys were in the room.

After work by students in the workshop was shown at a pop-up exhibition at the DTLA Art Walk, interest in the project exploded. Today, Las Fotos Project enrolls around 150 students a year who identify as female or non-binary. In addition to Digital Promotoras, which uses photojournalism to raise awareness of pressing local issues, Las Fotos Project offers its flagship program, Esta Soy Yo, which is based on Ibarra’s original therapeutic photography workshops. The nonprofit also hosts a CEO program (short for creative entrepreneurship opportunities), where students build professional portfolios through paid photography assignments.

All programs are entirely free, and supply participants with professional cameras, expert instruction, workshops, and mentorship. It’s all part of the mission of Las Fotos Project, “to elevate the voices of teenage girls from communities of color through photography and mentoring, empowering them to channel their creativity for the benefit of themselves, their community, and their future careers.”

Of course, Las Fotos Project’s 10-year milestone wasn’t supposed to go like this. In the spring, the organization was readying to make a big move to a new location in Boyle Heights. They’d planned an open house for March to show off the space. Then COVID hit. Out of that semester, where the organization was forced to adapt and temporarily move classes online, came “IMG2020.jpg.” The collection of work is an arresting visual narrative that captures a moment of isolation, fear, and uncertainty, as well community, hope, and protest.

More than ever, said Torres, students want to speak up and share their stories and those of their communities. “They’ve come to us and said, ‘We want to talk about these issues. We want to share our opinions. We want to share our voices.’”

It’s fitting then that the title of the 10th-anniversary retrospective also doubles as a kind of organizational credo. There’s always this idea, Torres pointed out, when people talk about youth work and mentorship, that young people are “our future leaders.” But that takes away young people’s agency to make their voices heard and enact real change in the present. And so, as Las Fotos Project looks ahead to the next 10 years, with its “Era of Change” retrospective, the organization is declaring, “The time for young people is now.”

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Today, London-born and Amsterdam-based painter Esiri Erheriene-Essi pursues a different sort of visual fidelity when she transforms archival mid-century snapshots of the African diaspora through oil paint and often xerox transfer, a graphic technique she uses to layer images onto the background of her pieces.

Erheriene-Essi’s vibrant scenes pull insight out of everyday life—whether it’s an afternoon outing or a birthday crowd gathered round a table featuring a cake piled high with candles. Reconstructing these “quiet histories” in lush technicolor and unmistakable patterns, she opens up her source material and challenges the way the past is remembered.

History, Erheriene-Essi writes on her website, is the means through which “we build our identities and our knowledge, frame our references, question our aspirations and form our points of view.” But representations of everyday Black life are so often removed from its telling.

As “part of an initiative, long overdue” to document Black experience, the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently showcased 150 studio portraits of African Americans taken in the 1940s and ’50s. That 2018 exhibition revealed not only what was able to be uncovered in auctions and flea markets, but also what had been lost to time and neglect. Visitors entering the show were solicited to help in a crowd-sourcing effort to identify the many unidentified sitters and photographers, who, if they are still alive, are in their 80s and 90s now.

There’s more to what Erheriene-Essi does, though, than show the moment as it was photographed. Stripped of their original context, displaying anonymous photographs such as those at the Met addresses the need for representation, but often reflects personal moments in a historical vacuum. As an interpreter of the source images she collects, Erheriene-Essi is free to bring out personalities and suggest larger historical arcs in the paintings, such as those she developed for last year’s Prix De Rome (Netherlands), the country’s most prestigious art award, for which she was a nominee.

Lavished with dimension and detail, the resulting series, The Inheritance (or Familiar Strangers), includes recognizable markers of the larger political and cultural forces of the day that would have seeped into the lives of her subjects—a “Free Angela Davis” pin in one scene, a nod to MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign in another.

As Erheriene-Essi explains on her website, interpreting these anonymous photographs (which date from the 1950s to 1980s) as art gives her the opportunity to “re-imagine more humane and liberating narratives than what has gone before, and perhaps slightly change our reading of history in the process.”

By building bridges between the photographs she collects, the era they were taken in, and how she sees them today, Erheriene-Essi seeks to get closer to historical reality. But to do this also requires taking corrective measures to the medium of photography itself.

Erheriene-Essi, whose parents are from Nigeria, has spoken at length about how the photo technology of the period she uses as source material was intentionally set up to flatten and remove nuance from Black skin. That’s because Kodak’s “Shirley” cards—named after the Kodak employee used as the standard model—made it so that photo labs calibrated skin tones, shadows, and light during the printing process to Shirley’s ivory-white skin color. For decades, color film was intentionally designed for light-skinned people. (Concordia University professor Lorna Roth showed it took until the 1960s and ’70s for Kodak to begin to fix its color photography bias when it came to skin with more melanin.)

A century after hand-colored daguerreotypes were needed, Erheriene-Essi’s work makes a compelling case for why the mid-20th century, with all its technological gains, still requires the corrective hand of an artist to make these vernacular images of Black life—her “familiar strangers,” as she calls them—more recognizable.

The post Repainting History in Technicolor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Swim, Black boy, or die!” his assailants shouted as he floated away.

Twenty years later, in the summer of 1943, Parks was at a summer camp in upstate New York, taking photographs of white and Black children at play in a lake. His near-drowning must have been on his mind as he captured scenes still rare in America at that time: Kids of various races swimming, boating, laughing, eating, and working together.

Some might wonder why Parks, who would go on to become a celebrated photographer and a civil rights hero, chose to record these mundane scenes of docks and dining halls when experiences like his own in the Marmaton River—not to mention lynchings—still occurred in 1940s America. Seen another way, however, Parks’s camp images are sharp and subversive, stark statements from a man who later described his camera as “a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs.” By presenting an idyllic vision of America as he hoped it could be, but knew it wasn’t, Parks created photos that resisted the country’s segregation, in nature and beyond.

Parks had gone to the summer camps on assignment for the Office of Wartime Information to document scenes of everyday life. But Black children enjoying integrated natural spaces was not, actually, a part of everyday life at the time. By the 1940s, American culture had been systematically excluding people of color from outdoor recreational spaces, both physically and ideologically, for decades. As the U.S. urbanized at the end of the 19th century, many white people regarded (and cordoned off) wild and natural spaces as places for white people to go for a reprieve from metropolitan life. Summer camps, in particular, emerged as segregated spaces for white boys to cultivate masculinity through outdoor recreation.

But a small number of organizations used what historian Marcia Chatelain calls “camping activism” to counteract this ideology, including administrators at the New York camps Parks visited. Typically run by local charities or churches, these Northeastern organizations offered outdoor activities for children of color during the first half of the 20th century (though they never came close to offering the same number of camping activities available to white children nationwide). These progressive camp leaders believed that refashioning summer camps into microcosms of integration would advance equity in the outdoors—and elsewhere.

Parks’s images reflect that ideal. They champion camaraderie over exclusion. At the summer camps, his eye was drawn to Black and white kids sharing tents, swimming together, and eating together—intimacy that was taboo elsewhere at the time. He documented a Black boy helping a white boy bandage a cut, and climb up on a dock; he captured moments when Black girls set out happily on long hikes, or pulled bowstrings to take aim at archery targets. Through his lens, the campers are able to be themselves: joyful kids who indulge in comic books and relish juicy secrets.

Visually and symbolically, too, these photographs shift the American narrative. Unlike canonical paintings of the American frontier that showcased sublime wilderness scenery devoid of Native peoples—an act of human erasure that contributed to an assumption of white possession—Parks centered people in his nature narratives, depicting nature as a space of meaningful equality.

Parks’s photographs of Black children setting out on hikes also asserted their command of the outdoors, foreshadowing a more inclusive era. His portrait of the archer Loretta Gyles, which hearkens to statues of Greek goddesses, depicts a young Black woman for whom nature is her comfortable domain—a place where she can defend herself with poise and will not be victimized. Scenes in Parks’s summer camp photos mirror many of the most contentious segregated venues that later became sites of national protest: restaurants, restrooms, and outdoor recreation areas. The photos are harbingers of the 1960s civil rights movement.

“Whiteness,” W.E.B. Du Bois asserted in 1920, “is ownership of the earth.” Gordon Parks’s idyllic summer camp imagery directly challenged the grip whiteness held on the wilderness, providing a hopeful, even defiant vision of U.S. racial landscapes. Decades later, some white people still regard these places, as geographer Carolyn Finney wrote, as a “white space.” The recent Central Park incident where a white woman named Amy Cooper called the police on Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, is one example of the way white people continue to deliberately exclude people of color from natural spaces.

Yet the historical presence of these summer camps, as interpreted by Parks, speaks to the alternative possibilities inherent in the outdoors.

This essay is adapted from Amanda Martin-Hardin’s 2018 article in Environmental History, “Nature in Black and White: Summer Camps and Racialized Landscapes in the Photography of Gordon Parks.”

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The photographs are historical not because they are old—all were taken within the last few years—but because the elements you see in the frame contain so many old stories. Photographs often illustrate histories, but these photographs are different. They inspire a history. They drive a narration.

California Exposures started from photographs. Years ago, when I worked on a documentary with Geoff Ward, who writes most of Ken Burns’s films, I tried to figure out how documentary narration worked. I told Geoff, “I think I’ve got it. Every sentence is a topic sentence.”

“No,” he said. “There are no topic sentences. The photograph is the topic sentence.”

A photograph captures light at a particular moment. But a photograph also pushes back from the moment, and rides the elements in the photograph—trees, buildings, land, animals, roads, levees and more—into the past that created them. Link these elements to documents in archives, books, other photographs, maps, and memories. What emerges is history.

With one exception, the photographs in this gallery come from a single area, one of several in the book: the Tulare Basin and the neighboring San Joaquin Valley. This is the heart of the Yokut Indian homeland at about 1750, before European contact. Most Californians have seen it only while traveling on I-5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. By modern markers, it is the land to east of the freeway starting at about the In-N-Out Burger in Kettleman City and stretching nearly to the In-N-Out Burger near the Grapevine.

Thematically, these photographs show the rearrangement of water, which means some of them show no water at all—only what once was the Tulare Lake bed. Tulare Lake covered much of this area more than a century ago. And today, in some wet years the lake returns and the land floods. But in most years the old lake exists only in cut-off sloughs or in dismembered remnants impounded behind levees. Ecologically, this is the most altered landscape in California. Los Angeles seems a biological preserve in comparison.

This rearrangement of water has produced some of the most productive agricultural lands in the world and, sometimes, pastoral landscapes; it has also produced some of the most impoverished communities in California. The people traveling the I-5 largely come from politically blue California, but this is red California—in part because a significant number of its inhabitants cannot vote because they are not citizens, incarcerated or live in counties that intentionally and unintentionally pursue policies that suppress the vote.

The history has not been pretty, and the photographs reveal this history. To look at the image of the Tachi Casino is to grapple with genocide—and I used that loaded word advisedly to describe the slaughter of California Indians, whose population plunged from 150,000 in 1846 to 30,000 in 1873.

Those pumps draining the aquifers on the old lakebed? They involve a story of monopoly ownership of land that is now subsiding at a rate faster than any other place on Earth.

The vastness of this landscape, the seeming emptiness, is particular, not generic. The story in this selection of photographs is not the story of seemingly similar places in California. The single photograph from outside the San Joaquin is from the Owens Valley, a place that did not become part of the book, in part because it is already so well known. The Owens Valley is a different story. Jesse’s photographs both speak to it and put it in context.

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