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Photographs By Rita Bernstein

In the early nineties, I left my job as a civil-rights attorney to devote my energy to photography. Having two young children at the time, I naturally began to record and investigate their lives with the camera. This quickly evolved into an exploration of the sweetness and sorrow of family life in general.

Photographs By Steve Ladner

These photographs are of people I met on the streets of New York City. The sidewalks were like a river where I cast my line, fishing faces out of the crowd. I used a portable cloth backdrop to isolate my subjects from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Photographs By Bob Bayles

My father was diagnosed with cancer near his seventieth birthday, in September, and passed away the following April. During his illness, I made four trips back home to Westville, Illinois, where both my parents were born and raised.

Photographs By Clemens Kalischer

Three years after the end of World War II, thousands of people remained stranded in European displaced-persons camps. Some sought and gained asylum in the United States, where they hoped to start a new life. Having recently taken a beginners’ class in photography, Clemens Kalischer was drawn to the New York City waterfront to record the arrival of the displaced persons.

Photographs By Marvin W. Schwartz

The photographs from this selection are available as a PDF only. Click here to download.

Photographs By Gordon Baer

The first [part of the series] documents a day in Lewis’s life in Salem, Missouri, when she was a carefree seventeen-year-old who often skipped school and tried on the wedding dress she kept packed away in her hope chest. The second part was made a year later, after Lewis was married and pregnant. The year was 1969.

Photographs By John Rosenthal

Tuned In

DeGrane began taking photographs of people watching television in the mid-eighties. His first subjects were friends and family. Later, he sought out people who watched TV in unique or unusual ways, in their homes, apartments, dormitories, and prison cells. “I would always enter a person’s home with a certain reverence or respect, as a traveler might come upon a holy place,” he says.

The Neugents

In the tobacco country of rural North Carolina, David M. Spear has photographed a family of plain-living people, and the beauty of his vision is startling. An old woman preparing to shampoo loosens her long, white hair; it floats, diaphanous, over a bowl of water. A man lying in bed gazes out a grimy window, his weathered, pensive face illuminated by sunlight.

A Death-Defying Act

The Work Of Jane Orleman

I have had many dreams of being choked by a rapist, which of course I was. That was forty years ago when I was a child. I am still holding my breath.