Photography

Now you see him—now you don’t. Compare a photo taken in the 1930s of five Communist Party officials in the USSR and you’ll see Avel Enukidze, photographed next to Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov and others. But during Josef Stalin’s Great Purge, the onetime member of the ...read more

For centuries black communities around the world have created hairstyles that are uniquely their own. These hairstyles span all the way back to the ancient world and continue to weave their way through the social, political and cultural conversations surrounding black identity ...read more

The Past in Color features the work of colorist Marina Amaral, bringing to life black and white photos with color applied digitally. Farsighted but underrated, John Quincy Adams was a president of firsts. He was the first president not to have been a founding father. The first ...read more

The Past in Color features the work of colorist Marina Amaral, bringing to life black and white photos with color applied digitally. Blue lips. Blackened skin. Blood leaking from noses and mouths. Coughing fits so intense they ripped muscles. Crippling headaches and body pains ...read more

The Past in Color features the work of colorist Marina Amaral, bringing to life black and white photos with color applied digitally. In May 1956 the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. posed for a set of photographs at home with his young family in Montgomery, Alabama. It had ...read more

At first glance, the faded 1903 photograph of Mme Debeinche’s bedroom, bound in the yellowed pages of an early 20th-century album, shows what looks to be an unremarkable middle-class Parisian apartment of the time. The overstuffed room brims with floral decoration, from the ...read more

The New Deal was one of President Roosevelt’s efforts to end the Great Depression. Art projects were a major part of this series of federal relief programs, like the Public Works of Art Project, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and the Treasury Relief Art Project. ...read more

When the daguerreotype—the proto-photo—was first popularized in 1839, French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire railed against the form, calling it “deplorable.” And in the 178 years since its invention, the camera—and photographers—have courted controversy and headlines in equal ...read more

Throughout the morning of August 14, 1945, Greta Zimmer had heard the rumors circulating New York City. Japan had accepted the Allied terms for surrender. The world war that had torn her family apart was finally over. The 21-year-old dental assistant hoped that the reports of ...read more

Immediately after Truman made the announcement of Japan’s surrender in World War II, at 7:03 p.m. on August 14, 1945, an American sailor walking through Times Square grabbed a nearby nurse and bent her over backwards in a passionate-seeming kiss amid the cheering crowds ...read more

1. Camera Obscura: 5th century B.C. Long before there was the camera, there was the camera obscura. Literally translated as “dark chamber,” these devices consisted of darkened rooms or enclosed boxes with a tiny opening on one side. When sunlight passed through this “pinhole” and ...read more

1. “Migrant Mother,” 1936, California In 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange shot this image of a destitute woman, 32-year-old Florence Owens, with an infant and two other of her seven children at a pea-pickers camp in Nipomo, California. Lange took the photo, which came to be ...read more

• Born on November 18, 1787, in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, France, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre grew up in a middle-class family. His father, a royalist despite the outbreak of the French Revolution, named one of his daughters after Marie Antoinette. • Because of political upheaval ...read more