Mar 29, 2018 - Sale 2471

Sale 2471 - Lot 177

Price Realized: $ 2,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
(CIVIL RIGHTS.) Archive of photographs, apparently taken for Time Magazine's "Poverty in America" issue. 72 silver prints, 8 x 10 inches, uniformly printed on double-weight fiber paper, commissioned from a variety of photographers; most captioned in manuscript on verso, a small number with inked notes on recto, minimal wear and a slight curl. Vp, April-May 1968 and undated
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Additional Details

These photographs were apparently taken in conjunction with a cover story on "Poverty in America" which appeared in Time Magazine on 17 May 1968. Time sent its army of photographers to document the most poverty-stricken parts of the country. The work of at least 16 different photographers is represented here, covering every region. Of particular interest for this sale are the 5 photographs by J. Edward Bailey III (1923-1982), a Time Magazine regular and one of the few African-American photojournalists with a national reach during this period. He contributed two shots of a ramshackle grocery in Detroit (see illustration), and three of a family in nearby New Haven, MI. Robert W. Cottrol was another African-American photographer who contributed 5 shots of Harlem. Many of the photographers sought out African-American subjects. William Sartor is most heavily represented with 24 shots of Greenville, MS and Memphis, TN; others include Lee Baltermann in Chicago (1), Walter Bennett at Washington's Resurrection City (3), and Lee Spence in St. Louis. Other photographers documented poverty among whites in Maine and Kentucky, Latinos in Texas, and Eskimos in Alaska.
Only one of the photographs in this lot actually appeared among the 18 published in the Time article: Julian Wasser's shot of Mexican-American farmworkers in Fresno, CA. Several others, though, clearly came from the same sessions; Time published a different Bailey shot of the Detroit grocery, for example. We're not certain why these prints were produced and gathered--possibly for a museum exhibit tied to the article? Whatever the impetus, the result is a rich archive of professionally printed photojournalism. A more detailed list of photographers and locations is available.