In the winter of 1937 the Ohio River overran its banks and flooded the land between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cairo, Illinois, killing almost four hundred hundred people and displacing approximately one million. Communities in the path of the floodwaters were already struggling in the depths of the Great Depression, and few cities were more inundated… Read More
When the reporter and newspaper editor Jacob Riis purchased a camera in 1888, his chief concern was to obtain pictures that would reveal a world that much of New York City tried hard to ignore: the tenement houses, streets, and back alleys that were populated by the poor and largely immigrant communities flocking to the… Read More
NOMA’s Learning and Engagement staff suggests the following books related to themes of social justice. In partnership with Octavia Books, links are provided to purchase these titles through this independent bookstore based in New Orleans. For Adults For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights by Maurice Berger, Yale… Read More
In 2013, NOMA and The Gordon Parks Foundation organized Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument. This exhibition explored the making of Parks’s first photographic essay for Life magazine in 1948. At that time, Parks produced hundreds of photographs of the life of a young Harlem resident named Leonard “Red” Jackson that were later whittled… Read More
Through the course of the nineteenth century, white photographers making portraits of Native American sitters generally framed their subjects in stereotypical ways that exoticized their culture. Many of these photographs augmented the myth that Native American populations could not assimilate into white society and were destined to disappear. Such parallel ideas were often evoked to… Read More