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Transcription below by Elizabeth Lowman (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

LIFE & LOOK Magazines

When you went into the South and you started taking photographs, did they ask you to do that or did you do that on your own?

I had quit my job at AFSC [American Friends Service Committee]. I had been trying to freelance maybe or a year or so. I would go into New York, once or twice a month, and see the editors of LIFE, LOOK, and The Saturday Evening Post in one fear-filled day, and I would pitch stories to them. I learned this from another photographer I met through the American Society of Magazine Photographers, who told me in twenty minutes, how to do it—how to get on in the business. It's amazing how sometimes twenty minutes will focus everything you do. He said that New York is full of guys walking around the streets, carrying fantastic portfolios of pictures. The editors have got all of the talent they need. What they lack, are good picture story ideas. They're always looking for the story that is going to knock people out in the magazine and they don't have enough of these ideas. If you come in and say "I've got a great portfolio," they say, "We've got a woman who looks at them on the second Thursday of every month. If you drop your portfolio off with her, I'm sure she'll call you and tell you what she thinks of it." If I call the same editor up and said, "I've got three story ideas that I think might be right for you," he'd say, "What about three o'clock this afternoon?" So, that was how I proceeded. My whole past and orientation, my degree in English and Literature, and all of this was oriented toward storytelling, looking at the world and trying to make sense of it. So, this was perfect for me. I would go in and pitch a story, pitch three or four stories and they would say, "No, I don't think they are right for us." I would then say, "Why? What is wrong? Tell me what is wrong with these stories." These busy editors would then take half an hour and describe to me what they wanted that I wasn't providing because they knew that I would eventually be working for them. Before I went south, I had an eight page story in LOOK, which got the largest reader response of any story in LOOK's history. It was about a brain-damaged kid in Philadelphia and the new therapy which brought him back from being a zombie to a functioning person. I had a picture in LIFE. My career was sort of launched. If I had stayed in Philadelphia, I probably could have struggled into something.

By going south, it is sort of like every photographer has their own war zone. My career idea was that I'll go to Mississippi. I'll sit there. I'll pitch stories from the heart of the South that these editors will assign because these stories have more perception and depth than anything they can think about in New York. What I learned was that they basically did not care. When the action occurred, I was there. They knew me. They knew my phone number. They knew my work and they called me. So most of my stories did not go anywhere but I was shooting. Through this period, I was doing at least an assignment a month for LIFE. And I was working on stories that did get through, stories that I had generated for LOOK first and then for The Post. I was making a living. It wasn't a great living. So that was one part of it. This was my career. I was working out of the the war zone of the South and I was getting steady work.

The second thing was that I had come as a political activist. I had come south to work in the Movement. So I thought of myself as wearing three hats—the photojournalist hat, the hat of movement photographer or movement propagandist, propaganda, not in the sense of that nasty stuff that the Nazis did, but espousing a cause and making pictures that forwarded a political cause.

Did you see your photographs, even when they were going to LIFE and The Post, as propaganda at the time that you were doing it?

I was photographing things that I wanted to photograph. I was trying to bring to life a political movement which eventually transformed the country. We did not know that that was going to happen at the time. I was certainly pushing stories that I believed in. And I have never been any good at shooting stuff that I don't believe in. Which is why I tried corporate photography, as I told you, and quickly gave it up. So in that sense yes. But the pictures that I was taking for the Movement were different from when I was on assignment.

Did you see them as propaganda at that time or was it later that you decided that they were propaganda?

I was working with Jim Forman at SNCC and SNCC had a photo team at this time. I helped them set up a dark room. We had specific things that we wanted.

Transcription below by: Jamy Myatt (2010 adult workshop). Edited transcription by: Judy Minton (volunteer). Please report errors to: info@tellingstories.org

Can we go back one second just explain a little bit how you got involved in SNCC? Did you move south to get involved with SNCC or did you move south and then get involved with SNCC? Just tell us the story of your initial involvement with SNCC.

We moved to Mississippi. When Jeannine went to Jackson for Medger's funeral, she met Ed King, the white chaplain of a black college in the outskirts of Jackson, Tougaloo College. Ed King was the only white native Mississippian to join the Civil Rights Movement. He was number one on the Klan death list. He had been ostracized by all of his former friends in the white community for doing this. And it was Ed who had said, "Yes, you can move safely to Mississippi if you live in the white neighborhood in Jackson and keep your head down." To our neighbors we were just a middle class couple with two kids moving into a lower class neighborhood and trying to get ahead. Ed was very very much involved in the Movement. And the Movement in Mississippi at that time was CORE [Congress on Racial Equality] and SNCC largely. Medger was an NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] field secretary but the NAA was not very active. And so, we just gravitated through Ed to what was going on, which was largely SNCC. SNCC was the Movement in Mississippi. So, I didn't choose SNCC, I simply moved into the SNCC environment. Because I was closer to a professional, active photographer than anyone else there, I donated my services. I was not a SNCC field secretary doing civil rights work. I was a professional photographer coming in from the outside and offering my services. I was never an employee. I was never on salary. But I was doing whatever was necessary.