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The 30 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2020

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 17:39:34 GMT

After half a year of delays and more delays, the film industry appears to be cautiously creaking back to life this fall. Many of the blockbusters that were supposed to arrive this summer, from Mulan to No Time to Die, are already or will soon be available; they’ll will be joined by a number of streaming dramas that hope to take advantage of a thinned-out awards race. Meanwhile, movies continue to be pulled from the calendar and postponed, including Black Widow, Wed Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Wonder Woman 1984. Here’s when the most anticipated movies of fall 2020 are set arrive.

Also check out TIME’s most anticipated TV shows and books coming out this fall.

Robin’s Wish (Sept. 1 on-demand and digital)

Three months after Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014, doctors discovered that he had been suffering from Lewy body dementia, which causes a sharp decline in thinking and reasoning abilities. This documentary, created alongside his wife Susan Schneider-Williams, explores his final days, and the subsequent search for answers around his passing.

Tenet (Sept. 3 in theaters)

Originally scheduled to hit theaters on July 17, Christopher Nolan’s latest mind-bender faced a series of coronavirus-related delays before debuting internationally on August 26 ahead of a September 3 release in North America. The thriller stars John David Washington as an unnamed C.I.A. agent who embarks on a time-twisting mission to prevent the start of World War III alongside a mysterious new partner (Robert Pattinson). That’s all we’ll say for now, since, as Nolan purists will tell you, the less you know going in, the better.

Mulan (Sept. 4 on Disney+)

In the span of half a year, Mulan has turned from a surefire smash into a nerve-wracking experiment for Disney: will customers pay $30 on top of their Disney+ subscription to stream a war blockbuster that looks tailor-made for the big screen? (The movie will become free for subscribers in December.) Whether Niki Caro’s non-musical remake of the beloved 1998 animated Disney film succeeds in this new environment could set the tone for how movies are released in the coming months. Liu Yifei stars as the titular warrior and is flanked by Donnie Yen and Jet Li.

i’m thinking of ending things (Sept. 4 on Netflix)

With scream queen Toni Collette playing the seemingly unhinged mother of master onscreen sociopath Jesse Plemons, Netflix’s new psychological thriller has all the trappings of a can’t-miss horror hit. Written and directed by Academy Award winner Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), i’m thinking of ending things follows a young woman (Jessie Buckley, literally credited as Young Woman) who begins to have second thoughts about her relationship with her new boyfriend (Plemons) after embarking on a snowy road trip to his parents’ remote farmhouse. Judging by the acclaimed 2016 Iain Reid novel on which it’s based, the metaphysical fright flick suggests a chilling exploration of identity, memory and the fabric of reality itself.

Cuties (Sept. 9 on Netflix)

In August, this low-budget French awards-season hopeful got the worst kind of attention: a widespread cancellation campaign, after Netflix released a promotional poster and trailer that many deemed sexually exploitative of underage girls. Netflix apologized—and many who saw the film at its Sundance Film Festival premiere say that the ad campaign did not reflect the film’s nuanced handling of its young subjects. Well-received upon its release in France, the film follows an 11-year-old Senegalese Muslim girl, growing up in a poor area of Paris, who becomes intrigued by a group of young dancers in her neighborhood.

The Devil All the Time (Sept. 16 on Netflix)

Spanning the 20-some years between World War II and America’s entry into Vietnam, Netflix’s highly-anticipated Midwestern gothic thriller from Antonio Campos, based on Donald Ray Pollock’s 2011 novel of the same name, follows a sprawling cast of characters living in the Bible-thumping southern Ohio town of Knockemstiff and its neighboring backwoods. At the center of it all is young Arvin Russell (Tom Holland), a good Christian boy who begins to suspect the new traveling preacher in town (Robert Pattinson) of sinister motives. A stellar cast also includes Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennett and Mia Wasikowska.

Blackbird (Sept. 18 on-demand and digital)

After deciding to end her battle with ALS on her own terms, terminally ill matriarch Lily (Susan Sarandon) gathers three generations of her family for a farewell weekend in Roger Michell’s (Notting Hill, My Cousin Rachel) remake of the 2014 Danish film Silent Heart. The star-studded tearjerker, which boasts Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska as Lily’s daughters and Sam Neill as her husband, premiered to mixed reviews at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, with critics calling it both a “quality enterprise with numerous rewards for adult audiences” and a “lifeless death drama.”

Antebellum (Sept. 18 on-demand)

From the producers of Get Out and Us comes a social thriller about the state of race relations in America, which casts Janelle Monáe in the dual roles of a successful modern-day author and a woman enslaved on a plantation in what appears to be the pre-Civil War South. Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons and Gabourey Sidibe also star in writer-director duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s first feature.

Enola Holmes (Sept. 23 on Netflix)

Millie Bobby Brown is one of Netflix’s brightest stars as Eleven in Stranger Things. She partners with the platform again for a starring film role as Sherlock Holmes’ little sister, Enola. Based on the books by Nancy Springer, the movie follows Enola after her mother (Helena Bonham Carter) disappears, her famous brother declines to help, and the young novice decides to take on the case herself.

Agents of Chaos (Sept. 23 on HBO and HBO Max)

The documentarian Alex Gibney has previously burrowed into Silicon Valley, Scientology, and Enron. His newest feature investigates the Russian hacking of the 2016 election. He probes into Russian troll farms and the deep web, and talks to Americans who became caught up in Putin’s plot as well.

Kajillionaire (Sept. 25 in theaters)

Acclaimed independent filmmaker Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know, The Future) paints a captivating portrait of a dysfunctional family of scammers in this heist satire. Evan Rachel Wood stars as Old Dolio, the oddly-named daughter of small-time con artists Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert (Richard Jenkins) whose life is thrown for a loop by a chance meeting with a kind stranger (Gina Rodriguez).

The Glorias (Sept. 30 on digital and Amazon Prime Video)

Following Rose Byrne’s turn as Gloria Steinem in Hulu’s Emmy-nominated Mrs. America earlier this year, Academy Award winners Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore take up the mantle of the face of the women’s liberation movement in a new biopic from Julie Taymor (Frida, Across the Universe). Based on Steinem’s own memoir, My Life on the Road, The Glorias follows Steinem from her girlhood in 1940s Ohio through her rise to national fame as a feminist leader—alongside contemporaries like Dorothy Pitman Hughes (Janelle Monáe), Flo Kennedy (Lorraine Toussaint), Bella Abzug (Bette Midler), Dolores Huerta (Monica Sanchez) and Wilma Mankiller (Kimberly Guerrero)— in the ’60s and ’70s, and beyond.

The Boys in the Band (Sept. 30 on Netflix)

The Tony-winning cast of the 2018 revival of Mart Crowley’s landmark play reunites for a Ryan Murphy-produced Netflix adaptation directed by Joe Mantello. Jim Parsons stars as Michael, a boozy screenwriter who invites a group of his closest gay friends (played by Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, Tuc Watkins, Michael Benjamin Washington and Robin de Jesús)—along with a hapless hustler (Charlie Carver)—to his apartment for their buddy Harold’s (Zachary Quinto) birthday party in 1968 New York. Things quickly go off the rails when Michael’s straight college roommate (Brian Hutchison) also shows up.

On the Rocks (October 2 in theaters, October 23 Apple TV+)

It’s been 17 years since actor Bill Murray and director Sofia Coppola teamed up for the widely revered Lost in Translation. In their reunion On the Rocks, Murray plays the charming and inquisitive father of Laura (Rashida Jones), who suspects her husband of having an affair.

Once Upon a River (Oct. 2 in virtual cinemas)

The lone man on the river has long loomed large in the American mythos, from Paul Bunyan to Huckleberry Finn to the stories of Ernest Hemingway. This time, in a film based on the novel by Bonnie Jo Campbell, it’s a woman who makes her way downstream: Margo Crane (Kenadi DelaCerna), a Native American teenager who is forced to fend for herself after the death of her father. Wielding a gun and plenty of survival skills, Margo explores the Michigan woods in search of her estranged mother and a place where she belongs.

The Forty-Year-Old Version (Oct. 9 on Netflix)

Writer-director Radha Blank makes her feature debut with a semi-autobigoraphical comedy about a burnt-out New York playwright (played by Blank) who turns to rap to rediscover her voice as she turns 40. “It’s my love letter to NY and its struggling artists as well as the NY artistic institutions that raised me – Hip Hop and Theater,” Blank said of the black-and-white Sundance standout.

Time (Oct. 9 in theaters, Oct. 23 on Amazon Prime Video)

Garrett Bradley won best director for U.S. documentary at Sundance for this film, a damning portrait of the American prison-industrial complex. The film follows a woman’s tireless two-decade fight to free her husband from a 60-year prison sentence.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Oct. 16 on Netflix)

Many have drawn a connection between the social unrest of 2020 and that of 1968, when Vietnam War protesters stormed the streets the summer before a pivotal election. Aaron Sorkin’s latest drama depicts the tension that summer in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, when police attacked protesters and charged a group of organizers with conspiracy to incite a riot. Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II star.

American Utopia (Oct. 17 on HBO and HBO Max)

David Byrne, the onetime frontman of the Talking Heads, has proved himself time and time again an electric, inimitable live performer with his quavering tenor and skittish dance moves—most recently in his Broadway show American Utopia, a powerhouse concert of new and classic songs. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Saturday Night Live, he’s proved that his unique act converts well onto the small screen—and now audiences get to take in a recording of the Broadway show in full.

Rebecca (Oct. 21 on Netflix)

Fans of Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel who have dreamed of going to Manderley again are finally getting their wish. The forthcoming Netflix remake sees Lily James take the lead as du Maurier’s unnamed narrator, the new bride of wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer) who can’t seem to shake the feeling that her husband’s late first wife is still present at his eerie English estate. Of course, Ben Wheatley’s (High Rise, Free Fire) take on the gothic thriller has big shoes to fill considering Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Over the Moon (Oct. 23 on Netflix)

Based on the Chinese legend of the Moon Goddess Chang’e, this family-friendly animated film centers on Fei Fei, a young girl who dreams of going to the moon to reunite with her lost mother. Sandra Oh, John Cho, Ken Jeong and other Asian-American stars serve as voice actors; the late Audrey Wells, who died of cancer in 2018, wrote the script, while Glen Keane, a Disney Animation mainstay, makes his full-length directorial debut.

Those Who Wish Me Dead (Oct. 23 in theaters)

In this adaptation of bestselling author Michael Koryta’s 2014 novel, Angelina Jolie stars as a survival expert tasked with protecting a teenage murder witness from a pair of killers hunting him through the Montana wilderness—all while a raging forest fire wreaks havoc on the landscape. Nicholas Hoult, Jon Bernthal, Tyler Perry, Finn Little and Aidan Gillen also star in the thriller from director Taylor Sheridan (Wind River).

Bad Hair (Oct. 23 on Hulu)

This Sundance horror-comedy from Justin Simien (Dear White People) centers on a demonic weave and finds laughs and scares in the plight of Black women regarding the various pressures and judgments surrounding their hair. The cast includes Elle Lorraine, Lena Waithe, Blair Underwood and Jay Pharoah.

Connected (Oct. 23 in theaters)

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are responsible—as either writers, directors or producers—for several smash-hit kids’ movies over the last decade, including Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie series and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. They are producers on this Sony Pictures Animation film about a squabbling family on a road trip who find themselves in the position of saving the world. The voice actors include Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride and Maya Rudolph.

Black Ammonite (Nov. 13 in theaters)

After famed British fossil hunter Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) reluctantly takes on a new apprentice (Saorise Ronan) to work beside her on the shores of 1840s England, the two begin a passionate love affair that changes both their lives forever. This romantic period drama is the latest from God’s Own Country writer-director Francis Lee.

The Climb (Nov. 13 in theaters)

This buddy comedy was well-reviewed out of the Cannes Film Festival last Spring, with Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com calling it “thrilling and charming in a way that very few comedies ever are.” Michael Angelo Covino directs and stars in the film as Mike, whose bond with his best friend Kyle is put through the ringer due to romantic entanglements.

No Time To Die (Nov. 20 in theaters)

Daniel Craig will play James Bond for the fifth and final time in this film, which is directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation, Maniac) and includes screenwriting from Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The franchise adds some intriguing new faces—Ana de Armas, who previously partnered with Craig in Knives Out—Rami Malek, who plays the menacing villain Safin, and Lashana Lynch, who will take on the mantle of 007.

Soul (Nov. 20 in theaters)

Pixar has sent its protagonists deep into the ocean (Finding Nemo), space (Wall-E) and the underworld (Coco). Its fantastical next destination is The Great Before, the place where new souls are formed before birth. Jamie Foxx voices Joe, Pixar’s first Black protagonist, who is unwittingly sent there before a pivotal band gig and embarks on a journey to return to his life. Jon Batiste wrote original music for the soundtrack; Phylicia Rashad, Angela Bassett, Questlove, and Daveed Diggs lend their voices.

Happiest Season (Nov. 25 in theaters)

In this holiday rom-com from writer-director Clea DuVall (whom Veep fans know as Marjorie), Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis play girlfriends on the verge of engagement, with conservative parents standing in their way. Mary Steenburgen, Alison Brie and Aubrey Plaza co-star.

Mank (TBA on Netflix)

NetflixGary Oldman in ‘Mank’

Award-winning director David Fincher (Gone Girl, The Social Network) turns his camera on 1930s Hollywood for a biographical drama about journalist-turned-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his battle with Orson Welles over screenplay credit for Citizen Kane. Gary Oldman stars as Mankiewicz alongside Tom Burke as Welles, Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, Lily Collins as Rita Alexander, and Tom Pelphrey as Mank’s brother in the black-and-white Netflix drama.

See Inside the Private Family Life of a Young George H.W. Bush

Sat, 01 Dec 2018 05:45:44 GMT

George H.W. Bush, who died Nov. 30, 2018 at the age of 94, served the government in various roles before he was elected president in 1988.

In 1971, Bush had recently lost a bid for election to the Senate, and was serving as President Richard Nixon’s ambassador to the United Nations, a role he filled until 1973.

It wasn’t an easy job: when LIFE Magazine caught up with him, it was at the tense moment that the United Nations decided to admit “Red China” as a member in place of the Nationalist government based in Taipei. Bush, then 47, was an advocate of the “two-China solution,” of keeping both governments in the international organization. Bush was hissed at and booed by other ambassadors, and LIFE reported that even his wife, Barbara Bush, who died at 92 on April 17, 2018, was “sneered at” as she sat crocheting in the gallery.

For observers, however, Bush’s attitude in the face of the significant setback was telling. Though some had doubted whether he was appropriate for the U.N. job—his diplomatic experience at the time of his appointment was pretty much zero—Bush had quickly shown that he made up for that gap in “wit, stamina and enthusiasm.”

“In trying to save Taiwan’s seat,” the magazine noted, “he had set what must be a U.N. track record for personal effort.” His attitude every day was a model of go-get-‘em, as he raced to and from meetings, collapsing at the end of a long day knowing that even though he was sometimes so tired that he said he wanted to cry, he would do it all over again tomorrow.

The magazine ended up only publishing images of Bush at work, but photographer Leonard McCombe also captured the balance of Bush’s life—the home and family that he left behind when he went off to New York to the United Nations. As these images make clear, the future President whose “wit, stamina and enthusiasm” impressed the international community had no shortage of enthusiasm for the rest of life as well.

LIFE – TIME

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 08:22:19 GMT

Current & Breaking News | National & World Updates

These Never-Before-Published Photos Show Tennis Icon Arthur Ashe Making U.S. Open History

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 18:17:13 GMT

On Monday, Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, N.Y., swings open its doors to tennis fans, as the first round of the 2018 U.S. Open tournament begins. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the stadium’s namesake becoming the first African-American man to win a Grand Slam title.

When Ashe defeated Tom Okker of the Netherlands on Sept. 9, 1968, it was an exciting game to watch, to say the least; the 25-year-old Richmond, Va., native served 26 aces throughout the match, 15 of them to win the first set, which went all the way up to 14-12. (Tiebreakers were introduced in 1970.)

Even so, the record $14,000 prize money for the match went to Okker, who was the last professional player standing that year; Ashe got a $20 per diem as an amateur. But things were changing for Ashe — by year’s end, he would be ranked the No. 1 tennis player by the United States Lawn Tennis Association — as well as for the world around him. Fifty years later, Ashe’s win stands out as not only a milestone in tennis history, but also a milestone in the civil rights movement.

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One of the many people watching tennis history be made that year was longtime TIME and LIFE photographer John G. Zimmerman, whose images from that day were included in LIFE’s cover story the following week, about Ashe’s achievement — but many of Zimmerman’s pictures were never published in the magazine. The new book Crossing the Line: Arthur Ashe at the 1968 U.S. Open, from which the images above are drawn, brings together those pictures 50 years later. The book includes hundreds that have never before been seen publicly, some of which are included in the gallery above.

Zimmerman shadowed Ashe during much of the 36 hours in before, during and after the U.S. Open that year. The pictures show the surprisingly ordinary events that led up to his extraordinary achievement, such as the solitary subway ride from his hotel in Midtown Manhattan to the match in Forest Hills.

The Sept. 20, 1968, cover of LIFE magazine would describe his style of keeping it cool on the court as “icy elegance.” But he didn’t hold back at all when it came to talking about the impact of his playing within the larger fight for racial equality.

“I can make my protest heard by winning,” he told LIFE. “People don’t listen to losers.”

And win he did. By the time Ashe died in 1993, after contracting HIV from a blood transfusion following heart bypass surgery, he had won 33 singles titles and 14 doubles titles. When he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, President Bill Clinton remarked that Ashe had an “inner strength and outward dignity” that “marked his game every bit as much as that dazzling crosscourt backhand.”

The ‘Pressure to Make Good for Your Whole People’ and the Story Behind SuperFly

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 15:25:42 GMT

The movie SuperFly that comes out this week shares a name with the 1972 film Super Fly, though “they serve different audiences, they serve different worlds,” as TIME’s film critic Stephanie Zacharek puts it in her review. But, even with all those differences, both movies also share a link to an important part of American history — and the history of LIFE Magazine.

The original Super Fly was directed by Gordon Parks Jr., whose father Gordon Parks, who died at 93 in 2006, was the first African-American staff photographer at LIFE and a co-founder of Essence magazine.

In the autobiographical novel that inspired 1969’s movie The Learning Tree — which made him the first African-American director of a major Hollywood movie — Parks Sr. summed up why he became a photographer. He wrote that he sought to portray “how certain blacks, who were fed up with racism, rebelled against it.” After joining LIFE in 1949, in between photographing subjects as varied as the Paris fashion scene and Benedictine monks, he worked to convince African-Americans readers that they could trust the magazine to tell their stories, even though most of its staffers were white. At the same time, by default, he served as a translator of black life for many of LIFE’s non-African-American readers.

“There is this pressure to make good for your whole people,” he told TIME in 1953. “If you fail, they give you a black eye.”

Some of his most famous photo essays depicted black Muslims — with guidance from Malcolm X — and the life of the Fontenelles, a typical Harlem family; so many readers were moved by the family’s struggle to make ends meet that they sent in enough money to help the family move into a bigger home in Queens. As photographer Andre D. Wagner recently wrote for TIME, “It’s the dignity of the people that he was able to capture and his ability to get below the skin that made his pictures undeniable.”

But it was a different venture from the elder Parks that opened the door for Super Fly: Shaft.

Along with its sequel Shaft’s Big Score, the movie launched a “wave of eminently commercial movies by blacks about the black experience,” TIME reported in the April 10, 1972, issue. As TIME reported back then, Shaft cost $500,000 to make, but grossed an “astonishing $13 million in the U.S. alone,” making it “one of three movies that made any profit for MGM” in 1971. The success showed that “Hollywood finally took note of two basic facts: first, with movie theaters clustering in big cities and whites moving to the suburbs, the black sector of the moviegoing public was growing rapidly (an estimated 20% in the past five years),” TIME reported. “[S]econd, the black audience was hungry for films it could identify with, made by blacks, with black heroes, about black life. Now every major studio is making a play for the big black market.”

Parks Jr., who was also a photographer and got his start in film by watching his father make The Learning Tree, died tragically at the age of 44 in a plane crash in 1979 in Nairobi. But the film genre that he and his father pioneered endured and became controversially known as “blaxploitation.” TIME defined the genre in 1984 in a story about the dearth of roles facing black actors:

As history indicates, it could be worse, and it has been. In D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), the major Negro roles were played by whites in blackface. Hollywood’s first black star, Stepin Fetchit, fitted the stereotype of the slow, sly, shuffling Negro. Meanwhile, the industry mostly ignored Paul Robeson (too strong, too smart, too sexy, too damned uppity) and denied Lena Horne her best potential movie roles, as the mulatto heroines of Pinky and Show Boat, handing the parts instead to Jeanne Crain and Ava Gardner. It was not until the rise to stardom of Sidney Poitier in the 1950s that blacks had a bankable movie hero. “To this day,” argues Film Historian Donald Bogle, “Poitier remains the most important black actor. The image he presented made white audiences take black Americans seriously, at least while they sat in the movie theater.”

Outside the theater, blacks were becoming hard to ignore, and their impact was refracted on the screen. “When schools were being desegregated,” recalls Danny Glover, a likely Oscar nominee for his performance as the hobo in Places in the Heart, “you saw Poitier become a film star. And in the wake of the Watts riots and the push for community control, you got blaxploitation.” These were the low-budget gangster and horror movies that, along with prestige efforts like Sounder and Lady Sings the Blues, detonated the explosion of black films in the early ’70s. Suddenly directors like Gordon Parks and Melvin van Peebles had broken the color barrier, and Cicely Tyson and Diana Ross were crossover stars.

But the moment faded in the 1980s, leaving many African-American actors struggling to find good roles.

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Part of the reason for that shift was the controversy that surrounded the genre. TIME said as much a decade earlier in its original review of Super Fly, which the magazine headlined “Racial Slur.” The review argued that the film only exacerbated the problem of perpetuating stereotypes because its characters were “diddy-boppers or street-corner hustlers,” and that Super Fly and movies like it “demean the audiences they are made for.”

Representation of minorities in films and in all ranks of the film-making process is still an issue. While the 2018 SuperFly has a slicker and “practically bourgeois” feel, TIME’s Zacharek writes in her review, the real world outside the fictional movie has similar problems to those faced in earlier decades. “Racial inequality has perhaps shifted forms, but has in no way eased,” she writes. “We might enjoy [the 2018 SuperFly] more if we weren’t stuck in such a place of uncertainty and anxiety.”

Kerry Kennedy: What My Father, RFK, Means Today

Thu, 31 May 2018 11:21:11 GMT

Think of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson or Richard Nixon. Each, in his own way, is firmly set in a certain era of American history. Yet as vibrant as they were at the peak of their power and influence, none of these men could easily slip into the contemporary political world. Their leadership was unique to their time and place.

That does not ring true for my father, Robert F. Kennedy, who was killed 50 years ago. His appearance is ever modern: the shaggy hair, the skinny ties, the suit jacket off, the shirt sleeves rolled. Beyond appearances, what is striking about RFK are the themes he returned to again and again–themes that still energize the debate and resonate in our own time.

Think of the headlines over the past few years and it is easy to hear Robert Kennedy’s voice and imagine him speaking out in our country–on the madness of gun violence, the shame of police brutality, the need for compassion in welcoming immigrants and refugees, the urgent need to defy the call to war and, where war has broken out, the moral necessity of seeking peace. One imagines him urging us to focus not only on stopping terrorism but also on understanding and addressing its root causes. He would encourage us to focus on the destructive force of hate, the disillusionment of young people, the inherent injustice of a criminal-justice system that discriminates based on race and class and sends thousands to jail simply because they are too poor to make bail–the new Jim Crow. And it is easy to think of RFK reminding us of the duty to address the struggles of those who are not in the headlines, the most vulnerable among us: farmworkers, small farmers, factory workers, people who have seen the jobs that once supported them replaced by cheap labor or technology. He would also remember our duty to Native Americans and those suffering in the hollows of Appalachia, on the Mississippi Delta and in the most destitute slums of our great cities.

In the 1950s, he spent much of his time on the Senate Committee on Investigations fighting the excesses of its chair, Joe McCarthy, and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn–two figures who echo in the news today. He later caused Cohn’s resignation and led to the end of McCarthy’s reign of terror. Asked a decade later by Peter Maas how he could have worked for McCarthy, Kennedy responded, “Well, at the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States … [and] Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one doing anything about it. I was wrong.”

But to leave it at stopping the bullies would not do him justice. On that terrible night when he told a crowd in downtown Indianapolis that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered, he included in his remarks a quote from Aeschylus: “To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.” Indeed, my father focused much of his life taming the savageness, and he made gentle the life of the world.

There was no quality my father admired more than courage, save perhaps love. I remember after dinner one night he picked up the battered poetry book that was always somewhere by his side and read aloud Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” We listened aghast to the story of a group of soldiers whose commanding officer orders them to ride into an ambush, knowing they will be slaughtered–yet they still obey the command. My father then explained that he and my mother were going on a trip and challenged us to a contest to see who could best memorize the poem while they were away. I did not win that contest–my sister Courtney did–but one stanza still remains with me:

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die,

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred

Why would a father ask his ever-expanding brood of what became 11 children to memorize a poem about war and slaughter? I think there were three reasons: He wanted to share with us his love of literature. He wanted us to embrace challenges that appear daunting. But most of all, he believed it was imperative for us to question authority, and to learn how those who fail that lesson do so at their own peril. Now, coming upon 50 years after Robert F. Kennedy’s last campaign, those are among the lessons I think he would have liked to impart to all Americans. We face daunting challenges both nationally and globally. But we must rise to those tasks armed with courage, faith, love and an abiding commitment to justice, yet girded with a healthy sense of skepticism.

Kennedy is the president of the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and author of the new book Robert F. Kennedy: Ripples of Hope, from which this essay is adapted

This appears in the June 11, 2018 issue of TIME.

See Barbara and George H.W. Bush’s Historically Long Love Story in Photos

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:15:38 GMT

Barbara Bush, the fierce and beloved matriarch of the Bush family, died at the age of 92 on Tuesday.

The former First Lady had the longest marriage in presidential history — she was married to President George H.W. Bush for 73 years, dropping out of college to follow along as her childhood love grew in his career. The couple met when Barbara Bush (then Barbara Pierce) was a 15-year-old girl on Christmas break.

It was 1941 at a Christmas dance in Greenwich, Conn., when George Bush, a recent Andover graduate, asked fellow guest Jack Wozencraft if he knew the “strikingly beautiful girl” in the red and green holiday-themed dress, Jon Meacham writes in Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. Wozencraft told Bush that the girl was Barbara Pierce, a Rye, N.Y., native who was a senior at the boarding school Ashley Hall in Charleston, S.C., and the daughter of the publishing executive Marvin Pierce. Wozencraft asked if he wanted to meet her and Bush recalled saying, “That was the general idea,” so he introduced George by his nickname Poppy.

After winter break, Barbara Pierce went back to school in the South, but the two became pen pals. They wouldn’t see each other again until spring break, when they went on a double-date to Citizen Kane. He asked her to Andover’s senior prom, where he kissed her on the cheek, “in front of the world,” as she later recalled the moment.

In the summer of 1943, they made it official, as TIME explained in 1989:

The two became engaged that summer in Kennebunkport. It was a secret engagement, Bush says, meaning ”the German and Japanese high commands weren’t aware of it.” But after Bush was shot down over the Pacific in September 1944, Barbara dropped out of Smith in her sophomore year to marry him at the First Presbyterian Church in Rye. ”I married the first man I ever kissed,” she says. ”When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.”

Here, take a look back at their love story.

I See Your Picture Wherever I Go: Prince in the LIFE Archive

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 14:30:21 GMT

Prince’s ballad “Sea of Everything” — from 20Ten, his 35th album — begins by evoking the power of an image. “I see your picture wherever I go / I’m not here to lecture, just letting you know,” the ballad begins. “I know you’re busy, the world’s calling you…”

The world, it seems, will always be calling for Prince — and for any new pictures of him.

In music’s never-ending search for authenticity and genius, few can match Prince’s talents as a musician or songwriter. As LIFE observed in 1992, his music “sprang from that fundamental basement playroom where all rock is gestated. He drew into a single voice the various sounds of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Funkadelic, which he pressed into the thunder of Purple Rain. Prince remembered two basic facts about rock: It’s dance music, and its signature emotion is longing, romantic yearning.”

Although Prince passed away two years ago this April, his contributions to culture continue. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Janelle Monáe said that her new album Dirty Computer (set to release on April 27) features sounds she was “collecting” with her friend Prince. And on her new single, “Make Me Feel,” with its synth hook and yearning lyrics, that influence is clear.

This week, LIFE combed through its archives of hundreds of candid Prince photos to give a closer look at the beloved Purple One. LIFE photographer Gjon Mili once wrote that the best portrait is when the subject is “free and easy…in the line of the body.” By that logic, it was impossible for Prince to take a bad picture.

Billy Graham at Home: Rare Photos From the LIFE Archives

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 17:13:57 GMT

It was at his home at Montreat, N.C., that the Rev. Billy Graham, “the father of modern Christian evangelism” and “spiritual advisor” to U.S. Presidents, died Feb. 21 at the age of 99.

In 1955, LIFE photographed him when that 200-acre mountainside home was being built among the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, near the farm he grew up on in Charlotte. It was a sacred place for him — and only fitting that a man who would preach about God’s presence in nature would recharge in such a place between his crusades worldwide and media appearances.

The above photos, most of which were never published in LIFE magazine, show outtakes of the Baptist minister at home. They’re images that Ed Clark had taken for a special issue that came out during the Christmas week that year, at a time when Graham was “the most famous U.S. religious leader,” as the magazine put it. The feature, “Resting Up to Save Souls” (Dec. 26, 1955), showed the “boyish-looking” 37-year-old seeking “seclusion” with his wife Ruth (pictured below, from left) — who “knows the Bible better than he does” — and children Franklin, Virginia, Anne and Ruth, plus the family dog.

Ed Clark—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

See more: LIFE With Billy Graham: Rare Photos From the Early Years of His Career

In addition to reading the Bible while relaxing on a hammock, and going on hikes with his family, he played golf with “an unorthodox crosshand grip,” as the magazine observed. Graham told LIFE that the Lord won’t let him play the game well, because if He did, “I’d spend too much time at it.”

Behind the Anti-War Protests That Swept America in 1968

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 17:00:37 GMT

The following is an excerpt from LIFE’s new special edition, 1968: The Year That Changed the World, available in the TIME Shop, on Amazon and at retailers everywhere.

Protestors massed outside the White House at all hours. They circled alongside the fence, carrying signs reading “Stop the War,” “Bring the GIs Home Now,” and “We Mourn Our Soldiers, They Are Dying in Vain.” As the protesters walked, some handed out flyers, flashed peace signs, and held candles. Their chanting was so loud that they could be heard inside the executive mansion. “There aren’t enough walls to isolate you from that,” Lyndon Johnson’s younger daughter, Luci, later recalled of the constant refrains of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Soon the voices of protest reached inside the White House’s staterooms, too. When the singer and Batman star Eartha Kitt attended a White House luncheon at which Johnson spoke, she stood up and scolded the commander in chief. “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” Kitt said. “They rebel in the streets. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”

While personally affronted that Kitt would so publicly criticize him in the White House, Johnson knew why people protested. He knew why they begged for their fathers, sons, brothers, and boyfriends to come home from Vietnam. Both of his daughters’ husbands were serving there. Luci’s husband, Patrick Nugent, served in the Air National Guard, and Lynda’s husband, Captain Charles Robb, commanded a Marine rifle company. “To the Johnsons’ credit, their family had put their money where their commander in chief’s mouth was,” historian Mark Updegrove tells LIFE. Even so, says Updegrove, the President deeply believed that he had to keep his nation fighting, because “sometimes you have to take a stand, that you cannot take liberty for granted.”

As America’s military presence grew, so did the parallel battle for peace. It had been growing since the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and Johnson’s subsequent call for the Operation Rolling Thunder bombing campaign. Civil rights groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Free Speech Movement had held teach-ins and marched in Washington and elsewhere. Young men publicly burned their draft cards. The New Left dubbed the United States “Amerika,” and the underground press disseminated antiwar information through their own news services.

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It wasn’t just leftist students and hippies who opposed the war. Many people were against it because there was no sense that the United States could win. That’s what gave rise to the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War and what inspired Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to congress, to lead 5,000 women in a march to the Capitol. A financial brokerage house, Paine Webber, Jackson & Curtis, went so far as to run an ad saying that peace in Vietnam would be “the most bullish thing that could happen to the stock market.”

Eugene McCarthy’s entry into the 1968 presidential race gave a huge boost to the antiwar movement, and the battles of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive changed the minds of many, as Americans came to the realization that the North Vietnamese refused to be worn down. While a March 1967 poll had shown that more than half of Americans supported the way Johnson was handling the war, by early 1968 that proportion was down to about a third. The antiwar movement became more grounded in political analysis than in the starry-eyed assurance of earlier protesters, Anthony DeCurtis tells LIFE. “It was about capitalism and about something that needed to be overthrown,” he says, “and not by consciousness.”

Protests spread, and schools served as major centers of agitation. This was encouraged by the Johnson administration’s decision to abolish draft deferments for most graduate students, a move that affected some 650,000 men. Muhammad Ali, who had been banned from boxing because he refused the draft, toured campuses, giving hundreds of speeches.

At Harvard Law School, professor Alan Dershowitz taught a class on legal ways to resist the draft. Students there, as well as at Radcliffe and Boston University, took part in a four-day hunger strike against the war. And at Columbia, 3,500 students and 1,000 faculty members boycotted classes in protest. SDS members led by undergraduate Mark Rudd voiced their opposition to the school’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis and weapons research for the military, while also fighting the school over the construction of a new gym that they complained offered discriminatory access to Harlem neighborhood residents. They also took over school buildings and occupied the president’s office. When 1,000 New York policemen descended on Columbia’s campus to clear out the protesters, that response resulted in many injuries and 700 arrests.

Agitation spread to hundreds of schools. A Milwaukee Journal survey found that 75 percent of students supported organized protest as a “legitimate means of expressing student grievances.” And some abandoned the Gandhian principles of nonviolence championed by Martin Luther King Jr. There were three arson attacks at Southern Illinois University by those opposing the war. Students at many universities also opposed recruitment by firms profiting from the war and protested their universities’ investments in companies such as Dow Chemical, which made napalm, a jelly gasoline that was used in Vietnam in firebombs and flamethrowers.

Some of those opposed to the war raided draft offices. Father Daniel Berrigan and eight other members of the Catholic Church entered the Selective Service office in Catonsville, Maryland, and seized hundreds of draft files. Outside, they doused the cards with their own homemade napalm. A group that became know as the Milwaukee 14 broke into that city’s Selective Service office and took 4,000 class 1-A draft cards, dragging them out in sacks and burning them in a park across the street.

LIFE Books

Read more in LIFE’s new special edition, 1968: The Year That Changed the World, available in the TIME Shop, on Amazon and at retailers everywhere.

Here’s How One Family Prepared for Nuclear War in 1954

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 22:34:42 GMT

In the harrowing 38 minutes after an incoming-missile warning was mistakenly sent via Hawaii’s emergency alert system on Saturday, those who received the message scrambled to follow its instructions to seek shelter. The experience shocked a state and a nation whose citizens have often felt that the fear of a direct attack, especially a nuclear one, is a thing of the past. The days of fallout shelters and duck-and-cover drills have seemed over — though though perhaps less so these days, as the threat of conflict with North Korea looms, than at other times in the recent past.

In 1954, LIFE Magazine captured that fear at its height, sending photographer John Dominis and Dallas correspondent Scot Leavitt to profile the Beardens of Houston. The photographs that resulted, a selection of which are presented in the gallery above, were never actually published by the magazine.

However, Leavitt’s notes from that March day, which he sent to the magazine’s editors, were preserved in the archives. They now offer insight into the psychology of a nation under the shadow of nuclear doom.

“Like a good many other Americans who live in large cities, John Bearden has the melancholy conviction that, sooner or later, his home and family will undergo an atomic attack,” Leavitt wrote.

Bearden, a tax accountant, had personal experience with disaster, though not on a nuclear scale: He happened to have been present, as a Red Cross worker, for the April 1947 disaster at Texas City, Tex., in which a ship loaded with ammonium nitrate fertilizer caught fire and triggered a series of explosions that resulted in hundreds of deaths throughout the industrial port city. He knew what it looked like when life in a seemingly ordinary American city was suddenly disrupted on an enormous scale.

Of course, a person could be killed in the initial blast. But if a person survived, he or she would then be left, potentially in a seriously injured state, to confront a city without public services, without police, without doctors.

“The people were what frightened me,” he told Leavitt of his experience in 1947. “They seemed to be nice people, like you or me. But they became animals. The thin veneer of civilization was blown off and they were dazed, crazed animals. I saw nice-looking men acting as ghouls, stealing rings from corpses. There was no controlling them.”

So Bearden decided that, while many of his neighbors scoffed at the measures he took, his family would be ready. Being able to act without having to think it through could save lives in an emergency. Preparation and practice were key. By the time the LIFE staffers met Bearden and his family — his wife Martha, four children and dog — they had prepared to face that inevitability for more than three years, ever since the adults had attended a nuclear safety seminar in 1950.

Although the family had not built themselves a shelter (a possibility they planned to explore later that year), they had put together a plan. Their 6-year-old twin daughters were taught to hit the ground at the sound of an explosion — a lesson they had put into action once, when a nearby fireworks factory exploded — and the older children had been given jobs such as drawing water in the bathtub and fastening the window blinds closed. If they had to leave home, they knew they could go to friends’ houses outside the city center and would meet there if they got separated. On the chance those homes were not an option, their teenage son, a scout, had been learning his way around the countryside. And along with what today might be called their “go bag,” they had a rifle, a pistol, a machete and an axe. And, John Bearden implied to Scot Leavitt, he would not hesitate to use those tools if a real need arose.

And how could the family prepare for the possibility that, in the event of a nuclear attack on Houston, there might not be time to put any of their plans into action?

“That part of the precautions,” Bearden told LIFE, “we take care of in church every Sunday.”

In Memoriam: Remembering the Photographers We Lost in 2017

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 16:00:48 GMT

These photographers helped shape and define nearly every area of our world, from rock music to civil rights to fine art. Here, TIME celebrates the lives and work of some of the great photographers we lost in 2017.

Russ Adams (1930-2017)

Russ Adams—Sports IllustratedJune 15, 1981 Sports Illustrated Cover. Sweden Bjorn Borg in action during match at Stade Roland Garros. Paris, France. Photo by Russ Adams.

Russ Adams, a pioneer in tennis photography, died on June 28 at the age of 86, just weeks after the death of his wife of 65 years, Betty. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he began his career at the Worcester Telegram and the Boston Herald-Traveler photographing sports greats in the Boston area. By 1953, he had honed in on the sport of tennis — a subject that would dominate the next 50 years of his life.

Among his many accomplishments, he worked with the USTA to create a code of conduct for photographers covering tennis around the world in 1969 and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, R.I., in 2007. “He’s our dean, our guru, our guardian,” tennis champion Billie Jean King told the Boston Globe when Adams was inducted into the Hall of Fame. “Believe me, the players look for him and love him.”

His body of work, comprising about 1.6 million images, is considered the largest privately held source of tennis images in the world.

Richard Benson (1943-2017)

Richard Benson, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New YorkForillon Park, Gaspé, 2006.

Photographer, educator and master printer Richard “Chip” Benson died in Providence on June 22 at the age of 73. Benson taught photography at the Yale University School of Art for more than three decades, starting in 1979, and also served as Dean from 1996-2006. Among his many accomplishments are two Guggenheim Fellowships and a MacArthur fellowship. The son of a stonecutter, he always loved working with his hands.

He is perhaps best known for his innovations in photographic offset printing techniques and, later, ink-jet printing. In 1981, the Gilman Paper Company bought him an offset printer to install in his home in Newport, R.I., with which he was able to reproduce 200 of the historic photographs in the company’s collection, by photographers including Matthew Brady, Alfred Steiglitz and Robert Frank . He spent nearly five years creating prints that were tonally accurate to the originals. In a talk recorded for a later exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Benson stated that he couldn’t sleep through the night during that period, due to “blind terror” that he would screw it up.

From platinum palladium to the most cutting-edge digital technology, Benson embraced the future of photography and still believed in the power of the print.

Nick Cornish (1966-2017)

Nick Cornish/The Sunday TimesMobarak Mohamed, 46, lies distraught on hearing the news that her son Hassan Ali, 14 had been killed by Gaddafi’s forces during the first Battle of Brega, March 2 2011. Libya.

Photojournalist Nick Cornish died after a battle with leukemia on Jan. 18. He was only 51 years old. During his two-decade-long tenure at the London Sunday Times, he covered conflicts ranging from the wars in Libya, Syria and Iraq to riots in Europe and everything in between. He was a photographer who put himself in harm’s way on a regular basis.

In addition to working as a photojournalist for the Sunday Times and other publications, he was an accomplished commercial photographer with an eye for portraits and landscapes. He lived in Umbria, Italy, with his wife, Simona. “He was not just a wonderful photographer;” said Sunday Times picture editor Ray Wells in a Facebook tribute to Cornish, “he was the most gracious and self-depreciating of men, always surprised that anyone would know his name.”

Marie Cosindas (1923-2017)

Marie Cosindas Estate, courtesy of Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NYLenore, Boston, 1965. Dye Diffusion transfer print.

Marie Cosindas, a pioneer in the use of color photography, died in her hometown of Boston on May 25 at the age of 93. She had studied textiles and painting at the Modern School of Fashion Design and the Boston Museum School before a 1959 trip to her family’s homeland of Greece triggered a passion for photography.

After studying and attending workshops with Paul Caponigro and Ansel Adams, she was referred to Polaroid’s Edwin Land in 1962 to test out the company’s new instant-developing film. Excelling in experimentation with color film, particularly in its uses for ethereal portraits and still-lifes, she garnered the interest of Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski. He would offer her an exhibition in 1966, making her just the fifth woman in the museum’s history of have a solo show. In the press release, Szarkowski stated that her photographs were “as real and as unlikely as butterflies.”

Her work fell into obscurity during the 1980s but was revisited in 2013 when two museums — the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Tex., and the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University — presented new looks at her work. During her lifetime, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Grant, a Rockefeller Grant and two honorary degrees.

Arlene Gottfried (1950-2017)

Arlene Gottfried courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine ArtCommunion.

Street photographer Arlene Gottfried died on Aug. 8 from complications of breast cancer. She was 66 years old. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she was the older sister of actor and comedian Gilbert Gottfried, but her compassionate, curious photos of everyday New York City stand on their own.

As a teenager, she received her first camera from her father and would roam her Brooklyn neighborhood photographing her surroundings and interesting characters. After studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and working for an advertising agency, she shot for publications such as the New York Times Magazine, FORTUNE, LIFE and Newsweek. But her street work, captured over the course of three decades, resonated the most.

During the course of her career Gottfried published five books — the first of which, 1999’s The Eternal Light, brought her into such close contact with her subject, the Eternal Light Community Singers, that she became a gospel singer herself. (The photo featured in the gallery is from her 2011 book Bacalaitos and Fireworks.) And yet, in an interview with TIME’s Paul Moakley that year, she said that she still felt sometimes that she didn’t know much the business of making a photo book, even though she had clearly proved her aptitude at the process. “I’m good at taking the pictures and putting them in some order,” she said. “For me it’s a way of concluding something.”

Stanley Greene (1949-2017)

Stanley Greene—NOORChechnya, Grozny, woman staring 1995-2003 Downtown Grozny, April 2001. Since the death of her child Zelina often stares at something far away, elusive. She says she is already dead herself, if only time would hurry up.

Photojournalist, World Press Award winner and founding member of Noor photo agency Stanley Greene died on May 19 in Paris after a long battle with cancer. He was 68 years old. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1949, he received his first camera from his parents at age 11. As a teenager, he joined the Black Panthers and was an anti-Vietnam activist. With the encouragement of renowned photojournalist and former LIFE photographer W. Eugene Smith, Greene pursued photography at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York.

After college he moved to San Francisco and documented the punk scene and produced a body of work called “The Western Front.” He would move to Paris in 1986 and have a brief career as a fashion photographer and was in East Berlin in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell.

He won his first World Press award in 1994 for his 1993 work in the Russian White House. He was the only western journalist inside during the coup attempt against Russian President Boris Yeltsin. His focused work in conflict zones including Chechnya, Georgia, Afghanistan and Iraq would win him additional World Press awards and other honors including the W. Eugene Smith award in 2004 and the Lifetime Achievement Visa d’Or Award in 2016

Speaking to TIME earlier this year, MaryAnne Golon from the Washington Post stated: “From battlefields in Chechnya and Iraq to the Silk Road in Asia to New Orleans underwater to long defunct punk clubs in San Francisco, Stanley Greene floated through all with his gifted eye and came away with haunting black and white photographs often as unusual as he was.”

Ren Hang (1987-2017)

Ren Hang courtesy of TaschenUntitled.

Controversial Chinese photographer and poet Ren Hang died on Feb. 24 in Beijing. Born in Jilin, China in 1987, he wrote about his struggle with depression on his website; he was 29 and is reported to have jumped to his death.

Known for nude portraits of his friends, he began taking pictures as an advertising student while studying advertising a the Communication University of China using a point and shoot camera. Hang once said he “simply shot what he saw,” and in China what he saw got him arrested on various occasions for his sexually explicit work. This did not stop him from creating work and during his lifetime he published seven photo books and a book of poetry. Renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei took an interest in Hang’s work and included his photos in a 2013 exhibition in the Netherlands and curated his 2014 exhibit, La Chine a Nue at Paris’ Nue Galerie.

Speaking to TIME earlier this year, Alexander Öberg, of Galleri Tryffelgrisen, a longtime collaborator of Hang’s, told TIME he was a “lovely person and an incredibly creative artist who had so much more to share with the world.”

Don Hunstein (1928-2017)

Don HunsteinBob Dylan and Suze Rotolo, 1963. This photo was used as the album cover for ‘Freewheelin’ with Bob Dylan.’

Don Hunstein, best known for his iconic images of Columbia Records musicians, died in on March 18, from Alzheimer’s disease, in New York, N.Y. He was 88 years old. Born in St. Louis, Mo., Hunstein first became interested in photography while in the Air Force, stationed in Fairford, England. He bought his first camera, a Leica M3, after being inspired by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Not long after returning to New York, he began his career at Columbia Records in the company’s photo library. The position afforded him incredible access to photograph musicians including Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. He would go on to become chief photographer and Director of Photography for the label, spending 30 years of his career there. Hundreds of his photographs, as album covers, made their way into homes across the world.

One of those pictures in particular would become a defining image in pop culture. Early in his career, he captured Bob Dylan and girlfriend Suze Rotolo on a cold winter day in 1963, walking down the street in Greenwich Village. That picture would become the album cover of Freewheelin’ with Bob Dylan. The album cemented Dylan as a major recording artist and its cover remains one of the most recognizable images in Hunstein’s archive.

Ben Martin (1930-2017)

Ben MartinMartin Luther King and Coretta King, Selma March, Pettus Bridge, March 21, 1965.

Ben Martin came to photography young: He received his first camera at the age of 8 and became the youngest member of the National Press Association at 17. But when he joined TIME magazine it was as a copyboy, after a promised job in the photo department of LIFE was eliminated. Carrying around a camera around with him everywhere had its advantages, however, and he quickly went from copyboy to one of the magazine’s first staff photographers, shooting alongside many of the great LIFE photographers. He died on Feb. 10 in Salisbury, N.C., at the age of 86.

Martin is responsible for many of the memorable images that ran in the pages of TIME and LIFE during that era, including photographs of the 1960 presidential debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy and JFK’s funeral in 1963. In 1965, he joined civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. As the photographer spent much of the march walking backwards, the assistant United States Attorney General John Doar said that Martin was “the best shield Dr. King could have.”

Speaking with TIME, Martin’s former wife Kathryn Leigh Scott fondly remembered that he always said he would never retire. In fact, he never did and continued to work right until the year before his death.

Lennart Nilsson (1922-2017)

Lennart Nilsson—LIFE MagazineThe cover of LIFE Magazine features a photograph of an 18-week-old fetus inside its amniotic sac, April 30, 1965.

Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson, well known for his groundbreaking scientific imagery, died on Jan. 28 in Stockholm. He was 94 years old. Nilsson became a household name after LIFE magazine published the April 30, 1965, cover story Drama Of Life Before Birth, a photo essay that introduced LIFE’s large audience to color images documenting the growth of the human embryo. These images — which had been made over the course of 12 years, amid controversy over whether the fetuses on the pages were alive or not — fascinated readers, leading the issue to sell over 8 million copies in the first four days of publication.

Nilsson described himself as “fascinated with mankind,” but his fascination with the camera also began early. Born in Strängnäs, Sweden on Aug. 24, 1922, he received his first camera at age 11 and followed his father and uncle to a career in photography, working as a freelancer in Sweden in the mid-1940s before he embarked into the world of scientific photography.

During his career, he received Emmy awards for two of his documentaries, The Saga of Life (1982) and The Miracle of Life (1996). He is also credited with taking the first images of the human immunodeficiency virus and the SARS virus. His many honors include three honorary doctorates and membership in the Swedish Society of Medicine. In 2016, the iconic fetus that appeared on the cover of LIFE was included in TIME’s 100 Most Influential Photos.

George Pitts (1951-2017)

Charles Eshelman—FilmMagic/Getty ImagesGeorge Pitts attends the launch of the second issue of Aleim magazine at Crosby Hotel on Feb. 19, 2011 in New York City.

George Pitts, a pillar in the photographic community, died on March 4 after a long illness. He, seen above, described himself as a photographer, artist and writer on his website, but he was much more: a painter by training, a pioneering photo editor and an educator whose students often went on to become stars in their own rights. He was the founding photo director of Vibe Magazine from 1993-2004 and the Director of Photography of the revived LIFE magazine from 2004-2007.

“I vividly remember our meeting in 1999,” photographer Gillian Laub told TIME in the wake of Pitts’ death. “I remember immediately after looking at my photographs he said, ‘Some people photograph with only their brains as an intellectual quest, but your images come from your heart.’ He was deeply and so passionately interested in people and photography.”

Mel Rosenthal (1940-2017)

Mel Rosenthal—The Image WorksBronx, NY: : Bathgate Avenue ca. 1976 -1983.

Born in the Bronx in 1940, photographer and educator Mel Rosenthal became well known for his work in the New York City borough. Though he received a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1967, it was in Tanzania that he found his passion for documenting the human condition through photography. He died on Oct. 30 at 77.

The teaching career he began at Empire State College in 1975 would last for the next 36 years of his life, during which time he returned to the South Bronx to document his hometown and its resilient residents. In 2000, he published a book, In the South Bronx of America, images from which were later exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York.

“I’m not an artist; I’m a messenger,” he said in a 2011 interview with the New York Times. “I go to a place to see what’s going on, bring it back for people to see, then I go to the next place.

David Rubinger (1924-2017)

David Rubinger/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty ImagesSmall group of Israeli soldiers at the wailing wall after it was recaptured during the 1967 war.

David Rubinger, who died on March 1 at 92, was known as one of Israel’s most famous photographers — and in fact his link to that region was older than the nation itself. Born in Vienna in 1924, he moved to British Mandate Palestine as a teenager in 1939. While his father escaped to Great Britain, his mother perished in the Holocaust.

Rubinger was introduced to photography when he received his first camera from a girlfriend while on leave from his post in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army. He would go on to photograph his adopted homeland for more than six decades, for several local outlets and later, starting in 1954, for TIME and LIFE. The photo included in this gallery, of paratroopers at the Western Wall, is considered a defining image of conflict and his “signature photo” from 1967’s Six-Day War. He did not consider this to be the best image on the roll, but it was distributed by the government and gained widespread exposure.

Among his many accomplishments, Rubinger helped found the Foreign Press Association, published a decisive book of his work in 2008, and in 1997 became the first photographer to be awarded the Israel Prize in communications, the country’s highest honor in the field. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin eulogized Mr. Rubinger in a statement: “There are those who write the pages of history, and there are those who illustrate them through their camera’s lens. Through his photography, David eternalized history as it will be forever etched in our memories.”

Khadija Saye (1992-2017)

Image courtesy of the Estate of Khadija SayeNak Bejjen, 2017. From the series: Dwelling: in this space we breathe. Photograph, wet plate collodion tintype on metal. 250 x 200 mm

Khadija Saye, a rising star in the photography world, died in the Grenfell Tower Fire on June 14, 2017. She was only 24 years old, and lived with her mother on the 20th floor. Although she was born and raised in London, her work was closely tied to her Gambian heritage.

Saye attended the prestigious Rugby School and the University for Creative Arts at Farham, where she earned a BA in photography. While a student, she created a series called “Crowned” that focused on identity, hair and her understanding of being a black woman. This work caught the eye of artist Nicola Greene, who selected her work to be included in the Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries in Central London in 2014. Saye’s work was subsequently exhibited at the Diaspora Pavillion (which Greene co-founded) at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The youngest artist represented in that group, she created the series Dwelling: in this space we breathe specifically for the exhibition, exploring her African heritage using traditional ritual objects. The work, she said, spoke to “the search for what gives meaning to our lives and what we hold onto in times of despair and life-changing challenges.”

“I had the privilege of watching Khadija rise from a shining light of emerging talent who was struggling to get her work into the world, to a star at the crest of a wave of international success,” Greene told TIME. “It is impossible to believe that such a positive force of energy and power is gone from this world.”

Lord Snowdon (1930-2017)

Popperfoto—Getty ImagesPhotographer Lord Snowdon, husband of Princess Margaret, pictured at work in Venice, Italy on Oct. 14, 1971.

Lord Snowdon, born Antony Armstrong-Jones, died on Jan. 17, 2017, in London at the age of 86. His interest in photography began during his time as a student at Eton and, though he briefly studied architecture at Cambridge, it continued as he left school to set up a photo studio in London, where he became known for throwing wild parties and hosting a revolving door of celebrities.

In 1956, he became the court photographer for the British royal family — an assignment that did more than help his career, as he met his future wife, Princess Margaret, when he shot her official portrait in 1958. Their marriage in 1960, which made him Lord Snowdon, was the first time in four centuries that a British commoner married a King’s daughter. Though LIFE magazine billed him as a “retired” photographer when the magazine featured a five-page portfolio of his work in the March 14, 1960, issue, the marriage was not the end of his career. In fact, after the couple divorced 18 years later, he continued to photograph the royal family.

Beyond his position in the royal family, he was an Emmy-winning director, advocate for the disabled and the co-designer of the Aviary at the London Zoo. His photography appeared in the pages of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Tatler, and he worked for the Sunday Times for nearly 30 years. In 2000, he received a major retrospective of his work at the National Portrait Gallery and over 200 of his images now live in the permanent collection. And yet, in 2010, when interviewed by The Telegraph on the eve of his 80th birthday, he described himself as “an ordinary, run-of-the-mill photographer doing reportage,” and added: “I don’t think I’ll ever give up.”

Boris Spremo (1935-2017)

Boris Spremo—Toronto Star via Getty ImagesWorld press photo winner in feature class at Hague; Holland 1966 1st prize; Gold Medal.

Boris Spremo, the first Canadian photojournalist to win a World Press Award, died on Aug. 21 at the age of 81, after a battle with cancer. Born on Oct. 20, 1935, in the former Yugoslavia, Spremo’s path to Canadian photo history was a winding one — he attended the Belgrade Cinematographic Institute and traveled to Paris before settling in Canada — but he had a long career at some of the nation’s most prestigious publications, working as a staff photographer at the Globe and Mail for four years before beginning a 30-year run at the Toronto Star, from which he retired in 2000. As a staff photographer, he covered everything from war zones to royalty to Muhammad Ali. A member of the Canadian News Hall of Fame, he was known for always getting his shot no matter what the circumstances and for putting his subjects at ease.

It was at the Globe and Mail in 1965 that he achieved an impressive if somewhat odd distinction. Among the numerous awards he received for his work (close to 300) is that year’s World Press Photo award, the first-place prize in the General News category, pictured here. But, according to World Press Photo, though the photo was commissioned by The Globe and Mail, it was never actually run by the paper. Because the editors worried that readers would be offended by the image of a dog urinating, it was never published in the paper — even when they reported on it winning a World Press award.

Virginia Thoren (1920-2017)

Virginia Thoren Collection—Pratt Institute LibrariesAmerican in Paris, 1957. Image courtesy, June Bateman Fine Art and Virginia Thoren Collection, Pratt Institute Libraries.

Fashion photographer Virginia Thoren, born to Swedish immigrant parents in South Orange, N.J., died on Oct. 27. She was 97 years old. Although not formally trained, she would go on to shoot for magazines such as Vogue and Town and Country and photographed many famous faces of the day, including actor Vivien Leigh and model Suzy Parker.

Before her interest in photography blossomed, she studied advertising and design at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. She received her degree in 1942 and soon after joined the art department at Vogue, after turning down a position at the Museum of Modern Art. Although hired as an assistant in the art department there, she also became an assistant to Toni Frissell, the leading female fashion photographer of the time.

In 1944, Thoren began working for Albert Woodley and Company, an advertising agency, traveling to France frequently for her work. She bought her first Rolliflex in 1945 and photographed Yves Saint Laurent’s first collection for Christian Dior in 1946. She was awarded a Certificate of Excellence from the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1954.

Like her mentor, Frissell, she brought her models outside of the traditional studio and photographed them in natural light and real environments. Her early interest in watercolor is also evident in the soft atmospheric lighting and palette of her work. In 2007, her archives were donated to the Pratt Institute Libraries and her work is represented by June Bateman Fine Art.

In an email to TIME, June Batemen said of Thoren, “She was a unique person and photographer, and always modest about her trail blazing career in post WWII France, and in the competitive and mostly male world of commercial photography in the U.S. through the 1970s.”

Pete Turner (1934-2017)

Pete TurnerGiraffe, 1964.

“I see in color, and it’s as simple as that,” Pete Turner once said.

Turner, one of the first masters of color photography, died on Sept. 18, 2017, at age 83. Known for his brilliant, saturated color images, his work blurred the line between art and commercial photography. His experiments with color began when he was a teenager in Rochester, N.Y. — home of Kodak — and continued as he studied photography at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) with peers and future photography stars Bruce Davidson and Jerry Uelsmann.

Upon graduating from RIT, he was drafted into the Army and stationed in Astoria, N.Y., where he ran the color film lab and was able to continue his personal work. His first major assignment came in 1959 where he traveled to Africa for Airstream and National Geographic. In the mid-1960s he met music producer Creed Taylor, which led to a long partnership with Turner’s images gracing the covers of countless classic jazz albums. (One hundred of these images can be seen in the book Color of Jazz.) Perhaps most famously, an image that Turner shot of giraffe in Amboseli National Park in Kenya while on assignment for the oil company Esso in 1964 became the cover art for Brazilian artist Antonio Carlos Jobims’ 1967 album Wave. Turner’s use of filters to manipulate the color in the photo was not done widely at the time, and Turner would later say that the photo was important in his career because it showed him the benefits of breaking the rules. “It said you don’t need to be afraid to experiment,” he said. “Playing things safe is often a mistake.”

Turner was named one of the 20 most influential photographers of all time in 2000 by PDN and his archives reside at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.

The Mane Event: LIFE’s 25 Most Memorable Horses

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 14:00:29 GMT

In 2004, when the Senate agreed to designate December 13 as the National Day of the Horse, the resolution acknowledged that “horses continue to permeate the society of the United States, as witnessed on movie screens, on open land, and in our own backyards” and are “a vital part of the collective experience of the United States.”

Nowhere is that vital role clearer than in the archive of LIFE Magazine’s great 20th century photography, which features these majestic creatures in all of their many roles. They’re athletes (Seabiscuit), movie stars (National Velvet), military troops, farm workers, even gamblers — not to mention beloved companions. In one 1952 gimmick, a horse that supposedly possessed clairvoyant powers even composed a headline for a LIFE story about herself. (She was clairvoyant, not creative: the headline was “Talking Horse.”)

To mark the celebration of horses now and then, here’s a look back at 25 of the most memorable horses in LIFE’s pages.

‘A Country Within a Country’: Inside the Navajo Nation in 1948

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 17:00:41 GMT

As LIFE described the situation to readers in 1948, the Navajo Nation was “a country within a country” — a reminder that Native American history courses inextricably alongside everything else that falls under the umbrella of American history, a fact that is underscored for Native American Heritage Day on Friday.

When photographer Leonard McCombe visited Navajo country in Arizona to create the images seen above, however, he caught a people at a very specific and important point in that long and ongoing history. The Navajo Nation, which comprised about 61,000 members at the time and was the fastest-growing Native American group in the nation, was at a moment of crisis.

By that point in 1948, the U.S. government was well aware that the land on which the Navajos lived could no longer support the residents, but that fact was news to most Americans, who first heard the story through news reports of starvation on the reservation. However, as LIFE noted, simply sending food wouldn’t solve the problem.

The story focused on the extended Yellowsalt family, most of whom made their living by herding sheep. The family couldn’t get permission from reservation administrators — who pointed to the disappearing grass in the area — to expand the flock. By the government’s calculations, according to LIFE, the land could only support enough sheep for about 20% of the families to own enough of the animals to make a sustainable living, or for more families to barely scrape by. Meanwhile, even though exposure to white populations had introduced new and devastating diseases into the Navajo community, the government-run hospitals didn’t have enough beds to support the population.

The two central questions posed by the story were inescapable: “How can technical knowledge be made available to a primitive people without destroying the whole fabric of their lives? How can nations which differ from each other in appearance and language and culture live peaceably together?”

Now, nearly seven decades later, replace the word “primitive” with “native” and those questions are still profound ones, says David E. Wilkins, a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and an author of The Navajo Political Experience.

“Overall, I was surprised at the general accuracy of the piece,” Wilkins tells LIFE, considering the date and the audience for which it was written. “It was full of the assimilation language that was dominant at the time, but that wasn’t surprising.”

Wilkins has some other quibbles with the story — for example, LIFE published images of bare-breasted Navajo women that strike him as strange, as he says he’s not aware of a ceremony in which Navajo women would usually go unadorned — but the big thing that’s missing, he says, is a sense of the larger context in which the Yellowsalt family was living. LIFE hints at the reasons why there aren’t enough sheep for the family to prosper, noting that when the people returned to land they’d been forced from in the late 1800s, it was now a reservation “hemmed in by land-hungry whites,” and that grazing flocks on that fenced-in space destroyed the range. “As the Navajo nation grew,” LIFE noted, “the land, the basis of its existence, began to fail.” But as Wilkins points out, it was a federal livestock-reduction program in the 1930s — not the natural course of things — that had mandated they cut back on grazing animals on that land.

“In 1948, the Navajo Nation was still reeling from the livestock-reduction program,” he says. “It devastated the Navajos economically, psychically and culturally.”

The coming of World War II staved off economic disaster for a little while; Wilkins says that over 15,000 Navajos were employed in some fashion as a result of the war. But in 1948 the consequences could no longer be denied. “The war’s over and they go back to the reservation and there’s nothing there because of wrong-headed policy makers who thought they were doing the right thing,” he explains. Though those policy-makers thought they saving the land from overgrazing, Wilkins says that in fact later research shows that the Navajo livestock were not a primary cause of the problems. In addition, though federal policy affected every aspect of Navajo life, it was only later in 1948 that the Arizona Supreme Court declared that the state’s Navajo citizens had the right to vote.

But the best thing about this article, Wilkins says, is what happened after it was published.

Media attention paid to the crisis among the Navajo People, with popular journalistic reports such as this one, contributed to what Congress did in 1950. That attention, Wilkins says, encouraged them to pass the Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Act, which “helped to save those two peoples from the economically crippled situation they were in.”

Assistance like that — coming from the very source that had contributed to the problem in the first place — made a huge difference for those tribes in the 1950s, and is perhaps an example of one part of an answer to that central question: How can two very different nations live peaceably together?

How the Fashions of the 1960s Reflected Social Change

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 14:00:01 GMT

In the 1960s, the fashion world turned “topsy-turvy,” as TIME noted in 1967. Nearly every aspect of that revolutionary decade, from the civil-rights movement to the space race, was somehow reflected in the clothing worn by American women.

The book Mod New York: Fashion Takes a Trip, which is being released in coordination with a show of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York (opening Wednesday), takes a look at the influences behind and lasting influence of American fashion in the years between 1960 and 1973. As this sampling of photos shows, fashion’s reach was broad, stretching all the way to the White House.

Courtesy of The Monacelli Press & Museum of the City of New York

As the book notes, for a long time before this period, American fashion hadn’t actually been all that American. High fashion, after all, was synonymous with France. But during World War II, when trade and communication with Paris grew more difficult, French designers’ counterparts in New York City stepped up. By 1960, as John and Jacqueline Kennedy — whose personal style was often drawn from French influences — floated into the White House with an aura of American youth, the idea of truly American fashion was not so far-fetched.

As the rate of changing trends accelerated throughout the 1960s, women who cared about clothes threw off old norms about what was proper — just as much of American society broke loose from restrictions of the past. Though Jackie Kennedy broke new ground for American fashion, she made way for a series of looser and more revolutionary looks than she herself presented. Art and youth movements made themselves known in the fashion world. Black models and African-inflected clothing inspired and reflected the pride of the civil-rights movement. Feminism was embodied first in miniskirts, which defied the model femininity of the 1950s, and then with clothing designed for women in careers.

What TIME once called the “mod, mod world of fashion” was, it turned out, a crucial part of the larger mod, mod world of the 1960s.

Thousands of People Became American Citizens on the First Official Veterans Day

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 16:00:55 GMT

LIFE MagazineFrom the Nov. 22, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine.

Veterans Day, which falls each year on November 11, is a time for Americans to remember the sacrifices made by those who served in the U.S. military. But first Veterans Day that was dedicated to veterans of all wars also happened to honor a different group of Americans.

On Veterans Day in 1954 — one month after President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued the first Veterans Day proclamation and the new holiday officially replaced Armistice Day — a whopping 50,000 men and women from coast to coast were sworn in as new U.S. citizens in what LIFE magazine called “the first time in U.S. history that citizenship was conferred upon so many people in so many mass ceremonies.”

A photo in the Nov. 22, 1954, issue showed three Japanese people getting sworn in on the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Bremerton, Wash., on the same deck on which the Japanese signed their surrender on Sept. 2, 1945, ending World War II — but many more photos from that day exist in LIFE’s archives, and they provide a unique look at that historic day.

At a ceremony at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field — where 1,600 men and women took the oath of citizenship — U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. acknowledged the renewed significance of the ceremony’s overlap on Veterans Day.

“November 11th is a hallowed day for all Americans,” he said, “And it continues as a day dedicated to memory of the past and hope for the future — hope that all men can learn to live together in peace as we have done in this American melting pot of the world.”

He also emphasized that swearing allegiance as a U.S. citizen was more important than ever in 1954, with the Cold War in full swing. In fact, the Cold War had changed the character of the country’s most famous immigration station, Ellis Island, as it was put to use in the ’50s to implement a post-WWII policy “banned anyone who had ever been affiliated with a totalitarian party,” as TIME has previously reported.

But as Brownell said in his speech, only a few hundred had been detained there in recent months — compared to the 1.2 million that Ellis Island processed in 1907 — so its place as a symbol of immigration to the United States was fading. Immigration function in New York would be moved to a different building, off the island, on Nov. 12, 1954, the day after this historic Veterans Day, Ellis Island closed as an immigration center.

“The island buildings, I feel sure, can be put to useful service in other work,” Brownell said.

In the decades that followed, the immigration center would be reoped as a museum — one that, all these years later, sees even more visitors each year than the number who came through Ellis Island annually at the height of immigration.

How a Long-Lost Photograph Revealed One Family’s Immigration Story

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 14:00:06 GMT

Christian R. Greco found the earliest known photographs of his family by accident. In the wake of President Trump’s decision to walk back some protections for young undocumented immigrants, the historian and legal activist couldn’t help but think about his own family’s immigration experience and his father’s journey to New York from Italy in October of 1950. Inspired to look for images from Ellis Island from that period, he stumbled upon a LIFE.com gallery that contained several Alfred Eisenstaedt photos that were never published in the magazine.

One of them, of a man waiting with his children, caught Greco’s eye. And that man, he was fairly sure, appeared to be his own grandfather, Raffaele Greco.

Greco’s stunned father, seen in the photo as the little boy seated at right in the image, confirmed the match. Because the image had not been published in the magazine, the family had not known about its existence until that moment. And when the photo inspired Greco to do more digging into his family’s past, he found new layers of a story that his grandfather had kept hidden for his entire life.

The family’s immigration story, as reconstructed by Greco, who now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, begins in the town of Rende in Italy’s Calabria region. In the years after World War II, the family was well-off for the time and place, but not by American standards. Christian Greco’s grandmother Rose was American but she met his grandfather in Rende and settled there as their family grew. The couple decided that they ought to make the move to her homeland around 1950, for reasons that have been lost to family memory.

Some months after Greco’s grandmother and her eldest son made their way to the United States, her husband and their four younger children followed on a liner called the Saturnia, arriving on Oct. 22, 1950, after an 11-day journey in what was essentially steerage from Naples to New York City’s Pier 84. Christian Greco’s father Michael, at 7, was the oldest of those four. (The other three children in the photo are Allen, Vivian and Anna Marie, ages 5, 3 and nearly 2.)

Unbeknownst to them, they had not picked a good moment to come to America.

Just weeks earlier, the U.S. Congress had passed a law called the Internal Security Act of 1950, also known as the McCarran Act. In an environment of tense McCarthy-era Cold War fear, the act was billed as a way to keep the nation safe from the insidious influence of communism. The way it was framed, however, was a problem — so much so that the law passed despite a veto by President Truman, who argued that the act would help communists by proving that the United States was not the free nation it claimed to be.

As TIME explained in the wake of the episode, the way the law was written had made such an outcome fairly inevitable:

The letter of the law did not give much choice. It banned any alien who “at any time” had been “affiliated” with any “section, branch, affiliate, or subdivision” of any “totalitarian party.” Under Hitler, nearly every youth was forced to join one or another of the Hitler Youth organizations; nearly every man who worked for a living had to belong to a Nazi-dominated labor union. In Italy, every school was a Fascist school. Officials estimated that the new law would exclude 90% of all Germans, more than half of all Italians. It would bar all repentant Communists, interfere with trade with Yugoslavia, exclude many of the 55,000 German refugees from East Europe, whose admission Congress had just authorized last June.

As one 1950 New York Times Magazine article noted, immigrants who thought that their visas were already settled were “baffled and bitterly disappointed” to arrive in New York City only to be detained under the act. To deal with the bottleneck before it became a crisis, the State Department soon cancelled all U.S. visas for those who had not yet arrived, but it was clear the law would need fixing. (Though its constitutionality was at first upheld when challenged and select portions of the law still stand, many parts of it were struck down over the next few decades. Meanwhile, on Nov. 12, 1954, Ellis Island closed as an immigration center.)

In the meantime, as the Saturnia pulled into the pier in October of 1950 and law-enforcement officers began to approach the ship, the passengers — including the Grecos — didn’t know what to expect.

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It was the McCarran Act that brought LIFE’s Alfred Eisenstaedt out for a story that was published in the Nov. 13, 1950, issue of the magazine, which dubbed Ellis Island “a gray and gloomy place suddenly full of bewildered people who have become victims of American politics.” The photographer met the hundreds of detained immigrants aboard the Saturnia, where they were crammed into a luxury lounge to await interrogation and then, for many, transfer to Ellis Island for further questioning and detention. According to news reports from the time, the 130 Saturnia passengers who were detained comprised the largest group held under the law at that point. Though only a few of the images would be published in LIFE, Eisenstaedt shot pictures throughout the ordeal and they are still part of the LIFE Picture Collection.

“It’s fascinating to look at the faces of some of these people, including my grandfather,” Greco says. “You can just see the ebb and flow of emotion as people are at first surprised, confused, and then they start to get worried and some of them are in tears as the day goes on.”

Greco says that his grandfather had been conscripted into an Italian fascist youth corps in the 1920s and then into the Italian army during the war, and that was enough of a red flag to trigger the McCarran Act — even though the same would have been true for pretty much any Italian man of that age.

It would take days — accounts differ on exactly how many — for the Grecos to be released into the United States to reunite with their family. But, with the children young and the family ultimately proving to be the kind of immigrant success story that America loves (Greco’s father was the first immigrant to be president of the American Bar Association, for example), those terrifying first few days were rarely discussed. Each of the Greco children, of whom there would be a total of ten over the course of Raffaele and Rose’s half-century-long marriage, developed a slightly different version of the story, but the law didn’t figure heavily in any of the versions that made their way to the next generation. “It was news to us a month ago when I started to discover these photographs that we were even victimized by this act,” Greco says.

To Greco, the information he has gathered about the law and his own family’s story has only added another layer to the apt timing of his initial discovery. After all, if it hadn’t been for today’s debate over immigration, he might never have found the photograph — or have learned that the debate had a precursor through which his own family lived.

“I’m a first-generation Italian immigrant,” Greco says, “and as the child of someone who has now learned this story and learned that we were victimized by a law similar to what Trump is trying to do by detaining certain people based on their point of origin, it struck a chord with me that I wasn’t aware was a chord until I read about it.”

Though there are still gaps in what the Greco family knows about that period, the discovery of Eisenstaedt’s photographs of that day have been a start toward a complete story — one that only makes him appreciate more than ever the bravery of his grandfather, crossing an ocean with little money but four small children, to a land where he didn’t speak the language but where dreams for his family’s success would eventually come true. Looking at his grandfather’s face even on that stressful day so many decades ago, he sees a spark of the confidence that would carry Raffaele Greco forward, like so many other immigrants before and after.

“Without Eisenstaedt and LIFE we wouldn’t have known this,” he says. “I don’t think it ever would have been realized by the family.”

Photography’s Power in the Civil Rights Movement Had a Tragic Side

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 13:00:56 GMT

Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination was just one of the “apocalyptic events” of 1968, as TIME would later put it in a special report on the significance of the year, published for its 20th anniversary. The magazine compared the events of that year to a “knife blade,” that “severed past from future.”

The photographs of that era have always held a special place in the history of civil rights in the United States, and as the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination approaches, the power of those images is as apparent as ever. Opening at The High Museum in Atlanta on Saturday, a new exhibition of civil rights photography features more than 40 prints of the leader’s disciples and the people he fought for. For example, the work of Doris Derby, a photographer and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) participant, sheds light on the “unsung and overlooked women,” as the museum phrases it, who followed in his footsteps even when it meant putting their lives in danger. The show features a mix of the museum’s permanent collection and new acquisitions, starting with the images that helped draw national attention to King — such as Charles Moore’s photo of King’s arrest outside the Montgomery, Ala., courthouse on Sept. 3, 1958 — to an image of Coretta Scott King leading the March in Memphis just four days after MLK’s death, taken by Burk Uzzle of the Magnum Photos cooperative. The show also features images of modern-day adaptations of his signature nonviolent demonstrations, showcasing photos of the 50th anniversary commemoration of the march in Selma, Ala., as well as Black Lives Matter protests in Atlanta, Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo.

Photographs from the civil-rights movement helped expose the cruelty of segregation and discrimination to the wider world, but as made clear by the story behind one of the photos in the exhibition, the power of those images could hurt, too. Even as photography helped to make change on a national level, the people who appeared in those images could be harmed on an individual level as a result of opening up their lives to that exposure.

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Gordon Parks’ 1956 photograph “Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama” — the first slide in the gallery above — shows a group of black children peering through a fence guarding a whites-only playground. It was part of a LIFE magazine photo essay titled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” for which he shadowed sharecropper Albert Thornton’s family and showcased their experience with segregation. The children in the photograph, the story explained, “do not grasp the logic” of not being allowed to enter the “wonderful place from which they are being deliberately excluded,” just on the other side of the fence.

“Although the Thorntons are thoughtful and, in private, articulate, they do not make many direct statements about segregation,” the article said. “This is because they fear yet another restraint — the constant fear of publicly speaking their minds.”

Unfortunately, their fear was proved to be founded. After the photos came out, Thornton’s daughter Allie Lee Causey and her family were forced to leave their jobs and home in Choctaw County after facing white intimidation. As LIFE acknowledged later that year, the editors had wanted to “explain one of the most controversial social problems before the United States today” but had not anticipated “subsequent developments.” (The magazine helped them relocate to an unnamed location of their choice.) Parks, who was black, later wrote that the mayor had noted that the townspeople would have “tarred and feathered [Parks] and set him to fire” if they had seen him there after the story was published.

Causey’s nephew Michael Wilson told AL.com in 2015 that that LIFE photo essay “totally changed their way of life and they lost everything, basically. But I think from that … people saw how people are being treated. So from that sense, it did what it was supposed to do.”

A Fire That No Water Could Put Out: Civil Rights Photography runs through May 27, 2018.

How a Photographer Illuminated the Plight of the ‘Invisible Poor’

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 14:00:55 GMT

They came to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1968, by the thousand — young and old, black and white, traveling in buses and cars and mule trains. Some had left homes in the rural South. Others came from cities like Memphis, Chicago and Los Angeles. Most were African Americans, but Latinos, white, and members of half a dozen Native American nations were on hand as well. Virtually all of them were poor. Although Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had summoned them to the nation’s capital, the movement belonged to them. This was the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC).

They were often called “the invisible poor.” But they came to Washington determined to be seen and heard by their government and by the nation as a whole. They had answered King’s call because they shared his conviction that the nation’s progress toward racial equality and economic justice had stalled. Indeed, King believed that the nation was in crisis. He pointed to signs that couldn’t be missed — millions of citizens of the world’s richest nation living in grinding poverty; violent eruptions of rage and frustration in black inner cities; an immoral war in Southeast Asia that siphoned away resources from anti-poverty programs at home while spreading suffering and death abroad. During the December 1967 press conference at which the SCLC launched the PPC, King told reporters that America was in the grips of “a kind of social insanity.”

King was convinced that a renewed campaign of civil disobedience — in his words, “a new kind of Selma or Birmingham” — would recalibrate America’s moral compass and force the government to address the needs of the poor. He felt that the campaign’s demands for jobs for every able-bodied worker and for a decent income for the elderly and infirm would receive “a sympathetic understanding across the nation.” King pledged to “lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington.” Once there, what he called “militant nonviolent actions,” such as marches and sit-ins, would “dramatize the economic plight of the Negro, and compel the government to act.”

In New York City, Jill Freedman heard King’s call — and she answered. Like King, she sensed that America faced an existential crisis. In a recent interview, she told me that his assassination in April 1968, only weeks before the PPC was scheduled to arrive in Washington, left her devastated and searching for a way to respond. A chance encounter with a campaign organizer in Central Park seemed to supply the answer. Still in her 20s, she quit her job as a copywriter for an advertising agency and left for the nation’s capital with hundreds of others, in what she describes as a “long covered Greyhound wagon train.” Her camera was in her hand. Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968, an exhibition that opens at the Steven Kasher Gallery on Thursday, and her new book, Resurrection City, 1968, showcase the photographs that she made as a participant in the PPC.

Freedman was far from being a professional photographer. At the time, she was little more than an enthusiastic amateur with a darkroom. She was in love with the art and craft of photography, however, and was especially drawn to the way the photo-essays she saw in LIFE magazine, by photographers such as of W. Eugene Smith, told stories about the quiet heroism of ordinary people. She felt that photographs like Smith’s introduced viewers to people and events — and to truths — that they might never have otherwise imagined. Photography like this had the potential to change the world, at least in some small way, and Freedman wanted to play her part. By joining the PPC, she committed herself to documenting the campaign that King had called into being.

Resurrection City, the PPC’s plywood and canvas city-within-a-city that took shape on the Mall in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, became the visible symbol of the PPC. For the six weeks of its existence, in May and June 1968, it was also Freedman’s home. The encampment was a magnet for photographers. Scores came and went, and some made compelling photographs. But of those photographers only Freedman lived in the city, from beginning to end, and her pictures stand out from all the others.

Most of the photographers who visited camp were looking for kind of dramatic images that readers of newspapers and magazines had come to expect from civil rights campaigns. Clichés were easy to find — daily marches to government buildings; periodic confrontations with the police; charismatic leaders, such as a young Jesse Jackson. Visits by Sidney Poitier and other celebrities, and concerts by the likes of jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, also provided photographers occasions for making photographs that instantly caught the eye.

Jill Freedman, courtesy of Steven Kasher GalleryJill Freedman and Demonstrator, Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968.

Freedman sometimes photographed scenes like these. It was important, after all, to document the protests and the police. But those aren’t the photographs at the heart of either the exhibition or the book. Avoiding most of the easy drama and all of the celebrities, she offers instead portraits of ordinary people — the women, men and children who were the unheralded heroes of the movement. Freedman’s people are the ones with the muddiest shoes and wettest clothes, the people with the most to gain and most to lose. Her refusal to concentrate on protests and charismatic leaders challenges her viewers. She asks her audience to see the dignity and humanity amid the grime, the anger, and the rain.

Freedman’s photographs of Resurrection City first appeared in the June 28, 1968, issue of LIFE as part of a photo-essay on the PPC. The photographs, five by Freedman and seven by members of the magazine’s staff, focused on the daily lives of the camp’s residents — children play, teenagers flirt, an elderly woman plays a guitar, everyone struggles through the mud. An article by staff writer John Neary that accompanied the photo-essay contained some of the most insightful reporting on Resurrection City to appear anywhere. He knew that the women and men who made up the PPC simply wanted their share of the American dream — “dignity, a future, a chance for their kids, a modicum of happiness.” He understood knew that the campaigners were in Washington to assert their rights, not to plead for them. They had come to the capital and built their city in order to “demand an end to poverty and violence, to demand a meaningful job for every employable person, and end to hunger and malnutrition that scarred their lives.” Neary admitted that he didn’t know what would become of the people of Resurrection City and their campaign, but he was sure that they intended “never to be invisible again.”

It is now nearly half a century since Freedman made her photographs of the PPC. That may not be forever, but it’s long enough to suggest that her images of the no-longer-invisible poor have become an indelible part of the nation’s historical record.

Steven Kasher Gallery

John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia. He is writing a book on the photographer, writer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks. This piece is adapted from “Seeing Resurrection City, Seeing the Poor,” Mason’s introduction to Freedman’s new book, Resurrection City, 1968.

‘The Turmoil of Burma’ in 1949: The Constant Conflict of Myanmar

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 13:30:55 GMT

As Rohingya Muslim refugees continue to stream toward Bangladesh, fleeing persecution in Myanmar, tens of thousands of people have now been uprooted in the face of the latest wave of what the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has called ethnic cleansing by the forces of the Buddhist-majority nation. The shocking images and stories that have emerged from the crisis have drawn international attention to Myanmar, and to its leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was formerly hailed as a human rights champion.

The current crisis is unfolding seven decades after Myanmar gained its independence, a period during which the nation has been regularly swept by ethnic and religious strife.

Jack Birns—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty ImagesLIFE correspondent Roy Rowan (left) and photographer Jack Birns in Burma.

It was in 1949 that LIFE Magazine sent photographer Jack Birns and correspondent Roy Rowan to the nation, then known as Burma (as it was until the late 1980s), to document one such conflict. Some of the images from that story, as well as photographs from the trip that were never published by the magazine, can be seen in the gallery above.

After Japan and the U.K., of which Burma had been a colony, fought over the territory during World War II, the founders of an independent Burma rejected a place in the British Commonwealth and became their own nation early in 1948, its many factions unified largely by the Buddhist religion. But 33-year-old leader Aung San — father of Aung San Suu Kyi — was assassinated, along with many of his advisors, in July of 1947, prior to independence. That violence was perhaps a harbinger of what was to come next, what LIFE called simply “the turmoil of Burma.”

A new round of violence began in the late 1940s, at least as LIFE presented it to American readers in 1949, as “one more Communist uprising in Asia.” But as civil war broke out, a group from the Karen minority — Baptists by religion, thanks to the work of American missionaries — entered the fray. Both the Communists and the Karens opposed the new largely Buddhist regime. The uprising by the Karens would be the start of a conflict that continued, in one form or another, for decades.

“All this violence is racking a country which by logical standards should be the most content in Asia,” LIFE noted. “Its 17 million people are neither overcrowded nor underfed. Its rice surpluses are normally the largest in Asia, and India must buy Burmese rice to avoid famine. In an Asia straining against old colonial ties Burma is exceptional. After the U.S. in 1776, Burma in 1947 became the first colony to gain full independence of Great Britain.”

A coup in 1962 put the nation under a long run of military control (the free elections held there in 2015 were the first in decades) but the Karen conflict continued steadily, if less explosively, throughout. Two years ago, Myanmar’s leaders signed a cease-fire designed to end conflict with many of the nation’s ethnic minority groups — including the Karen, in what was billed as one of the most significant victories for the negotiators. At the time, the chairman of the Karen National Union called the cease-fire “a new page in history” for the group and the government of Myanmar. And yet, in the years since, for the Karens and for others, it has become painfully clear that the “turmoil of Burma” continues nonetheless.