User:Womanofwisdom/sandbox

Matt Herron is an photojournalist, author, and social documentary photographer best known for images of the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the American South, published in Life and other leading national magazines of the time. One photo, of a white deputy sheriff wrenching an American flag from a black boy, won a World Press photo contest. Others are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Herron was born in Rochester, New York in xxxx to xxxx Herron, an accountant, and Ruth (nee XXXX) a housewife and craftswoman. He attended local public schools and graduated from Princeton University in 1953. After teaching at a Quaker school in Ramallah, Jordan as an alternative to military service, he returned to Rochester, where he apprenticed with the photographer Minor White and began working as a freelance photographer. He counted the Depression-era Farm Services Administration photographs of Dorothea Lange, among his models and inspirations. In 1963, accompanied by his wife Jeannine and their two young children, Herron went to Birmingham, Alabama to document the sit-ins and demonstrations marking the intensifying struggle among southern black people (aided by northern college students and religious leaders) to exercise their right to vote. Two weeks after his arrival, Life assigned Herron to photograph the aftermath of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four young black girls had lost their lives while attending Sunday school. [Did your photo run in Life?] Herron, a freelancer, was represented by the photo agency Black Star. His photographs were carried by the Associated Press and appeared in Look, Time, Newsweek, and many newspapers. Inspired by the fine arts photography of Dust Bowl refugees by Dorothea Lange, who offered him advice and encouragement, Herron obtained limited funding to organize the Southern Documentary Project, which sent nine photographers to document the “Freedom Summer,” of 1964, when a thousand college students, mostly from the north, came to Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia to support African American people in their efforts to register to vote and to educate their children. One of the project’s photographers was brutally beaten while shooting a meeting at a black church. Herron was chased though a field by a deputy sheriff wielding a billy club.“I would strap on my cameras like armor plate,” Herron told an interviewer. “They gave me courage that otherwise I lacked.” Herron’s photographs often focused less on dramatic moments of mass confrontations, but on a disappearing way of rural life in hidden corners of the south, where people in small communities organized and registered to vote, despite intimidation, outside the national spotlight. Herron’s images included quiet subjects like laundry drying on a rickety country porch, rain reflected in cotton furrows, and young men in their Sunday best massed outside a rural church. “I was trying to document a manner of life,”he told author Ken Light. “I was interested in Southern Culture, black and white, and Southern Institutions…I had a conviction that what I was witnessing was history, and that things people saw as everyday events were in fact special. “ 	In 1965, he photographed both famous and unknown people taking part in the historic, 54-mile mass civil rights march from Selma to Alabama’s state capital, Montgomery. “People were shooting Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralphe Bunch, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel…Sammy Davis Jr. came down in his jet for the final day,” he recalled. “That wasn’t the march, as far as I was concerned. I felt this was a march of ordinary people.” (Connie Hale) That year, Herron won the World Press Photo Contest for images of a Mississippi highway patrolman wrenching an American flag out of the hands of Anthony Quinn, a five year old black child protesting with his mother outside the Governor’s Mansion. Ken Light, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, has described Herron’s work an important body of visual documentary. “We often see the Selma march, the speeches,” Light explains, “but we forget the day-to-day struggle of people in the smallest communities, fighting for their rights.” Herron’s photographs are included in three books: Mississippi Eyes (self-published ytk) This Light of Ours (University of Mississippi Press, year tk) Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, by Ken Light (year tk) and The Quilt: Stories from the Names Project by Cindy Ruskin, (Pocket Books, 1988). With his wife and children, he is a co-author of The Voyage of Aquarius, (publisher, pub date) a memoir of their months-long sail in (year tk) in a from Florida to the coast of West Africa. In the 1980s and 1990s, Herron covered the AIDS crisis in San Francisco and wrote and photographed other subjects for CoEvolution Quarterly, Whole Earth Review, Smithsonian, Newsweek, and other magazines. From 1993 to 1995 he was president of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP) a guild organization for professional photographers. He subsequently helped create its online marketing system for electronic images. In 2012, he curated a travelling exhibition of photographs of the movements for African-American civil rights and the unionization of farmworker. The exhibit, (title?) toured museums and academic institutions throughout the United States. A companion volume, This Light of Ours, was published by the University of Mississippi press. Exhibits of Herron’s work have been mounted at the San Francisco Public Library, XXX and XXXX. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Memphis National Civil Rights Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the High Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the George Eastman House. He is the subject of several television, newspaper, magazine, and book profiles, including one for the Princeton Alumni Weekly and another included in Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, by Ken Light. (pub date, publisher.)