Picturing the Poor: Photography and the Politics of Poverty in the 1960s

Throughout the 1960s—from the War on Poverty to the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign—Americans fiercely debated what the persistence of poverty meant for the United States. Picturing the Poor examines an array of rarely seen social documentary photographs to show that debates over poverty were also debates over the right ways of seeing, feeling, and knowing.

When the public “rediscovered” poverty in the late 1950s and 1960s, photography played a crucial role in shaping how the problem was imagine...