Cornell University Library Digital Collections

Inequality and Discrimination

This set of photographs was developed around the theme of inequality and legacies of discrimination. Within its holdings of twentieth-century photojournalism, the Johnson Museum contains many images of disenfranchised people by international photographers. From the Depression-era images of both rural and urban poverty by Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt, to Gordon Parks’ and Bruce Davidson’s work on the oppression and uprisings of Black Americans in the 1960s, to Bill Brandt’s and Sebastião Salgado’s begrimed coal towns and gold-mine workers, humanity’s basic struggle for survival is starkly represented on film. Equally overt messages of social injustice are delivered in Nazi-era images by Alfred Eisenstadt, damning photographs of the consequences of Apartheid policies by Ernest Cole, and Gilles Peress’s intense images of war-torn Northern Ireland. These are photographs of people denied their basic civil rights due to the color of their skin, their religion and customs, or their position in the social order, that in most cases were meant to help bring attention to humanitarian crises through books and the illustrated press. They can be used in broad-reaching teaching arenas, connecting to collections and classes across disciplines engaging in questions of art, authenticity, and photographic truth.

Contemporary artworks in the Museum’s collection by Teresa Margolles, Meryl McMaster, Zanele Muholi, Carolee Schneeman, Carrie Mae Weems, Brian Weil and many others address legacies of white supremacist and heteronormative ideologies and structures, and the persistence of various forms of violence against people marginalized by their identities.

The Library’s collections offer insight into the historical realities of marginalized and oppressed communities, particularly within the United States. Holdings are particularly strong in Black American history, thanks in part to hundreds of photographs dedicated to the subject in the Loewentheil collection, which span from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement and beyond. The Library also holds the photo archives of the New York City-based Amsterdam News, one of the oldest Black-owned and run newspapers in the country. The internationally prominent Hip Hop Collection also offers documentation of everyday life in communities of color in New York City, especially in the work of Joe Conzo, Jr. who photographed hip hop culture when it was still localized and grassroots but about to explode into global awareness. The Huntington Collection contains rare nineteenth-century volumes on Indigenous people and cultures of the Americas as viewed by Western photographers in the employ of colonialist governments and corporations. The Library also holds a complete set of Edward Curtis’s The North American Indian, both the text volumes and photogravure portfolios (the Museum also holds a small group of individual photogravures), and materials related to the creation of this monumental publishing effort. The establishment of the Human Sexuality Collection in 1988 laid the foundation for one of the most important collections dedicated to this subject in the country. Amongst its wealth of photographic materials are those in the archives of Honey Lee Cottrell and Susie Bright, who played pivotal roles at the groundbreaking lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs; the records of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; and the papers of AIDS activist Robert Garcia.