the color of water racism essay

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• The Color of Water: Summary of Epilogue
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The Color of Water

By james mcbride, the color of water study guide.

The Color of Water (1997) is the bestselling memoir of James McBride , a biracial journalist, jazz saxophonist, and composer whose Jewish mother gave birth to twelve children, all of whom she raised in a housing project in Brooklyn. His mother witnessed the premature death of her first husband, a reverend, and through sheer force of will saw each of her children graduate from college. Her basic household tenets rested on the importance of academic success and the church, and many of her children moved on to earn graduate and professional degrees.

McBride grew up in the Red Hook housing projects of Brooklyn confused by his mother's "whiteness". His confusion about his own racial identity later became the wellspring from which he pursued an understanding of his mother's history, and learned, as an adult, that she was born the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and a crippled mother in Suffolk, Virginia. Ruth Jordan McBride was born Ruchel Dwarja Zylska to an Orthodox Jewish family in Poland. The family settled in America, in the small town of Suffolk, Virginia, during a time of active discrimination against Jews and heated violence against blacks. Ruth married a black man, and was thus after considered "dead" by her Jewish family. When her mother died, the "Jew" in her passed away completely. She healed her feelings of grief and guilt by turning to Christianity, and she and her first husband, Andrew McBride , founded a Baptist church in the living room of their apartment. Her husband was the first reverend of the church.

The book alternates between the mother's voice, transcribed from interviews, and the son's voice, which recounts the "orchestrated chaos" of his childhood. Near the end of the book, the voices converge into a portrait of a family's love that transcends divisions of race, religion, and generational experience. McBride eloquently weaves a tribute to his mother and grandmother, offering his readers a complex tale that mixes elements of the immigrant experience, race politics, religion, generational dissonance, friendship, family, love, the force of will, and, perhaps, above all, the value of memory. As the American experience presses into the future, this memoir asserts just how far it is that we have come.

The Color of Water Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Color of Water is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The color of water

I think drag races to watch his stepfather.

What is the ache inside James that gets bigger as it grows?

That would be his mother's white skin.

What event is related to Ruth’s claustrophobia?

I think it is her grandfather's death.

Study Guide for The Color of Water

The Color of Water study guide contains a biography of James McBride, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Color of Water
• The Color of Water Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Color of Water

The Color of Water literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Color of Water.

• Constructing an Identity: James McBride and Richard Wright
• Discerning Racial "Color": Ruth's Role in The Color of Water
• Finding Yourself: Emotions and Origins in The Color of Water
• Literacy v Bigotry

Lesson Plan for The Color of Water

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Color of Water
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Color of Water Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Color of Water

• Introduction

The Color of Water Summary, Characters and Themes

“The Color of Water” is a memoir by James McBride, exploring some complex themes of race, identity, and family through the lens of his own life and that of his mother, Ruth McBride. 

Ruth’s story is a testament to the art of human resilience; a Polish Jewish immigrant who becomes the matriarch of a large, biracial family, her journey marked by adversity, transformation, and unwavering love.

Born into a family of Polish Jewish immigrants, Ruth’s early years are shaped by hardship and abuse at the hands of her father, Tateh, a failed rabbi turned store owner in Suffolk, Virginia. 

Tateh’s store, situated in a predominantly black neighborhood, becomes a source of contention and shame for Ruth, who is appalled by her father’s racist attitudes and predatory business practices. 

Escaping a life of abuse, betrayal, and the constraints of her rigid family and community, Ruth leaves everything behind, including a hidden pregnancy, for a new beginning in Harlem.

In New York, Ruth’s life takes a turn towards hope and renewal. 

She meets and marries Dennis McBride, a black man, with whom she finds happiness and starts a family. Together, they defy societal prejudices and lay the foundations for a life built on faith, education , and equality. 

Their union, however, is not without its trials; Dennis’s untimely death leaves Ruth with eight children to raise alone, a challenge she meets with remarkable strength and resourcefulness. Ruth later finds love again with Hunter Jordan, adding four more children to their blended family.

James McBride’s narrative weaves seamlessly between his mother’s past and his own journey of self-discovery. 

Growing up in a home where race and identity were secondary to moral values and education, James struggles with his own place in the world. His mother’s steadfast beliefs and the rich, albeit complex, heritage she passes down serve as his guiding light. 

From a troubled youth to his eventual success as a musician and writer, James’s path reflects the lessons of resilience and faith instilled by his mother.

Ruth McBride

Ruth McBride is the matriarch of the McBride family and the central figure of the memoir. Born in Poland and raised in the United States within a strict Polish Jewish family, she endures a childhood marked by abuse and racism. 

Ruth’s resilience is evident in her decision to leave her past behind, including her family and Jewish heritage, to embrace a new life and identity in New York. Marrying a black man and converting to Christianity, Ruth breaks societal norms and faces prejudice with courage. 

Her character is defined by her strong moral convictions, unwavering faith, and dedication to ensuring her children receive a quality education and understand the value of hard work.

James McBride

James McBride is the author and a principal character, offering insights into his personal journey of self-discovery and identity. 

Born to Ruth and her first husband, Dennis, James grows up in a large, biracial family, struggling to understand his racial and cultural identity. 

His journey is fraught with challenges, including the death of his stepfather, Hunter Jordan, which leads him into a period of rebellion. However, inspired by his mother’s strength and guided by her values, James eventually finds his path through music and writing , achieving academic and professional success. 

His character embodies the complexities of biracial identity in America and the quest for personal understanding within a diverse family dynamic.

Dennis McBride

Dennis McBride, Ruth’s first husband, is a figure of stability and love in the memoir. His marriage to Ruth signifies a bold stand against the racial prejudices of the time. 

Dennis is depicted as a kind, loving husband and father who supports Ruth’s conversion to Christianity and shares her dedication to family and faith. 

His untimely death from lung cancer has a profound impact on Ruth and their children, marking a pivotal moment of loss and transition for the family.

Hunter Jordan

Hunter Jordan is Ruth’s second husband and a stabilizing force for the McBride family following Dennis’s death. 

A good-hearted and hardworking man, Hunter’s marriage to Ruth represents a new chapter of hope and resilience for the family. He loves Ruth’s children as his own and contributes to the family’s well-being until his death. 

Hunter’s character underscores themes of love, resilience, and the complexities of blended family dynamics.

Tateh, Ruth’s father, is portrayed as the antagonist of her early life. An abusive, racist, and unfaithful husband, his treatment of Ruth and her family contrasts sharply with the values Ruth later instills in her own children. 

Tateh’s character serves as a backdrop to Ruth’s transformative journey, highlighting the courage it takes to escape a toxic environment and forge a new path.

Mameh, Ruth’s mother, is a silent sufferer in the memoir. Disabled and abused, her plight deeply affects Ruth and shapes her understanding of strength and resilience. 

Mameh’s character, though not extensively developed, represents the sacrifices mothers make and the impact of maternal influence on children’s lives.

1. The Complexity of Racial Identity

James McBride’s memoir masterfully explores the intricacies of racial identity through the prism of his own life and that of his mother, Ruth. 

As a biracial individual growing up in a predominantly black community, James grapples with questions of belonging, identity, and self-acceptance. 

His mother’s refusal to conform to racial stereotypes – a white Jewish woman who marries black men and raises her children in a predominantly African American culture – further complicates these questions. 

The memoir underscores the fluidity of racial identity, challenging the binary notions of race and encouraging a deeper understanding of identity as multifaceted and evolving.

2. The Power of Family and Maternal Love

At its core, the book is a tribute to Ruth McBride’s strength, resilience, and unwavering love for her family. Despite facing societal prejudice, financial hardships, and personal tragedies, Ruth’s love remains her children’s constant, guiding them towards success and fulfillment. 

Her sacrifices and determination to provide her children with a better life, emphasizing education and moral values above all, highlight the profound impact of maternal love and the strength of family bonds. 

The narrative celebrates the idea that family is not just defined by blood or race but by the love and commitment that bind individuals together.

3. The Intersection of Faith and Identity

Faith plays a pivotal role in shaping the lives of Ruth and her children, serving as a source of strength, guidance, and transformation. Ruth’s conversion from Judaism to Christianity marks a significant turning point in her life, symbolizing not just a change in religious belief but also a rebirth of self. 

For James and his siblings, faith becomes a foundation for understanding their own identities and values. The memoir illustrates how faith can transcend racial and cultural boundaries, offering solace, community, and a sense of purpose. 

Through the lens of faith, this memoir explores the complex interplay between religion, identity, and the search for meaning in life.

Final Thoughts

Ruth McBride’s legacy, as depicted in “The Color of Water,” is a powerful reminder of the enduring strength of family and the transcendent nature of love. 

Her life, marked by sacrifices and a relentless pursuit of a better future for her children, stands as a beacon of hope and a bridge between worlds. Through her story and James’s tribute, we are invited to reflect on our own identities and the myriad ways in which love and understanding can transcend the deepest divides.

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The Color of Water

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Before You Read

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-18

Chapters 19-22

Chapter 23-Epilogue

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Describe James’s attitude toward the Black Power movement in his youth. In what ways does he find it alluring? In what ways does he find it dangerous? How do his views on Black nationalism evolve over the course of his life?

Despite the fact that Ruth seeks to bury her Jewish heritage, how and why does it emerge as a cultural force in her adult life, particularly with respect to how she raises her children?

Examine the book’s title. What is the importance of the quote from which the title comes? What does it mean to James with respect to the book’s themes?

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Racism In The Color Of Water

The following academic paper highlights the up-to-date issues and questions of Racism In The Color Of Water. This sample provides just some ideas on how this topic can be analyzed and discussed.

The American South. particularly in from the 1930s to the sixtiess. is a difficult topographic point to populate for when you are a “colored individual. ” This novel. written by James McBride. discovers the complexnesss of holding a bi-racial activity. particularly at a clip when inkinesss and other minorities are hated and discriminated upon by the dominant white society.

This fresh efforts to reflect at the domination of American society by the white adult male. and efforts to detect his ain individuality by looking at his mother’s yesteryear: the life of Ruth McBride. a Polish-Jewish immigrant in the South of the 1930s. beset by changeless bullying and force of the white bulk to other racial minorities. particularly to Jewish immigrants and to the inkinesss. who were historically imported by white plantation proprietors to work as slaves in cotton plantations.

However. the journey of Ruth McBride does non stop here ; she really continued her journey off from the American South. loving two inkinesss in the manner. and depicting the alone complexnesss of the Harlem territory of New York City. The Christian religion besides plays a colourful portion in this novel. supplying the needed comfort and counsel in times of hardship.

This background. combined with inquiry about his racial self-identity. will shortly take him to hold a violent behaviour.

Proficient in: Environmental Science

“ Have been using her for a while and please believe when I tell you, she never fail. Thanks Writer Lyla you are indeed awesome ”

including stages of drug usage and offense. However. he will shortly happen value in his life. trusting upon the rules of difficult work and self betterment. plus extra accomplishments in authorship and wind music. The fresh starts with chapters presenting the female parent of the writer. Ruth McBride. and is already full of symbolisms and play ( McBride. n. pag. ) .

The first chapter. entitled Dead. describes the Judaic beginning of Ruth. and offers a glance of the favoritism that they are already sing ; and she farther becomes “dead” due to her matrimony to Dennis McBride. whose race is officially viewed as inferior. and whose race is a victim of an officially-sponsored racial segregation ( McBride. n. pag. ) . Given that the background of the household of Ruth comes from a conservative 1. guided by Orthodox Judaic patterns. taking to get married a coloured one certainly brings in favoritism by society and rejection of the household.

In this instance. it can be clearly seen that in America of the early 20th century. your race can really find the manner you live ; being a colored can do you have a suffering life invariably under menace and looked down. even when you may populate in the “land of the free. ” This subject continues in the 2nd and 3rd chapters. where the bike of Ruth became a medium where she can happen changeless motion off from the problems of populating a multi-racial household. all while her boy James already looked into offense and drugs for flight ( McBride. n. silver. ) . Ruth besides recalls the beginnings of her household. as symbolized by the Kosher. where Jews are already enduring from favoritism and bullying in their native land. and where in-migration and the patterns of Orthodox Judaism serves as a convenient flight from the racial favoritism that they are sing ( McBride. n. pag. ) . Such experiences vividly explore the adversities of belonging to a despised race. where flight is a necessary thing.

The point of position of James is besides seen in this chapter ; James recall that he sees her female parent as different at such an early age. although he truly can non to the full grok why in fact she is different from others. This is highlighted in the history when James already reaches kindergarten ; he asks his female parent why she is different from him. although her female parent refuses to entertain the inquiry ( McBride. n. pag. ) . Her acrimonious memories sing her household influences her non to open the subject subsequently in her life. shortly to be understood by James.

In the 3rd chapter. entitled Kosher. Ruth recalls the ordered matrimony of her female parent and her male parent. which was brought out of convenience. in which she does non do any sense of it at all ( McBride. n. pag. ) . In add-on to this. she besides recalls all of the rigorous patterns of Orthodox Judaism. to which she sees it as really smothering. doing her have a really hard life. combines with a really string fright of decease ( McBride. n. pag. ) .

Such experiences will subsequently impact her in raising a household. concentrating on difficult work to countervail the troubles of their racial beginning ( McBride. n. pag. ) . In the ulterior chapters. such as in Black Power. James began to recognize the complexnesss of being a multi-racial individual ; torn between the desire of holding solidarity with fellow black neighbours endeavoring to contend for black power and concern for his white female parent who is unwilling to perpetrate with this motion. stressing the importance of privateness. the church. and the household ( McBride. n. pag. ) .

James even asked her female parent if he was adopted. due to the fact that he has a different colour with her female parent. The civil rights motion at that clip was really threading. with the black community in their country actively back uping and runing for more black powers in society. to which her female parent is really loath to accept ( McBride. n. pag. ) . Adding to such complexnesss is a commentary of James upon her mother’s belief. frequently contradictory because of her Orthodox origins. every bit good as she being a Christian convert life among a black community ( McBride. n. silver. ) . After this callback. nevertheless. James decides to demo sympathy to his female parent. stoping up pluging the face of a boy of a member of the hawkish Black Panther Party. whom he deemed as a menace to his white female parent. After all. this episode shows that fall ining a black power solidarity motion. particularly for a multiracial is non ever smooth ; strong beliefs for black power may conflict with personal beliefs and precedences. arousing vacillation despite common discriminatory experiences in a white-dominated society.

The book so shifts on how Ruth has found her counsel and inspiration amidst all these contradictions. following her Orthodox Jewish origins to her eventual transition to Christianity ( McBride. n. pag. ) . Her early experiences are ne’er easy. Contrary to the popular belief that holding a new life in America will take you to the comfortable “American Dream. ” In the chapter entitled the “Old Testament. ” the experiences of Ruth’s household were no American dream ; on the contrary. they suffered under changeless poorness ( McBride. n. pag. ) .

Her male parent tried to do a life by being a rabbi. coercing them to travel invariably from topographic point to topographic point ; until they decided to open a food market shop in the preponderantly black town of Suffolk. Virginia. Ruth besides had a remembrance on her loveless girl male parent relationship. particularly because of the fact that her male parent was in secret mistreating her sexually. However. she besides points out that she still has a positive recollection of her childhood. which includes her memories with her female parent during Judaic vacations ( McBride. n. pag. ) . In the following chapter. entitled the “New Testament. ” the transition of Ruth to Christianity is portrayed.

This is emphasized in the manner how Ruth raised her kids. non taking lightly one case where Billy refused to declaim a scriptural transition in Easter Sunday ( McBride. n. pag. ) . However. inquiries on race is also9 presented in this chapter. with James inquiring her female parent what is the colour of God’s spirit. and her female parent replying that it has no colour. that God is the colour of H2O ( McBride. n. pag. ) . Such transitions reflect how of import colour is as an issue at that clip. for ones’ chances and possibilities in life doctrine non determined by abilities entirely. but by colour.

In add-on to this. America at the clip of James still sees a society wherein being a coloured means being a lesser human being ; where black power is being fought for. and being black while holding a white female parent makes you trapped in inquiries and baffled. This is followed by a remembrance in the place of her female parent in Suffolk. Virginia. where the absence of chances for inkinesss and Jews likewise has lead them to suffering poorness. in add-on to the presence of the Klu Klux Klan which presents changeless bullying and force for them ( McBride. n. silver. ) . This remembrance is so intertwined with the experiences of James with regard to his siblings. foregrounding the troubles of raising a household that explores his/her racial individualities ( McBride. n. pag. ) . The following chapters. particularly School. Boys and Daddy explores the personal experiences of both James and Ruth on racial bias. with Ruth holding to in secret run into with her loved one due to the menace of the Ku Klux Klan. and the frights of James in go toing a preponderantly white school.

However. this portion of the novel besides gives a positive penetration ; the enormous work moral principle of Ruth. and the geographic expedition of wind music by James as a new manner of flight ( McBride. n. pag. ) . The following parts of the book explores the desolation of the household with the death of the 2nd hubby of Ruth. particularly in its consequence to James. and an penetration into mundane life in the Harlem territory of New York.

James so began to seek the beginning of his parents in Suffolk. Virginia. and witnesses the poorness and racial complexnesss in that country intertwined with the early experiences of his female parent in love. particularly in the chapters The Promise. Old Man Shilsky and A Bird who flies ( McBride. n. pag. ) . The jobs of the interracial matrimony Ruth and Dennis. every bit good as the find of the temple is highlighted in the chapters A Jew Discovered and Dennis ; while the concluding chapter. Finding Ruthie. emphasizes the fact that being a multiracial is non merely hard. but full of uncertainnesss ( McBride. n. pag. ) .

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Racism In The Color Of Water. (2019, Dec 07). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/paper-on-racism-and-self-identity-a-review-of-the-color-of-water-essay/

"Racism In The Color Of Water." PaperAp.com , 7 Dec 2019, https://paperap.com/paper-on-racism-and-self-identity-a-review-of-the-color-of-water-essay/

PaperAp.com. (2019). Racism In The Color Of Water . [Online]. Available at: https://paperap.com/paper-on-racism-and-self-identity-a-review-of-the-color-of-water-essay/ [Accessed: 4 Jun. 2024]

"Racism In The Color Of Water." PaperAp.com, Dec 07, 2019. Accessed June 4, 2024. https://paperap.com/paper-on-racism-and-self-identity-a-review-of-the-color-of-water-essay/

"Racism In The Color Of Water," PaperAp.com , 07-Dec-2019. [Online]. Available: https://paperap.com/paper-on-racism-and-self-identity-a-review-of-the-color-of-water-essay/. [Accessed: 4-Jun-2024]

PaperAp.com. (2019). Racism In The Color Of Water . [Online]. Available at: https://paperap.com/paper-on-racism-and-self-identity-a-review-of-the-color-of-water-essay/ [Accessed: 4-Jun-2024]

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Plessy V. Ferguson: Examining the Aftermath of Legal Segregation

This essay about Plessy v. Ferguson examines the 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. It explores the immediate and long-term consequences of the ruling, including the proliferation of Jim Crow laws, widespread segregation, and systemic inequality. The essay also highlights the resistance efforts leading to the Civil Rights Movement and key legislative victories that dismantled legal segregation, while acknowledging the persistent racial disparities that continue to affect American society.

How it works

In the annals of American legal history, few cases have left as lasting and contentious a legacy as Plessy v. Ferguson. Decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1896, this landmark ruling upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the doctrine of “separate but equal.” The case revolved around Homer Plessy, a man of mixed race who challenged Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, which required railway companies to provide separate accommodations for white and non-white passengers.

The aftermath of Plessy v.

Ferguson rippled across the fabric of American society, shaping attitudes, policies, and institutions for decades to come. While the case itself solidified the legality of segregation, its repercussions were far-reaching, deeply entrenched, and often divisive.

One immediate consequence of Plessy was the entrenchment of segregation laws across the Southern states. Emboldened by the Court’s decision, legislatures swiftly enacted a barrage of Jim Crow laws, which mandated racial segregation in public facilities, transportation, schools, and housing. These laws codified racial discrimination and institutionalized white supremacy, creating a rigid system of apartheid that relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship.

The pervasive impact of legal segregation extended beyond the South, infiltrating every corner of American life. Northern cities, though not bound by Jim Crow statutes, practiced de facto segregation through housing policies, restrictive covenants, and discriminatory practices by businesses and institutions. Segregation became a national phenomenon, a stain on the ideals of equality and justice enshrined in the Constitution.

Education bore the brunt of segregation’s pernicious effects. Under the guise of “separate but equal,” schools for African American children were chronically underfunded, lacking basic resources and infrastructure compared to their white counterparts. This disparity in educational opportunities perpetuated a cycle of poverty and limited social mobility for generations of African Americans, depriving them of the tools necessary to compete on equal footing in American society.

The legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson also manifested in the realm of public accommodations and transportation. Segregated waiting rooms, water fountains, restrooms, and seating areas became ubiquitous features of daily life, reinforcing the notion of racial hierarchy and exclusion. African Americans were subjected to indignities and humiliations simply for asserting their right to equality in public spaces.

Yet, despite the pervasive nature of segregation, resistance and resilience emerged within African American communities. From the grassroots activism of the NAACP to the courageous acts of individuals like Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders, a movement for civil rights began to coalesce, challenging the legitimacy of segregation and demanding justice and equality under the law.

The tide began to turn in 1954 with the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. This watershed moment marked the beginning of the end for legal segregation, signaling a seismic shift in the nation’s approach to race relations. The Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, galvanized by the moral imperative to dismantle the edifice of segregation and secure equal rights for all Americans.

In the years that followed, a series of legislative victories further eroded the legal foundations of segregation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, striking down Jim Crow laws and paving the way for desegregation in public accommodations and employment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 dismantled barriers to political participation, enfranchising millions of African Americans and safeguarding their right to vote.

Yet, the legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson persists in the persistent racial disparities that continue to plague American society. Despite legal victories and social progress, systemic racism and inequality persist in housing, education, healthcare, and criminal justice. The scars of segregation run deep, shaping the lived experiences and opportunities of millions of Americans to this day.

In confronting the aftermath of legal segregation, we are confronted with the enduring challenge of building a more just and equitable society. It requires reckoning with the legacies of the past, acknowledging the injustices wrought by segregation, and committing ourselves to the ongoing struggle for racial justice and equality. Only through collective action and unwavering resolve can we fulfill the promise of liberty and justice for all, transcending the divisions that have long divided us and forging a more perfect union.

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Plessy v. Ferguson: Examining the Aftermath of Legal Segregation. (2024, Jun 01). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/plessy-v-ferguson-examining-the-aftermath-of-legal-segregation/

"Plessy v. Ferguson: Examining the Aftermath of Legal Segregation." PapersOwl.com , 1 Jun 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/plessy-v-ferguson-examining-the-aftermath-of-legal-segregation/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Plessy v. Ferguson: Examining the Aftermath of Legal Segregation . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/plessy-v-ferguson-examining-the-aftermath-of-legal-segregation/ [Accessed: 3 Jun. 2024]

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‘Not a place of belonging’: Discrimination allegations plague Stanford admissions office

Who belongs at stanford undergraduate admissions.

Five sources included in this article requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation. Many former employees expressed concern about speaking on experiences in the admissions and financial aid office because of ties between Stanford’s office and the broader admissions community.

The Daily also used gender-neutral descriptors and withheld specific dates and other information, instead using general timeframes and descriptions, to protect sources’ identities. Pseudonyms were used to improve readability.  

Alice, a person of color who was a former admissions officer, said Stanford’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid “is not a place of belonging” for employees of color.

Other former employees of the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid allege that the office’s troubling culture extends beyond labor issues and promotional opacity to repeated racism. According to them, racism within the office also influenced application decisions, affecting the makeup of Stanford’s undergraduate community.

Former Associate Director of Admission for Diversity Outreach and External Relations Latif Legend, who worked at the Admissions Office for six years from 2017 until 2023, is suing the University for racial and disability discrimination, workplace retaliation and wrongful termination.

Concerns about workplace racism and bias

Seven former employees reported experiencing or witnessing repeated microaggressions within the office, such as the mixing up of names of employees of color and racially charged jokes and comments about employees of color’s qualifications and educational backgrounds. 

Four employees said they believed that the lack of diversity within the office contributed to racial microaggressions and biased behavior. Three added that racially-based cliques formed within the office, with white colleagues exclusively spending time with one another, isolating themselves from colleagues of color.

“My manager was a white woman, most of my team were white women. Suddenly, I realized, ‘Oh this is a cliquey-ass office,’ where it’s basically the white group, the white girls, versus the [people of color]. ” said Peyton, a former admissions officer who is a person of color.

Currently, the four most senior members of the admissions office are white — former employees said they shaped the office’s culture. Some said this culture comes from the top, starting with the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Richard Shaw, who has held the position since 2005. 

Shaw declined to comment personally multiple times and directed The Daily to University spokespeople. 

“At the end of the day, it’s also a lack of holding leaders in the office accountable,” Alice said. “If you have a majority white leadership team who seem to be promoting or who seem to be hiring certain individuals over others, you should then be questioning why that is happening.”

Five former admissions officers said qualified and experienced employees of color were often passed over for promotions and the positions were given to white employees. This “happened several times and continues to happen in the office, where there is a lack of transparency in regard to how promotions are happening,” Alice said.

Former admissions officers said that the office’s promotion structure and system were inconsistent and unclear. Due to this lack of transparency, many have chosen to leave the office in favor of other institutions and other careers. 

Three former admissions employees who worked in the office more than 10 years ago reported that the office when they worked there was relatively diverse. However, recent employees said the culture has since changed dramatically. 

Chris, a former admissions officer of color who worked in the office over 10 years ago, said they believed political polarization influenced the change. “In the last 10 years, a lot has happened. Trump has happened. Lots of political discourse [has happened], Black Lives Matter movement really skyrocketed. That could be something that’s polarized the officers,” they said.

The Office of Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid refused to provide data on the racial makeup of the office. This information is accessible for other University departments.

University spokesperson Luisa Rapport wrote that “Stanford cares deeply for and values all employees, including those working diligently to embrace the admissions process with integrity.”

Ripple effects from officers to candidates

Final admissions decisions happen in committees. After the individual officers assigned to an application review independently, they advocate for and discuss applicants in committees based on geographic background. Most former employees who spoke to The Daily said that they believe racist workplace conditions shaped committee applicant decisions and prohibited fair assessment of applicants from diverse backgrounds, in turn impacting the makeup of the undergraduate community.

Peyton said that they felt like the process was “stacked against” them as an employee of color because they found it hard to communicate context for applicants of color to white colleagues. 

Six employees said that applicants of color were scrutinized more than white counterparts and microaggressions happened frequently during reading sessions. 

For example, former admissions officers said that whether applicants of color “actually wrote their essays” was discussed, and they were instructed to read applicants of color’s essays as “exactly written” since committee chairs believed admissions officers of color were rewording applications to give applicants an advantage. Former admissions officers said that these instructions and comments were not directed toward white applicants or their essays. 

Multiple former admissions officers mentioned a similar scenario of how this kind of racism affected committee decisions: If two applicants, one a person of color and the other a white person, applied with the same classes, activities, GPA and both spoke of depression in their application essays, the white applicant would be accepted as they would be given more “benefit of the doubt,” allege Alice, Peyton, Jordan, another former admissions officer who is a person of color and former employee Pat, who is white. 

Former officers also explained that admissions officers would often perceive white applicants as better positioned to thrive at Stanford. Depression, in this scenario, is something that a white applicant can overcome and boosts their application while it’s perceived as a hindrance to applicants of color.

“There’s definitely discrimination, I don’t know if [discrimination] is the right word, but it might be. There’s definitely a lot of hesitation with students [of color] who share about mental health issues in their application,” Jordan said. “It’s almost like they’re expected to resolve it. So that there’s less risk in admitting them, which is ridiculous because Stanford will say ‘Oh, we have all of these mental health resources.’”

Alice remembers “constant questions of applicants of colors.”

Officers allege that the diversity of admissions employees directly connects with how applicants of color are reviewed. 

“Understaffed POC equals less POC in the room, equals the way that you present [applicants] or even [what] you might be speaking [not getting] through to either the chair or anyone else in the committee,” Peyton said. 

Multiple admissions officers including Peyton, Alice and Legend mentioned that admissions officers of color had to play “political games” as a way of admitting applicants of color. 

They mentioned how often they would have to present an applicant of color simultaneously with a wealthy and/or legacy applicant, who most often was white, in order for the committee to fairly hear their case for the applicant of color. Former employees believe they had to play these games due to their racial identity. 

“You have to play the bureaucracy involved in all of this,” Alice said. “You have to defer to modes of communication that are more palatable for people who come from privilege.”

Former employees of color spoke of hesitation to speak out due to fears of being perceived as “the angry person of color.” 

“I think that in those instances where you hear commentary or comments that can be perceived as microaggressions or even have racist undertones…in committees, it is very unlikely that you will feel empowered enough to speak up,” Alice said.

Biased advancement opportunities

Former employees allege that the pay and performance review concerns present in the undergraduate admissions office particularly affected employees of color. Former employees of color said that due to the office’s unwelcoming culture, they did not feel comfortable speaking up against racist and microaggressive behavior. 

In contrast to white colleagues, former employees of color said they felt as though they could not take on leadership roles. Alice said this shapes promotion opportunities because others view employees of color as lacking leadership quality: “They haven’t led projects, or they’re not as well spoken or vocal.”

Alice said this is a “process of white supremacy.” 

Former employees further allege that white employees were recognized and congratulated more than employees of color, furthering disparities in promotions.

“[The admissions office is] trying to bring diversity within their office, but then they didn’t support us, and then they wondered why we all wanted to leave,” Pat said.

According to Pat, limited opportunities for growth privileged admissions officers who relied on partners’ or parents’ salaries. “You can’t have an office full of people who have all had access to money admitting all the students of the institution,” Pat said.

University spokesperson Dee Mostofi wrote that human resources provides guidelines on individual salaries. Practices are designed to “ensure that pay is managed in a consistent, equitable manner regardless of funding sources,” Mostofi wrote.

Lack of DEI trainings

Former employees speculated a lack of robust diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) trainings drove the biased culture in the office.

“Even when affirmative action was still here, there was not enough diversity training at all levels,” Alice said.

Additionally, multiple former officers shared that most sensitivity training did not change following the Movement for Black Lives in 2020, despite requests they made for more comprehensive training. 

Former employees said that there was sensitivity training around reading applications from school shooting survivors, but nothing on applicants from over-policed communities, even at the height of the 2020 movement. 

“When it comes to race, especially in those years of the [racial] reckonings in 2020 and beyond, I don’t remember any training about that,” Peyton said. “Or like calling out, ‘Oh this student’s from Minneapolis or a place where… Black lives are being affected.’”

Following the movement, Peyton said that not much changed. They especially did not see “a dramatic shift” in learning to evaluate test optional applications with sensitivity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sam Krow-Lucal, a former employee in the financial aid office, which is housed in the same building as the admissions office and which also reports to Shaw, echoed concerns about the lack of DEI training. He said training stood in sharp contrast to positions in the bursar’s office, student services and his current position in the Stanford Land, Buildings, and Real Estate (LBRE). “It’s disheartening, but it doesn’t actually surprise me… I never felt like there was any effort to be a leader of any sort on campus.”

In contrast, Krow-Lucal said the LBRE established a comprehensive DEI council with funds, staff and mission and vision statements. DEI is a focal point at every LBRE meeting, he said.

Concerns raised in lawsuit against Stanford

Following six years at undergraduate admissions, former Associate Director of Admission for Diversity Outreach and External Relations Latif Legend, who is Black, is taking legal action against the University. Legend’s lawsuit alleges that his mistreatment in the workplace was due to his racial identity and criticizes a broader discriminatory culture.  

When Legend returned to work after recovering from cancer, he said he developed carpal tunnel syndrome. He requested accommodations for his workplace injury and subsequently went on medical leave. 

Legend said that his requested accommodations, including an ergonomic chair and keyboard, went unfulfilled for months.

Legend said that after facing months of inadequate support and retaliatory actions from his supervisors, he was terminated in January 2023 due to significant absences from various medical leaves. He filed a lawsuit in April that cited workplace retaliation, wrongful termination and racial and disability discrimination. 

“Stanford often hides behind ‘unconscious bias’ to justify discriminatory or retaliatory behavior, and their solution is often training for staff that does nothing to change the deeply rooted systemic issues that allow violence towards BIPOC communities,” Legend wrote in a statement to The Daily. “Their favorite tools to utilize are lack of transparency and accountability.”

He characterized the prevailing attitude as “hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil.”

The Daily reviewed documents and emails between Legend, supervisors, medical professionals and other University officials. 

Prior to his leave, Legend contacted Human Resources (HR) to request accommodations, as advised by a supervisor. He was directed to Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S). Later, he was told the University lacked the funds — around $300 — to provide accommodations like an ergonomic chair and a semi-vertical mouse. His lawsuit alleges this violates its legal obligation to provide disability accommodations.

It took five months for Legend to receive the ergonomic chair, according to emails and other documents obtained by The Daily. He did not receive the other requested accommodations like a keyboard tray or mouse until October 2022, a full year following his request.

Following his request, Legend said supervisors who “admonished” him for contacting HR and not the Occupational Health Center (OHC), even though this was the instruction from his direct supervisor. 

As he awaited accommodations, Legend said his condition worsened, prompting another medical leave.

While on medical leave, Legend worked part-time and started to receive negative performance reviews, which were starkly different from previous evaluations. Legend describes the process to obtain accommodations and his treatment afterwards as “traumatizing.”

He characterized as retaliatory several “special projects” assigned between leaves, with the expectation he would work on them while on medical leave.

His attorney, Frank Zeccola, told The Daily this was to create a case for termination. “There’s never going to be an email that says he was terminated because he’s sick…  Black or disabled,” Zeccola said. “So the employer is going to then overload that person with projects. They’re going to give them a performance improvement plan, that’s going to have a million items on it, it’s going to be impossible to meet.” 

Legend was terminated in January 2023 due to 16 months of absence during his 38 months as associate director, all from approved and documented medical leave for his workplace injury, cancer, COVID-19 and emotional distress caused by his treatment in the office.

While employed, Legend raised concerns about his treatment and filed a grievance report following a corrective action email on March 30. His concerns led to multiple internal investigations and an external investigation by the Oppenheimer Group. Some took more than a year to complete and concluded following his termination.

Investigators found no wrongdoing on the University’s part.

In February 2023, Legend went public with his treatment in the admissions office on social media and has since actively criticized racism in admissions practices online. 

“I want Stanford to be accountable. I want Stanford to have integrity,” Legend said.

The University declined to comment on pending litigation.

Dilan Gohill ’27 is the Vol. 265 student activism beat reporter and a news staff writer. He is from Santa Monica, CA and enjoys avocado toast and listening to Lorde. Contact him at dilan 'at' stanforddaily.com

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The Color of Water

James mcbride, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Remembering D-Day, RAF veteran Gilbert Clarke recalls the thrill of planes overhead

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Gilbert Clarke leans back on the seat of his mobility scooter, cranes his neck and gazes into the bright blue skies over East London, remembering the moment 80 years ago when he knew the invasion of France was under way.

Clarke, then an 18-year-old Royal Air Force volunteer from Jamaica, was still a trainee learning about the intricacies of radar systems when the roar of aircraft engines forced him to look to the heavens on June 6, 1944.

“You couldn’t have seen the blue sky,” Clarke recalled, his voice tinged with awe eight decades later. “Was all planes. Hundreds and thousands of them — all shapes and sizes. All different type of plane. The instructor (said) ‘Hmm. Well, boys, it’s started.’’’

“We all shouted, `Give them hell,’ or probably something a lot stronger than that.’’

Clarke got to make his own contribution after he finished his training a few weeks later and was posted to a series of air bases where he serviced the radio and radar systems of British and American aircraft for the rest of the war. He plans to travel to northern France later this wee k, joining other veterans of the Battle of Normandy for ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings that started the campaign to liberate Europe from Nazi rule.

Clarke, now 98, is one of more than 3 million men and women from South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean who served in the British military during World War II. Citizens of what was still the British Empire, they volunteered to fight for “king and country” just like recruits from the British Isles, but their service is often overlooked.

The U.K.’s former colonies were crucial to the Allied victory because they supplied money and resources, as well as manpower, to support the war effort after the Nazis occupied Europe and threatened to invade Britain, said George Hay, a historian for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Those contributions should be remembered along with the sacrifices of those who fought and died on the Normandy beaches, he said.

“It’s incredibly important, what those men managed to do on the beaches on that one day,” Hay said. “But what gets them there and what keeps them there and what allows them to fight on from that point is far bigger than those who actually put their feet on the sand.”

That includes ground crew members like Clarke, who had the unglamorous but vital job of maintaining the aircraft that were crucial to the success of the Normandy campaign.

The RAF was a popular destination for Black volunteers because the air force lifted the “color bar” soon after war broke out and it started recruiting in the Caribbean in 1940. By the end of the war, around 6,000 West Indian men had enlisted in the RAF, with 450 assigned to air crews and another 5,500 serving on the ground. Eighty women joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

Many of the recruits faced racism, despite an official ban on discrimination. Still, many thrived.

One of the most highly decorated West Indian volunteers was navigator Philip Louis Ulric Cross, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who flew 80 missions over Germany and occupied Europe. Cross, who died in 2013, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and was promoted to squadron leader before he left the RAF. He later served as a high court judge in Trinidad and returned to London as the high commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago in 1990.

Clarke was a teenager in Montego Bay when he heard reports of German submarines attacking ships in the Caribbean and figured the war was coming to Jamaica. Rather than wait for that to happen, he decided to enlist.

“We were all in a situation where someone’s gotta do something to end what was going on,” Clarke said, speaking softly, with a Jamaican lilt still in his voice. “And (I’m) proud to know I did my little bit.”

Still, there was a “flood of tears” when Clarke went home to say goodbye. He soon found himself on board a troop ship that was part of a convoy being attacked by U-boats, but he made it safely to Liverpool and was assigned to a base in northern England for training.

Life in the RAF proved to be a series of Nissen huts, prefabricated structures made of corrugated iron bent over a semi-circular frame and heated with a single wood- or coal-burning stove.

“The Black volunteers had learned a lot about Britain at school and most considered that they were in a real sense ‘coming home’ to the mother country,” according to an exhibit at the RAF Museum. “On arriving here, however, many experienced culture shock” due to the cold weather, lack of Caribbean food and the fact that most white Britons had never met a Black person.

Even so, Clarke decided to stay in England after the war, using his RAF training to earn a living “fixing anything with a wire.”

Like other veterans, he proudly wears his RAF beret and a dark suit coat festooned with medals and military badges on ceremonial occasions. But in Clarke’s case, the ornamentation isn’t just to celebrate his service. It also reminds the world that men who look like him came to Britain’s aid in its hour of need.

While he sidesteps questions about any racism he may have faced over the years, Clarke recognizes that Black people still face discrimination in Britain.

He hopes his story, and those of other Black veterans, will help to change that.

“We are somebody,″ he said. “We did something for the presence of all the people here. I feel very proud.”

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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

A group of experts met to discuss the images that have best captured — and changed — the world since 1955.

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By M.H. Miller ,  Brendan Embser ,  Emmanuel Iduma and Lucy McKeon

• June 3, 2024 Updated 9:25 p.m. ET

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Of the dozens of photographers not represented here that a reasonable person might expect to have been included, the most conspicuous absentees include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. Putting together a list of the 25 most significant photographs since 1955 — both fine art photos and reportage — proved a difficult task for the panelists (even the chosen time frame was controversial). They were: the Canadian conceptual photographer Stan Douglas , 63; the Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê , 64; the acting chief curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, 66; the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas , 75; the American photographer Shikeith , 35; and Nadia Vellam, 51, T’s photo and video director. Each participant (including myself, the moderator, 36) submitted up to seven possible nominees for the list. We gathered at The New York Times Building on a morning last February (with Shikeith joining on video from a shoot in Los Angeles) to begin our deliberations.

We chose judges from the realms of both fine art and reportage because, increasingly, the line between the two has collapsed. The modern age has been defined by photographs — images that began their lives in newspapers or magazines are repurposed as art; art has become a vehicle for information. Therefore, it was important to us and our jurors that we not draw boundaries between what was created as journalism and what was created as art. What was important was that the photographs we chose changed, in some way, how we see the world.

The conversation naturally turned into a series of questions. Like how important was it for a photograph to have expanded the possibilities of the medium? And how much did it matter who took a photo and what their intentions were? The list that emerged is less concerned with a historical chronology or an accepted canon than it is with a set of themes that have been linked indelibly to the photographic medium since its inception: labor and activism; war; the self and the family. Intriguingly, beyond an image by Wolfgang Tillmans from the ’90s, fashion photography is largely absent. So, too, are many world historical events that have been captured in landmark photographs, including the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall and anything from the pandemic lockdown or the presidency of Donald Trump. There were just too many other photographs to consider.

The process of producing the final list was clearly not scientific. It was more of a debate among a certain group of people on a certain day and is best considered that way. At the end of nearly four hours, jittery from caffeine, the group stood before a pile of crumpled masterworks on the floor as we assembled our chosen 25 images on a conference table. Many of our questions weren’t resolved (indeed, are unresolvable), but the results — which aren’t ranked but rather presented in the order in which we discussed them — are nothing if not surprising. — M.H. Miller

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

M.H. Miller: I thought we should start by talking about the time frame we settled on, starting in 1955.

Stan Douglas: It’s an agenda.

Miller: A little bit. It certainly shows an American bias, so I apologize to our Canadian representative — 1955 is really the beginning of the American civil rights movement, an era from which a number of us nominated photographs, and photography was so important in just making people aware of what was going on in the country. An-My, you chose Robert Frank’s picture of a streetcar in New Orleans, taken that year.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

Robert Frank used “Trolley — New Orleans” as the original cover of his influential photo book “The Americans,” first published in the United States in 1959. Frank, a Swiss émigré, spent two years traveling the States and capturing what he saw. In this photograph, two Black passengers sit at the rear of a New Orleans streetcar while four white passengers sit at the front; all look out from a row of windows, the mullions between them emphasizing their strict separation. At the time of its publication, “The Americans” was considered by several critics to be a pessimistic, angry portrait of the country. (The magazine Popular Photography famously called it a “warped” and “wart-covered” depiction “by a joyless man.”) Many more viewers and artists, however, found inspiration in the direct, unromantic style pioneered by Frank, whose outsider status likely let him view America’s contradictions from a clarifying distance. He had “sucked a sad poem out of America onto film,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in an introduction to the book. This image, shot in the months before the Montgomery bus boycotts made segregation a national debate, showed America to itself, as if for the first time. The faces in the photographs, Kerouac wrote, don’t “editorialize or criticize, or say anything but ‘this is the way we are in real life.’” — Emmanuel Iduma

An-My Lê: I tried to look for things that spoke to me, but also spoke to a generation.

Douglas: If I had to choose a civil rights image, I wouldn’t choose this one. Great photograph. But something happening on the street would be more appropriate, I think, like the dog attacking protesters , or the photo with the firemen .

Roxana Marcoci: But this was the cover of “The Americans,” and it does happen in the street, actually. I think that what you’re saying is, it’s not a photojournalistic image.

Douglas: The most important thing to me is: does a photograph reveal a new reality, or reveal something that’s been hidden previously? I think that’s a key criterion for making it significant. What impact on the world can that image have? A European might not have recognized that this was happening in the U.S. Maybe a lot of Americans in the North didn’t realize this was happening in the U.S. And I love this photograph, so I’m very happy to keep it.

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

Mamie Till fixes her eyes on her dead son, as her fiancé, Gene Mobley, holding her, stares at the viewer. Emmett Till , 14, is laid out on a cot in a Chicago funeral home, his face disfigured and bloated. His mother allowed the photojournalist David Jackson to take this picture in September 1955, a few days after two white men had abducted and murdered Till while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Quickly acquitted by an all-white jury, the men would go on to sell their confession to Look magazine for $4,000. When this photo was published, first in Jet magazine and then in The Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers, it incited an unprecedented level of outrage in America over racial violence; Jet had to reprint the Sept. 15, 1955, issue in which it appeared because of high demand. For the same reason Mamie Till let this picture be taken, she chose to keep her son’s coffin open during the funeral. “The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all,” she said. An estimated 100,000 people came to view his body. Jackson’s photograph was a call to action for many, including Rosa Parks, who said she thought of Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus later that same year. — E.I.

Miller: I feel like you can’t have this conversation, especially with the year we designated as the starting point, without talking about Emmett Till. There’s the devastating series of photographs of Till’s funeral. But there’s also the one from the trial — when Till’s great-uncle is identifying the men who murdered his nephew. The judge didn’t allow that photographer, Ernest C. Withers, to shoot in the courtroom. So it’s a miracle that the picture exists, and that it’s composed as well as it is when it had to be taken in secret. And it’s a moment where you saw a larger shift taking place. Up to that point in the South, a Black witness identifying white defendants in court was unheard-of.

Marcoci: The picture [of his body] was also about the power of the witness, right?

Susan Meiselas: Oh, for sure. Mamie Till and her insistence on an open coffin: how brave an act that was. And it ran in Jet and moved around the world.

Douglas: The issue for me with the trial picture is that it needs a paragraph to explain why we’re looking at it.

Marcoci: The courtroom was a travesty. They went free. But this, Mamie Till with her son, created a generation of Black activists.

Shikeith: I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and when we were learning about Black history in the fourth or fifth grade, that picture was brazenly shared with students. It was probably the first time I learned how powerful a photograph can be in having real material change in the world. It’s an image that I’ve lived with my [whole] life, and that’s impacted how I viewed the world and racism and its violence. It scares me. But, you know, it’s the truth. The truth can be very scary for a lot of us.

Miller: Shikeith, you also selected this Gordon Parks photograph, which is one of two color images the group nominated from the 1950s and ’60s — and the second was taken from outer space.

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

In 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to document the effects of Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South through the experiences of one extended family in Mobile, Ala. Parks was one of the few Black photojournalists to work for an establishment magazine at the time, and was known especially for his fashion photography, as is easily apparent from this image. For Life, he photographed everyday scenes — a church choir singing or children drinking from water fountains — intentionally capturing signs reading “White Only” or “ Lots for Colored .” “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) was shot for the Life story, which ran at 12 pages under the title “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” but, for unknown reasons, it didn’t make the final edit, and it wasn’t published until 2012, when a five-volume collection of Parks’s photographs was released. “Department Store” has since become a belated icon, one of the most memorable images in a career that also includes directing the 1971 film “Shaft.” Notable most of all for its vivid color, a startling contrast to the predominantly black-and-white imagery from the civil rights era, the portrait depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson, then age 27, dressed in an ice-blue, A-line cocktail dress, with her young niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing beneath the red neon “Colored Entrance” sign in front of a department store. Wilson’s upright posture and outward gaze — peering in the opposite direction of the sign’s blue arrow — subtly signify defiance. But there’s an intimacy and vulnerability in the picture, too. In 2013, Wilson, who went on to become a high school teacher, told the art historian Maurice Berger that she regretted that the strap of her slip had visibly fallen. “Dressing well made me feel first class,” she said. “I wanted to set an example.” She had set an example, of course, which Parks had recorded with such clarity: Wilson also told Berger that she refused to take her niece through the “colored” entrance. — Brendan Embser

Shikeith: I think what’s beautiful about this image is that it’s brilliantly composed — it uses beauty to draw you into a poignant moment in history, becoming a record of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern U.S. I tried to pick photographs that had an influence on me, and that I thought my mother would recognize, to indicate their influence on people who might operate outside of art history conversations. It [can be used as] a tool for educating even the youngest of minds about what marginalized communities went through.

Marcoci: I think that’s a great point: the pedagogical nature of photographs. In this picture, there’s the elegance and grace of these two figures, and then the ugliness of that “Colored Entrance” sign. There’s such a tension between them.

Nadia Vellam: You don’t immediately realize the context because you’re so attracted to the two people in the image. It asks you to spend more time looking.

Douglas: It’s quite an exquisite picture. It’s basically an X, which draws your eye into the center, which then takes you to that woman’s gaze outside the frame. Inside the frame, there’s something quite sweet. But outside — both beyond that door and out in the world that’s made that door — there’s something quite ugly.

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960

Alberto Korda, a favored photographer of Fidel Castro, captured this image of a 31-year-old Che Guevara by chance during a funeral in Havana in 1960 to honor the victims of a freighter explosion. Guevara, at the time the president of the National Bank of Cuba, happened to move into Korda’s line of sight while Castro was giving a speech. His expression is one of restrained anger; the Cuban government accused the United States of being responsible for the tragedy, which it denied. Five years later, Guevara resigned from Castro’s cabinet and joined revolutionary causes abroad, including in Congo and Bolivia, where he led guerrillas in a failed coup attempt. Korda’s photo wasn’t widely published until after Guevara’s execution by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, when posters, murals and eventually T-shirts emblazoned with Guevara’s face began to appear around the world. In the original portrait, he is flanked by another man and some palm fronds, but the reproductions are cropped to show just Guevara’s head. Korda’s image made Guevara into something more than a man, or even a famous revolutionary; he became a symbol for revolution itself. — E.I.

Miller: We have two pictures of Che Guevara to consider. Stan, you picked Che following his execution , and Susan, you picked the more famous portrait of him by Alberto Korda. It’s in every college dorm.

Marcoci: It’s in every tattoo parlor.

Douglas: They’re both propaganda images. One is the revolutionary looking to the future, which we’ve seen in everything from Soviet realist paintings to Obama posters. So, in many ways, a cliché, even though it’s had this huge impact. The image of Che dead [which was taken by the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta] is both iconic in that it’s like [an Andrea] Mantegna [1431-1506] painting of the dead Christ [“ Lamentation Over the Dead Christ ,” circa 1480], but also as evidence, on the part of the people who killed him, that the guy is dead. It’s just such a weird photograph: the officer on the right who’s poking at Che’s body to prove he’s just a human. Just mortal. And it somehow seemed like the end of the export of revolution from Cuba, which very much shut down after Che’s death.

Meiselas: And then he’s resurrected as a tattoo.

5. Diane Arbus, “Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C., 1967”

The boy in “Boy With a Straw Hat” doesn’t look like a typical Arbus subject. Wearing a prim collared shirt, bow-tie and boater hat, with one American flag at his side and another, much smaller one twisted into a bow on his lapel, the thin-lipped paradegoer seems like the paragon of anodyne conservatism. He’s nothing like the cross-dressers, carnival entertainers, nudists and others relegated to the margins of society that fascinated Arbus, whose work prompted one of the more protracted debates on the ethics of photography, as her images were so often said to skirt the lines of voyeurism and exploitation. Yet his steady gaze prompts a similar sense of unease in the viewer, as does the small pin on his jacket that reads Bomb Hanoi. “Boy With a Straw Hat” was the cover image of Artforum’s May 1971 issue, published two months before Arbus’s death by suicide at age 48. In 1972, when her posthumous MoMA retrospective drew record crowds, the art critic Hilton Kramer refuted the idea that she was merely capturing her subjects for the sake of spectacle; he argued that she collaborated with the people she photographed, and that that act of participation provided dignity — or at least authenticity — especially for those individuals who are shunned or otherwise invisible. Arbus herself once said that the “best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.” — B.E.

Miller: A number of us nominated Diane Arbus photos.

Douglas: [I picked] the sitting room in Levittown [“ Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I., 1962 ”], which is one of those suburbs created in the postwar period that people could buy [homes in] with their G.I. Bill money, in which Black people couldn’t live. It’s a case of there [being] something outside the image, which is very powerful: The construction of this new suburban reality, while Emmett Till’s being killed.

Marcoci: I chose the “Giant” [“ A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970 .”], because this was one of the first pictures where I was really thinking, “Who is that person? What would it be like to be him?”

Meiselas: One of the things that photographs do is make us emotional. Some of Arbus’s most memorable pictures are the ones that make you feel more than think.

Vellam: I’d vote for “Giant” just because it spawned so many people’s idea of portraiture: Katy Grannan, Deana Lawson, Larry Sultan. Like this idea of going into a place — in her case, middle-class suburbia — that you may not even have spent any time in otherwise. I feel like that became its own genre: There’s so much photography that has come out of her idea of going into people’s homes.

Marcoci: If I were to choose just one Arbus, I’d probably choose “Boy With a Straw Hat”: A portrait of an individual that’s this very interesting collective portrait of America, too. There’s this tension between the innocent face and then those buttons: “God Bless America” and “Bomb Hanoi.”

Shikeith: He’s sort of the archetype for the Proud Boys. You can see that smirk on his face.

Meiselas: There were pictures from the R.N.C. [Republican National Convention] four years ago that looked so much like this.

Miller: Stan and An-My both nominated a very different kind of photograph from the Vietnam War era: Malcolm Browne’s picture of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation.

6. Malcolm Browne, the Self-Immolation of the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, 1963

The AP reporter Malcolm Browne was among the only photojournalists on the scene when the monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as an act of protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of the Buddhist majority. As flames engulfed Quảng Đức, hundreds of monks surrounded him, mourning while he burned. The photo, sent out as soon as possible on a commercial flight to reach the AP’s offices, was published on front pages internationally the following morning. When President John F. Kennedy saw it, he reportedly exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” and then ordered a review of his administration’s Vietnam policy. (He would later say, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”) Browne won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for the photograph, which also contributed to the collapse of support for the South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, who was assassinated in a coup that year. President Kennedy was assassinated just a few weeks later, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, would escalate the war. Browne’s photograph, which is newly resonant today, enshrined the act of self-immolation as the most extreme form of protest. — Lucy McKeon

Lê: I think it’s one of the most incredible monuments that exists as a photograph. [It documents] an extraordinary act of sacrifice for a cause. These days, you see [some] people protesting, and it’s all about their egos. And here, there’s no ego. It’s one of the few pictures I know that’s so violent and peaceful at the same time.

Douglas: He was there for five minutes, apparently, burning, and just didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. This is what you do when you have no other recourse, when you feel the suppression is so severe that this is the only way you can get your statement heard.

Meiselas: It makes me think of the Napalm Girl, as well [ Nick Ut’s 1972 image of Kim Phuc Phan Thi , age 9, fleeing a napalm attack in the village of Trảng Bàng]. That moment impacted a generation. The question is, which one mobilized us further?

Lê: The Napalm Girl picture, for me, represents the notion that all Vietnamese are victims of war. I started watching war movies in college, and every time the word “Vietnam” comes up, that is the image that people have in their mind. I think the monk speaks to [something] beyond himself. He’s not a victim.

7. NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise,” 1968

On Christmas Eve 1968, aboard Apollo 8 during its pioneering orbit of the moon, William A. Anders photographed the Earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. The picture was the first of its kind — and it was also unplanned. Anders, the youngest of the three astronauts on the spacecraft, had been tasked with taking photographs of the moon’s craters, mountains and other geological features. He spontaneously decided, however, to include Earth in the frame when he noticed how beautiful it was. “Here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament, very fragile,” Anders would recall in a NASA oral history. “And yet it was our home.” His first shot was in black and white. For the next, he switched to color, which emphasized the contrast between the moon’s gray surface and the planet’s blue-green vibrancy. “Earthrise” was the first image most of humanity saw of the planet we live on, a nature photo like none before it and a reminder of how small our world really is, in comparison with the rest of the universe. As Joni Mitchell would sing of the image, on 1976’s “ Refuge of the Roads ”: “And you couldn’t see a city on that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest or a highway/Or me here least of all. …” — E.I.

Lê: “Earthrise” isn’t the first image of the Earth seen from space. There were earlier low-resolution ones in the ’40s , made from unmanned missiles or whatever. There was one made on Apollo 4, in 1967 . But I think this one, taken by a crew member on Apollo 8 the next year with a Hasselblad, is important because it’s humbling: seeing the Earth in relationship to the Moon, and thinking about us not being the only people on this Earth. Perhaps this is when we started thinking about how we should take care of our home.

Miller: Stan, you nominated a later photo, “ Sunset on Mars ” (2005).

Douglas: I’ve always had this knee-jerk response to Apollo being American propaganda somehow, part of the arms race — who’s going to get [to the Moon] first, the U.S. or the Russians? And once the U.S. got there, they lost interest. It wasn’t really about exploration, but dominance. This image on Mars is something quite extraordinary, because in effect, the camera is a prosthesis. It’s both a very artificial one and a human one. We actually extend our vision through it.

8. Ernest C. Withers, “I Am a Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee,” 1968

In the last weeks of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. took part in a protest of Black sanitation workers striking for safer conditions and decent wages in Memphis, Tenn. In a speech, King emphasized the connection between the United States’ civil rights battle and the struggles of poor and disenfranchised people worldwide, a message that resonated with the crowd. Their protest signs bore the phrase “I Am a Man,” a stark acknowledgment of all the ways this most basic fact was disrespected. “We were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has,” one of the participants, James Douglas, recalled in a 1978 documentary titled “I Am a Man.” The defining photo of the strike was taken by the Black photojournalist Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis native who previously shot the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, and also made famous images of the Montgomery bus boycott , the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Withers’s picture became the official record of King’s last major civil rights action. Years later, however, Withers’s own story was revealed to have been more complicated. Like King, the photographer drew the attention of the F.B.I. Unlike King, he became a paid informant. Yet he continued to produce some of the most iconic images of the movement: On April 4, 1968, less than a week after taking this photo, Withers was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, photographing the blood stain at the scene of King’s assassination. — L.M.

Shikeith: I think I first saw this image around the time the Million Man March was happening [in 1995]. I have a greater understanding of manhood [now] and how much of it I want to align with, and how much I don’t. But I understand how vital the need to identify as a man was in that moment.

Meiselas: I love the contrast of “I am a man,” singular, and “I am a collective.” It’s just all there: perfect distance, perfect composition. Whether or not Withers was working for the F.B.I. …

Douglas: Was he?

Meiselas: Yeah.

Douglas: And his role was to just …

Meiselas: Report on his fellow men. They paid him to spy on his colleagues. It’s a dark story. But let’s not go there.

9. Blair Stapp, Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, 1968

In the summer of 1968, outside of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., where Huey P. Newton stood trial for the murder of a police officer, supporters held up posters of him that instantly became synonymous with the Black Panther Party. The year before, Newton, the party’s co-founder and Minister of Defense, had collaborated with fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver and the photographer Blair Stapp to stage a portrait of himself in a black leather jacket and a tipped beret, holding a shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other. He’s seated on a rattan peacock chair that recalls chairs woven by inmates in the United States-colonized Philippines decades earlier. Its oval back piece frames Newton’s head like an oversize halo. Two Zulu warrior shields are propped against the wall. Stapp’s portrait and the peacock chair itself have since become an enduring symbol of Black Power. Michelle Obama sat in one for her 1982 prom portrait . Melvin Van Peebles recreated the photograph in his 1995 film “Panther.” The visual artist Sam Durant memorialized Newton in bronze in 2004 , and Henry Taylor painted it in 2007 . After two hung juries, the murder charges against Newton were dropped in 1971. For him, the struggle was about survival — or as he put it, “survival pending revolution.” — B.E.

Shikeith: I was trying to think of images that my grandmothers revered in a way. I think this is one of those images that exists in a lot of Black domestic spaces as a symbol for strength and determination. And it has this royal demeanor that’s been continuously emulated in Black photographic practice, whether amateur or professional.

Marcoci: The beret is almost [like] Che’s.

Shikeith: You can see people replicating this pose on the wicker chair throughout Black portraiture in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m really interested in photographs that’ve had a long-lasting effect on our daily lives.

10. W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko in Her Bath,” 1972

In the Magnum photojournalist W. Eugene Smith’s picture of Tomoko Kamimura, 15, she is being bathed by her mother at their home, in Minamata, Japan. Kamimura had been born with a kind of mercury poisoning that would later come to be known as Minamata disease, caused by a chemical factory contaminating the city’s water and food supply for more than 30 years. Smith and his wife, the photographer and activist Aileen M. Smith, lived in Minamata in the early 1970s, taking thousands of photographs to document the toll of the disaster — 1,784 people died after contracting the disease and thousands were left with severe neurological and musculoskeletal disabilities. Images from the series were printed by Life magazine in 1972, and Kamimura’s portrait became, for a time, one of the most famous images in the world. Amid the public outcry, “rumors began to circulate through the neighborhood claiming that we were making money from the publicity,” Kamimura’s father, Yoshio, would later write, “but this was untrue — it had never entered our minds to profit from the photograph of Tomoko. We never dreamed that a photograph like that could be commercial.” The Chisso Corporation, which owned the factory, has paid damages to some 10,000 victims. Kamimura died in 1977, at the age of 21. Smith died the following year. Twenty years later, after a French TV network wanted to use the photograph, Aileen M. Smith transferred control of it to Kamimura’s family. They haven’t allowed the photograph to be reproduced since. — L.M.

Meiselas: Without this documentation by Eugene Smith, I don’t think Minamata and the mercury poisoning would ever have been confronted. So when you do choose to represent a victim, I hope it’s purposeful.

Douglas: I heartily agree. And it’s a beautiful image of a loving relationship between mother and daughter.

Vellam: Smith documented people, but he was also very conscious of what he was doing while he was documenting them. I think he took a very long time after he shot everyone to figure out what he even wanted to show from them.

Meiselas: He believed that they should be better understood.

11. Photo Archive Group, “Photographs From S-21: 1975-79”

Some photographs, taken in the darkest moments of history, end up saying very different things from what their creators intended — like the images that Stalin’s secret police took during the Great Purge, or the ones white spectators took of lynchings in the United States. One of the more extensive photographic records of an authoritarian regime comes from the Khmer Rouge army, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and whose genocidal purges of minority groups and political opponents led to the murder of almost a quarter of the country’s population. Before killing most of its victims, the army took their portraits, in part to prove to leaders that the supposed enemies of the state were indeed being executed. Of the nearly 20,000 people sent between 1975 and 1979 to what was known as the S-21 death camp, the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, only about a dozen survived. In 1994, the American nonprofit organization Photo Archive Group cleaned and cataloged more than 5,000 photographs taken of prisoners before their executions. A selection of the images, known as “Photographs from S-21: 1975-79,” was published as a book called “The Killing Fields” in 1996 and shown at MoMA the following year. Who was the girl pictured here? What had she seen? It’s impossible to know. And yet the regime’s photographic record offers a way into humanizing and remembering the victims of one of the most ruthless atrocities of the 20th century. S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where a number of the images from “Photographs From S-21: 1975-1979” are on permanent display. — L.M.

Lê: So these pictures were found in an archive in Cambodia [in 1993]. After the Khmer Rouge took over [in 1975], they went on a rampage, killing teachers and anyone who they felt wasn’t one of theirs. The bodies were buried in different locations. But they photographed these people before killing them. There were thousands of these pictures.

Douglas: If you want to make them disappear, why do you document them?

Lê: But that’s the thing. It’s the banality of evil. It’s unconscionable, right? Civilians being just collateral damage in war. Perhaps there are other ways to speak about violence, and I think this [set of photographs] certainly does.

12. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80

Cindy Sherman was 23 when she began making her “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white staged self-portraits that explore stereotypes of women in film and mass media. As a student at Buffalo State College, where she originally studied painting, she became fascinated by performers such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, artists who put their own bodies center stage. Sherman also liked to dress up as stock characters for parties, purchasing clothes from flea markets and experimenting with cosmetics. In “Untitled Film Stills,” she plays the career girl, ingénue, librarian , mistress, femme fatale and runaway , alternately heartbroken, hung over, daydreaming or determined to escape a predator as though trapped in some film noir. But which film? That feeling of vague recognition was Sherman’s point, as well as that of other artists of the era experimenting with pictures from mass media, who would eventually be called the Pictures Generation, a name based on a 1977 exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp . They wanted viewers to almost recognize the images, so as to heighten the uncanny nature of their work. Sherman initially sold eight-by-ten prints from “Untitled Film Stills” for $50 out of a binder from her desk at her day job as a receptionist at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space in New York. Douglas Eklund, who organized a Pictures Generation exhibition in 2009, noted that the series “never ceases to astonish, as if Sherman knew how to operate all of the machinery of mass-cultural representation with one hand tied behind her back.” Her intuitive grasp of the self-portrait’s theatrical appeal, especially when that self could be manipulated — decades before anyone could have imagined camera filters on an iPhone — has kept “Untitled Film Stills” relevant ever since. — B.E.

Marcoci: There’s something about the “Untitled Film Stills.” It’s this relationship between still and moving images. Cindy Sherman has the capacity to encapsulate, in a single [work], a narrative. She calls on this pantheon of women’s roles from movies that we think we’ve seen, but none of them are based on an actual film still. There’s one [“Untitled Film Still #13,” 1978] where she looks like Brigitte Bardot in a head scarf from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), but she’s a librarian. She’s reaching for a book. She makes the Bardot type into an intellectual, which is [an agency] that most male Hollywood filmmakers of the time, or even a filmmaker like Godard, would not have given the real Bardot. She was able to see something about how we engage with mass media and tweak it.

Douglas: I’m not convinced about Sherman. [There’s] an art-world canonization of the work. How important was it? How influential? I don’t think it was that important or influential outside of a very small area.

Marcoci: On the other hand, if you ask people if they know about Sherman, they probably do.

Lê: They do. Many young women find Sherman’s work empowering.

Marcoci: I never thought that we would just be considering photojournalism.

Meiselas: No.

Douglas: I mean, looking at the art world, I would include Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” [1966].

13. Ed Ruscha, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” 1966

As a teenager in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, Ed Ruscha delivered newspapers by bicycle daily along a two-mile route. He dreamed about making a model of all the buildings on his circuit, he later recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “like an architect standing over a table and plotting out a city.” After moving to Los Angeles for art school in 1956, Ruscha became obsessed with the city’s architecture, particularly on the Sunset Strip, that part of Sunset Boulevard that stretches for about two miles, like his old paper route, across West Hollywood. In 1966, Ruscha photographed both sides of the Strip by securing a motorized camera to the bed of a pickup truck. The result was “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a nearly 25-foot accordion-fold, self-published artist’s book. Today, Ruscha is most famous for his text-based paintings, many of which reference corporate logos and advertising slogans, for which he is widely celebrated as postwar America’s answer to the Dadaist nonsense movement. But his photography shares with the paintings a repetitive, deadpan humor. In addition to the Sunset Strip, Ruscha photographed swimming pools, gas stations, parking lots and apartments, and collected the images into small books that provoked the ire of critics — and fellow photographers — who deemed the work lacking in style and meaning. (“Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but the filling stations,” the photographer Jeff Wall once complained.) But what he created was a kind of time travel, a meticulous, obsessive visual cartography of a long-lost Los Angeles. He and his brother, Paul, still make the trip to photograph the street every couple of years. — B.E.

Marcoci: I love [Ed] Ruscha, and I think we’ve barely touched on conceptual photography. Obviously superimportant, but is he really the photographer that did so much for photography through that series?

Meiselas: I know what you mean. Of course, because the photographs came way early, we rediscovered them after he became famous for painting.

Miller: Well, he’s certainly not as famous as a photographer as some people on this list, but I don’t know if we need to get hung up on that.

Douglas: I think “Sunset Strip” was extraordinary. Ruscha produces photographs governed by a hard-core conceptual procedure. In the case of “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” the procedure is in the title and, in order to fulfill it, he had to make hundreds of stops along a Los Angeles street. But I also thought this was too inside the art world.

Miller: Maybe this is a good time to talk about Nan Goldin.

14. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1979-2004

Nan Goldin originally presented “Ballad,” named after a song from Bertolt Brecht’s satirical musical “The Threepenny Opera,” as a series of 35-millimeter slides shown by a carousel projector in bars and nightclubs and backed by an eclectic soundtrack — from Dean Martin to the Velvet Underground. Goldin’s visual diary is itself a bohemian opera of New York’s downtown counterculture, a community freed from convention yet abandoned many times over by society; it documents sex, addiction, beauty, violence, powerful friendship, the AIDS crisis and the joyful struggle to live beyond the limits of the mainstream. Friends were photographed doing the twist at a party or preparing to inject heroin. In “Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984), a portrait of domestic abuse, the artist’s bloodshot eye meets the lens head-on. Goldin’s “Ballad” has since been credited with inspiring everything from selfie culture to the raw, diaristic aesthetic and saturated color now commonplace across social media and in fine art. Over the years, Goldin would revise and update the series, presenting it with new images and a different soundtrack, and it would become an ubiquitous presence in galleries and museums. But because the work has so thoroughly permeated the culture, it’s easy to overlook just how radical it was when it debuted. In “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ,” Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Goldin, the photographer describes a resistance to her art in the ’80s, “especially from male artists and gallerists who said ‘This isn’t photography. Nobody photographs their own life.’ It was still a kind of outlier act.” — L.M.

Marcoci: We’re talking about an artist who’s very much engaged with youth culture, with the cultures that transgress gender binaries. Also with the ravages of a generation that takes drugs, that loves, that dies young. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is a ballad. It shows this group of people as images set to music.

Meiselas: It was radical, it was very impactful to the photographic medium. But here’s my question: Would we be choosing either Nan [Goldin] or Cindy Sherman if we didn’t know their names?

Marcoci: Did you watch the “Ballad”?

Meiselas: Of course. I watched it in 1985.

Marcoci: How many times?

Meiselas: How many times has she changed it?

Marcoci: But even that I like. You don’t need to choose one picture. It’s interesting for me when photography is not just a moment that’s frozen in time, when it has the capacity to change.

15. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W),” 1993

A slightly different, color image of the same people in “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W)” was first published by i-D magazine in 1993 for an unconventional fashion story about camouflage. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans staged the scene in Bournemouth, England, where he’d attended art school the previous year, and captured a whorl of bodies in military fatigues, each person clasping another’s arm, thigh or chest, and all wearing camouflage patterns from different countries — a post-Cold War utopia. The black-and-white version was printed on color paper, which accounts for the warmth of its tone. On the beach, Lutz, Alex, Suzanne and Christoph appear as if from a scene in Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 short film “Powers of Ten,” which zooms out from a sunny picnic into the farthest reaches of the universe. Tillmans’s photograph “seems to model something like chosen family,” says the curator Phil Taylor, who edited a collection of the artist’s interviews. The way Tillmans envisions family in this early portrait — as a tight embrace amid the implied violence of the outside world — is emblematic of the way he would go on to depict men kissing at gay nightclubs or activists at antiwar demonstrations, each a picture of solidarity against the odds. — B.E.

Lê: I think Wolfgang [Tillmans] captured youth culture — in magazines like i-D and The Face — at a time [the early ’90s] when young people were being captured in a different way: It was very clinical and idealized, and he just came out with this very real [take on] youth culture. The pictures were a little more grainy, and I think it [changed] the way young people are seen. My students always bring up his work. I think it’s a way to photograph your family and friends and turn them into real protagonists. And I see that influence as very long-lasting.

Marcoci: What’s interesting in this image is [that] it’s four friends on a beach, dressed in camouflage. Camouflage immediately makes you think of military uniforms, of obedience, of listening to orders. But in the techno culture of these clubs in the 1990s, it had become a symbol of individuality and freedom: the exact opposite of what the uniform means.

Meiselas: This image, if I didn’t know his name, I would’ve just turned the page.

Lê: I think we need a picture that speaks about youth. And I think even though this picture was made in ’93 …

Miller: … That’s still how young people are photographed today.

16. Lee Friedlander, “Boston,” 1986, From the Series “At Work,” 1975-95

Lee Friedlander is best known for photographing America’s social landscape, from mundane street scenes in the Midwest to nudes of Madonna that were taken in the late 1970s. Between 1975 and 1995, he created six series of photographs depicting employees at different types of workplaces, including Rust Belt factories, a telemarketing call center and a New York investment firm. One of these series, commissioned by the M.I.T. Museum and produced between 1985 and 1986, looks at office workers in the Boston area who used desktop computers for their jobs. At the time, this was a fairly new development, but one that Friedlander presciently recognized would come to define not just corporate life but humanity itself. His subjects are often seemingly oblivious — or indifferent — to the presence of the camera. Likewise, his camera often omits the computers themselves, the ostensible subject of his images. Instead, the workers, sitting at brightly lit desks, are pictured from the chest up, their detached expressions familiar to any of us as they sit engrossed in (or bored by) screens just out of frame. With this series Friedlander had tapped into the dark comedy of the mundane. His influence can be seen in a generation of younger photographers who seek to question everyday life — from Alec Soth to LaToya Ruby Frazier — and whose images would mostly be viewed on screens. — E.I.

Marcoci: I love this series.

Douglas: I love it, too, but I put this in out of guilt for not having more art people in here. It’s images of these people just engaged in the world around them.

Meiselas: In autonomous labor. I remember when I first saw this series of white-collar workers in front of machines.

Lê: No one had done that before.

17. LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze,” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze,” named after the compact car made by General Motors, follows the 2019 closure of an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that had been open since 1966. Over nine months, Frazier documented the impact one corporation can have on a community, which lost thousands of jobs. The work was first presented as a multimedia installation: More than 60 portraits and video interviews with union workers and their families were mounted to orange metal trusses at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. In the accompanying monograph, Frazier included essays by artists and critics as well as members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers union. On its cover is this photograph, which she shot from a helicopter, showing a group of workers and their families protesting the plant’s abrupt shuttering and requesting a new product to work on. Other images show Lordstown residents in various states of mourning — wiping away tears or proudly displaying union memorabilia. Born in a Pennsylvania steel manufacturing town, Frazier embedded herself with the Ohio workers, producing one of the most detailed records of the gutting of America’s working class. “‘The Last Cruze’ is a workers’ monument,” she has said. “It is half-holy, half-assembly line.” — L.M.

Marcoci: LaToya Ruby Frazier is a true artist-activist. These workers were losing their pension plans, their health benefits, you name it. It’s a work that includes more than 60 pictures of union workers along with their testimonies, because she also did these interviews with them.

Miller: I think “The Last Cruze” might be the only complete photographic record we have of the impact that corporate decision-making has on a work force. GM skipped town, cut their costs and the people of Lordstown were left holding the bag. We have another picture, nominated by Susan, that also documents labor.

18. Sebastião Salgado, “Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil,” 1986

One of the most striking aspects of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of an open-air gold mine in Brazil is the scale. Several thousand men — their bodies hunched and fragile — are rendered miniature against the backdrop of a massive pit in the earth. In the photos, most of the miners are climbing into or out of that pit, holding tools or ferrying sacks up and down narrow ladders and steep slopes. In several shots, Salgado chose not to include the horizon within the frame; the viewer can’t see where the workers’ dangerous journey ends. The photographer, who was born in the state of Minas Gerais (which means “general mines”) in Brazil, spent 35 days at Serra Pelada, living alongside the miners while he took these photographs. When they were published in 1987 in The New York Times Magazine, they revealed a late-20th-century gold rush and the appalling conditions facing those at the bottom of it. In the nearly four decades since, Salgado has gone on to capture the burning oil wells in Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Some critics have labeled him an “aesthete of misery,” using the plight of the poor and disenfranchised to make visually striking pictures. When these images are exhibited in a fine art context, their size is so massive, the sheer aesthetics of the imagery threaten to eclipse the act of documentation. But in a profile in The Guardian this year marking his 80th birthday, Salgado responded, “I came from the third world. When I was born, Brazil was a developing country. The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come from. … The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt.” — E.I.

Meiselas: The scale of what he presented to us at the time was really quite amazing.

Douglas: It was like, “Holy moly, that’s still going on?”

Meiselas: Exactly.

19. Stuart Franklin, an Unidentified Man Blocking a Column of Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

On June 4, 1989, as a column of tanks rolled into formation on Chang’an Avenue bordering Tiananmen Square, the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin watched from the sixth-floor balcony of the nearby Beijing Hotel. He was holed up there with several other foreign correspondents, who were all covering the weekslong protests, led by hundreds of thousands of unarmed students, against the Chinese Community Party. The previous night, the People’s Liberation Army had cleared the area with force; that morning, they prevented parents from looking for students lost in the fray, and the soldiers fired live rounds even as medics attempted to rush the injured to safety. (Thousands are thought to have been killed in the protests, although an official death toll has never been released.) Suddenly, a young man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding shopping bags in his hands, approached the first tank. On the video footage, it attempts to maneuver around him. Like a matador taunting a bull, he flings his arms in fury and, when the tank turns back, the man jumps out again. Yet the dramatic photograph Franklin took, with five tanks and a destroyed bus in the frame, draws its power from its stillness, its potential energy. (Four other photographers are known to have captured the same scene, including Jeff Widener, whose tightly framed version for The Associated Press ran on the front page of The Times.) Authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate symbolic images of resistance and, while the Tank Man — whose identity has never been confirmed — became an inspiration for pro-democracy movements across the world, he was snuffed out from official Chinese memory. Today, image searches in China for “Tiananmen Square” only turn up cheerful pictures of a tourist destination. — B.E.

Douglas: Multiple photographers shot this image because they were all in the same corner of a hotel overlooking Tiananmen Square. They couldn’t really shoot anywhere else on the square. The first time I saw this scene, it was a video.

Meiselas: Right, there was a television camera. The stills are very different. And I don’t care whose image it is. I’m thinking about the man in front of the tank and what happens when one man stands up. And I love how this looks alongside Ernest Withers’s “I Am a Man.”

20. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” 2008

In 2008, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan during a period that was, at the time, the deadliest week since the war began in 2001. They brought a lightproof box containing a roll of photographic paper, and, occasionally, exposed six-meter segments of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds at a time. They were creating photograms, which, as opposed to conventional war photographs, display the marks of their making but little else. The resulting works — 12 in total — set out “to create a kind of post-mortem of photojournalistic representation of conflict,” as the artists wrote when the work was first exhibited. They made these images on days when a BBC fixer was executed or a suicide attack killed nine Afghan soldiers. But they also made one on the day that the title refers to — a day with no fatalities. In a literal sense, there isn’t anything to see in the images except splashes of light as abstract as a blurry sonogram. When Broomberg and Chanarin arrived in Afghanistan, the war was in its seventh year and, by then, a surfeit of photographs depicting death and violence had long been circulating. There’s hardly consensus on what to leave out when depicting war, but there is some consensus on the need to bear witness. With their photograms, Broomberg and Chanarin found a new, unexpected, but no less emotional way of doing so. — E.I.

Miller: There were a lot of different kinds of images of war from the George W. Bush era. Nadia, you nominated Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s “The Day Nobody Died,” which is very abstract.

Douglas: What is it?

Vellam: They did this project in Afghanistan where they took rolls of photo paper and put them outside, exposing them to the sun or the weather. Whatever would happen while the photo paper was exposed was the work. It’s about a new idea of photography, about it not depicting something specific but creating a mood. And this one was taken, as the title says, on a day nobody died, which is such an interesting and different way to talk about a conflict.

21. Richard Drew, “Falling Man,” 2001

When it was first published by The Associated Press, the photojournalist Richard Drew’s image of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was denounced by many readers as exploitative. Several media outlets published the image once, on Sept. 12 — including The Times, on page A7 — but it then disappeared from circulation, confined to shock websites like rotten.com. There was no shortage of graphic images of 9/11, including footage of the planes flying into the buildings. But Drew’s photo was uniquely unsettling because of its uncomfortable elegance: a single victim, framed by both north and south towers, caught in a fragile stasis before death. The image eventually began a strange afterlife as “one of the most famous photographs in human history,” according to the journalist Tom Junod, who wrote a 2003 essay in Esquire in which he attempts to identify the falling man. He couldn’t — not definitively. No one has. Recalling war photography that valorizes the unknown soldier, “Falling Man” would go on to be one of the inspirations for a novel by Don DeLillo and an opera by Daniel Levy. Long after the dust settled on the former site of the World Trade Center, the photograph of the unnamed man remains, like “an unmarked grave,” in Junod’s words, merely asking that we look at it. — E.I.

Miller: I think “Falling Man” is the defining image from the most violent day in America since the Civil War.

Shikeith: I was in middle school when 9/11 happened. Images from that day seem to seep into you. You carry them for life and they dictate certain fears and anxieties.

Miller: And then there are all the images from what happened in the years to come. The pictures of soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib military prison are arguably the most famous photographs from the war on terror.

22. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, Abu Ghraib Hooded Detainee, 2003

In early 2004, investigations into abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility had already been reported by news outlets including The New York Times and CNN. But the government had kept all photographs of torture out of view — until leaked images reached CBS. Even then, the news anchor Dan Rather would claim, the network’s executives only granted permission to show them when faced with the threat of a scoop by The New Yorker’s investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. (CBS executives justified holding the photos on various grounds, including the desire to avoid retaliation against American hostages.) The Abu Ghraib photos finally appeared in both outlets later that year. Their subject matter is brutal: men stripped naked and made to form a human pyramid with soldiers grinning behind them; a hooded man standing atop a box, hooked to electrical wires. The fact that American soldiers had recorded these scenes on their personal cameras only made them more disturbing. The photos significantly shifted American public opinion on the war on terror, further demonstrating the power of an image to alter a story. They also speak to a broader shift in news photography, in which everyone — no matter their intentions — is now a potential journalist. — L.M.

Shikeith: Both “Falling Man” and the hooded Iraqi detainee have a hard-core bodily effect on me. I think there was a sort of naïveté to the world I grew up in, just this idea that America is the greatest place on earth. For a moment there, we believed the myth. At least I did. When I started seeing these images, I developed a distrust in a lot of things. It only got worse. I have a very pessimistic outlook, but it sort of begins here, with these images.

23. Carrie Mae Weems, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” 1995-96

Carrie Mae Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is a work of appropriation that brings together 34 photographs, many of them of Black Americans, dating from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s, which collectively form a lesson on the history of racism in America. At the heart of the work are four images of people who were enslaved in South Carolina — some of the earliest known images that exist of America’s original sin — taken by the photographer Joseph T. Zealy and commissioned in 1850 by the Harvard University biologist Louis Agassiz. Originally intended to illustrate Agassiz’s baseless phrenological theories of Black inferiority, the pictures were rescaled and reframed by Weems, who also tinted them blood-red, making explicit the violence that allowed for their creation. Stored in Harvard’s archives for more than a century, Zealy’s images fell into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in 1976. After Weems used them without permission, the school threatened her with a lawsuit. “I think that your suing me would be a really good thing,” she told the university, as she later recalled to the art historian Deborah Willis. “You should, and we should have this conversation in court.” Instead of proceeding with the suit, Harvard acquired the work, further complicating the idea of ownership that Weems investigates. — E.I.

Vellam: We should talk about Carrie [Mae Weems].

Meiselas: We should definitely talk about Carrie. There are two very different options [“ Kitchen Table Series ,” 1990, and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.”]

Lê: I chose the “Kitchen Table Series” [in which Weems poses as the matriarch in various domestic scenes she staged in a single room, containing little else but an overhead lamp and a table]. The kitchen table is symbolic — it’s the intimacy of the home. In a way I always felt these pictures were about people being able to be themselves, being open and visible in a way that they maybe can’t in public.

Marcoci: To me, the “Kitchen Table Series” is a true performance for the camera in a way that Cindy’s is in “Untitled Film Stills.” But “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is an amazing work because it engages with race, with slavery, with colonialism, through an archive. The subjects here were really originally presented as specimens. But what Carrie does is give a voice back to these subjects, whose voices were completely muted. She enlarges the photographs. She tints them blood-red. The whole thing becomes a poem.

Shikeith: This particular work taught me how to use photographs to tell a story. And the fact that [Harvard threatened to sue her] introduces this whole other issue about who gets to tell what stories.

24. Deana Lawson, “Nation,” 2018

The idea for “Nation” came to Deana Lawson in a dream. She was haunted by a story that George Washington’s false teeth were made from the teeth of enslaved people . For months, she kept an image of Washington’s dentures — held in Mount Vernon’s collection — on the wall of her bedroom. Lawson dreamed about a person wearing a mouth guard and wondered if she might forge a connection between the majesty of gold — the jewelry of hip-hop and the regalia of the Ashanti Kingdom — and the fact that the first president of the United States could only speak the lofty words of liberty through teeth that once belonged to the oppressed. Lawson is known for portraits she stages in homes and other intimate spaces, often decorated with a large array of objects: family pictures, children’s toys, a Michael Jackson poster. In her images, Black men and women, their skin captured in color with meticulous attention to shade and tone, appear not as documentary subjects but as vessels. “Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory,” the novelist Zadie Smith has written of Lawson’s photography. At the photo shoot for “Nation,” Lawson offered three hip-hop artists a selection of jewelry and a mouth guard, typically worn during dental procedures, painted gold. “Someone said that I’m ruthless when it comes to what I want,” Lawson says in an interview in her self-titled 2018 monograph. “I have an image in mind that … burns so deeply that I have to make it, and I don’t care what people are going to think.” “Nation” presents an endless series of questions about Black lineage, going back centuries before the nation’s founding. Lawson later printed the picture of Washington’s teeth on a card and slipped it into the edge of the work’s golden frame. — B.E.

Miller: Deana Lawson seems to be doing something similar to Weems in “Nation.”

Marcoci: I think that’s an amazing image. It’s actually a collage, with the picture of George Washington’s dentures tucked into the top right corner. She’s said photography has the power to make history and the present speak to each other.

25. Carlijn Jacobs, “Renaissance,” 2022

On July 29, 2022, when Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” the first of what she’s envisioned as a three-act magnum opus (act two, “Cowboy Carter,” was released this March), the public was exhausted after two and a half years of pandemic restrictions and unprecedented change to their daily routines. They were stir-crazy and impatient for the dance floor. Beyoncé embraced the sounds of house music pioneered by Black and queer D.J.s, as well as the subversive, high-gloss styling of ballroom culture. The singer appears on the album’s cover in a Giannina Azar-designed silver rope dress, sitting astride a horse covered in mirrors. The image was taken by Carlijn Jacobs, a Dutch fashion photographer interested in the art of masquerade and maximalist glamour, and alludes to both rodeo and royalty. It also conjures a range of artistic references, including Kehinde Wiley’s painting “ Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon ” (2016); Rose Hartman’s snapshots of Bianca Jagger on a white horse at Studio 54 in 1977; and John Collier’s 1890s painting of Lady Godiva, the 11th-century Englishwoman said to have rode her horse naked through the streets as a form of protest. — B.E.

Vellam: Does anybody else feel like we’re missing a pop-culture celebrity moment? If we’re talking about images that go everywhere, and that people who live in the middle of the country all are going to look at, I don’t feel we have that.

Douglas: I think it’s important to include the idea of celebrity culture in photography. I’m not quite sure what that would be.

Lê: There’s the [2017] picture of Beyoncé pregnant with all the flowers .

Miller: Initially, Shikeith had also picked Beyoncé from the album cover of “Dangerously in Love” (2003).

Marcoci: But sorry, why don’t we then just choose a [Richard] Avedon of a celebrity?

Vellam: Marilyn Monroe [from 1957]. But don’t we feel like we have plenty of photographs from the past? Don’t we want to think about what celebrity is now?

Miller: What’s the iconic pop culture image from the last five years?

Douglas: Is there a Kardashian image?

Vellam: I can’t, because I hate them so much. But yes, you want the thing of [Kim Kardashian] when she broke the internet with her butt [an image that ran on the cover of Paper magazine in 2014].

Douglas: I’m going back to Beyoncé, because [you want] an image of a celebrity who’s not a person but an image. She’s like a simulacrum somehow.

Vellam: With her “Renaissance” cover, suddenly she was plastered everywhere. It was all over the city.

Douglas: I’d buy that.

Shikeith: I think it’s very important that she released this album and highlighted Black queer contributions to music in the culture because, very frequently, those same contributions are erased or attributed to someone else. Especially in pop culture.

Marcoci: Can you hold it up on your phone?

Vellam: Yeah. I listen to it all the time.

Top: Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) © the Gordon Parks Foundation; NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise” (1968); Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara)” (1960) © Alberto Korda, courtesy of the Alberto Korda Estate; Stuart Franklin, an unidentified man blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989) © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos; Deana Lawson, “Nation” (2018) © Deana Lawson, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery; LaToya Ruby Frazier, “United Auto Workers and Their Families Holding up ‘Drive It Home’ Campaign Signs Outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli Union Hall, Lordstown, OH, 2019,” from the series “The Last Cruze” (2019) © LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

M.H. Miller is a features director for T Magazine. More about M.H. Miller

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