Collecting area: Photojournalism

An award-winning photojournalist, Janet Knott was one of the first woman to become a staff photographer at the Boston Globe. Over a 31-year career, she covered a broad range of topics, from local assignments to longer-form photo essays and international coverage, producing iconic images of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the late 1980s famine in the Sudan, and the violence accompanying the Haitian elections of 1987. She was only the third woman recognized with the Robert Capa Gold Medal and, among many other awards, won first place for spot news from the World Press Photography Foundation. After leaving the Globe in 2007, she became Chief of Staff for Boston City Councilor Salvatore La Mattina, representing East Boston and the first district.

The Knott Collection contains an array of letters, ephemera, and photographs documenting both her photographic and political careers. There is an extensive body of work from her years working as a photojournalist at the Boston Globe comprised of slides, negatives, prints, and contacts sheets.

Cover of Liberation News Service issue 441, June 10, 1972.

Founded in 1967, Liberation News Service, an alternative news agency, issued twice-weekly packets aimed at providing inexpensive images, articles, and art reflecting a countercultural outlook. First from its office in Washington, D.C., and then from New York City, LNS provided underground and college papers around the globe with radical and unconventional coverage of the war in Vietnam, global liberation struggles, American politics, and the cultural revolution. Two months after moving to New York City in June 1968, LNS split into two factions, with the sides mirroring common points of dispute within the New Left. The more traditional political and Marxist activists remained in New York, while those more aligned with the counterculture and “hippie” movement settled on farms in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont. For a year each faction put out competing versions of LNS news packets, until the winter conditions and small staff at the farm in Montague caused their production to end in January 1969. LNS-New York continued its production of unique leftist coverage of national and international issues throughout the 1970s, closing in 1981.

The LNS-NY Records include a relatively complete run of packets 102-701 (1968-1975) sent to the subscribing underground press newspaper the Indianapolis Free Press. Some packets and years are more complete than others, and these New York packets are especially dense with photographs compared to earlier LNS packets from before the split in 1968. The collection also includes a small selection of other artwork, articles, and materials kept by the Indianapolis Free Press.

The photojournalist Nancy Palmieri (1951-2016) received her BA in journalism at Utica College (1977) and studied at the New England School of Photography before launching a newspaper career. In addition to working with the Springfield (Mass.) Union-News and Sunday Republican for several years, she held positions with the Daily Ledger (Antioch, Calif.), the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, the Ridgewood (N.J.) News, and the Providence Journal (1989-1991). Shifting course in the early 1990s, she became a photo editor for the Associated Press in Los Angeles, and for a short time she taught photography. Relocating to Northampton, Mass., in 1998, she became a successful freelancer, working for prominent clients in new and old media such as the Boston Globe, New York Times, and LA Times, as well as with local institutions such as Jacob’s Pillow, UMass Amherst, and Smith College. Palmieri died of cancer in July 2016.

The Palmieri collection consists of negatives (mostly 35mm), 35mm slides, compact disks of digital images, and selected prints representing a cross-section of a photojournalistic career. Arranged chronologically, the collection begins during the period when Palmieri was first emerging as a serious photographer, and includes content from each of her professional positions. In addition to standard news assignments, the content includes photo essays, human interest pieces, and wide-ranging free lance work.

Marc Peloquin is a freelance feature photographer who has worked for both the New York Times and Yankee Magazine. He has also worked as a medical photographer for David Hubel’s neurobiology research team at Harvard University (1978-1985), and has been an instructor in the School of Journalism at Boston University (1987-1988).

The photographs in the Peloquin Collection are associated with projects undertaken for Yankee Magazine during the 1980s, and many are accompanied by related correspondence and notes. Most images are 35mm color slides, although there are handful of black and white negatives, and the topics of the sessions include the professional wrestler Killer Kowalski, the New England Aquarium, George Plimpton, Walden Pond, and Henry David Thoreau’s hut.

One of the most frequently published photographers in Life magazine during the late 1960s, Rowland Scherman is noted for an iconic portfolio that documents the worlds of politics, culture, and the rock music scene. Born in New York in 1937, Scherman attended Oberlin College and began his career in the darkroom at Life before winning an assignment as the first official photographer for the Peace Corps in 1961. His work blossomed after becoming a free-lancer two years later, with assignments that included the civil rights March on Washington and the presidential campaign of Lyndon Baines Johnson. He covered the Newport Folk Festival when Bob Dylan broke on the national scene, the Beatles’ first concert in the U.S., Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency, and Woodstock, and he went along on a memorable tour with Judy Collins. His work has appeared in dozens of magazines and books, including Life, Look, Time, National Geographic, Playboy, and Paris Match, earning wide acclaim, including a Grammy Award in 1968 for the portrait that appears on the cover of Dylan’s greatest hits album. Scherman relocated to London in 1970, then to Birmingham, Ala., in the 1980s, and finally to Cape Cod on 2000. He continues to shoot portraits, photo essays, and abstract work.

This rich collection consists of nearly the entire body of work from Rowland Scherman’s long career in photography, including negatives and transparencies with a small selection of prints. Negatives from the March on Washington and the Peace Corps are in the collections of the Library of Congress.

Peter Simon’s life and work as a photojournalist follows the quintessential arc of the counterculture, baby boom generation. The son of Richard Simon, founder of Simon and Schuster, Peter grew up in the New York City suburb of Riverdale and attended Boston University, graduating in 1969. While a student at BU, he began documenting the political turmoil in the US when he became photo editor for the radical student newspaper, the BU News, and later as a press photographer for the Cambridge Phoenix. In 1970, Simon left Boston to form Tree Frog Farm, a back-to-the-land commune in Guilford, Vermont, and after leaving there in 1972, he immersed himself in the New Age, forming a close relationship with spiritual leader Ram Dass. Among the most constant threads connecting his work throughout these changes was music. Simon’s sisters, Carly, Lucy, and Joanna have all been involved in music, and through a partnership with longtime friend Stephen Davis and his association with Rolling Stone magazine, Simon enjoyed unique access to many of the most important musicians of his generation. He spent time on the road with the Grateful Dead; went backstage and at home with Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and many others. His early forays into the world of reggae with Bob Marley and other Jamaican recording artists resulted in one of his nine books, Reggae Bloodlines. Simon’s other photographic interests are as wide-ranging as his background. A visitor to Martha’s Vineyard since the 1950s and a resident since 1974, his work reflects the changes and cultural richness of that island; his family’s friendship with Jackie Robinson has driven his lifelong documentation of baseball, and he is in high demand for portraits, weddings, and other work for hire.

The Peter Simon Collection houses the original negatives for Simon’s complete body of work as a photo journalist and also includes many photographs taken by his father Richard, an avid amateur photographer, which documents the Simon family and life in Riverdale and Stamford, Connecticut, where the family had a summer home.

The photojournalist John Spragens spent the better part of a decade living in Southeast Asia from 1966-1974, working for a variety of relief and peace organizations.

Taken by John Spragens late in 1983, the black-and-white photographs in this collection document Cambodia shortly after the Vietnamese Army defeated Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and installed a new order.

For many years, Sovfoto, a stock photograph agency based in New York City, was the sole source in the United States for the best work in contemporary Soviet photojournalism. Founded in 1932, the company carried photographers for Tass and, later, other news agencies from throughout the Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, and China.

The Tass Sovfoto Collection depicts Soviet life, primarily in the 1950s and early 1960s. Typically rendered in heroic Soviet style, the photographs are relatively varied in subject, documenting political events (e.g., Communist Party meetings, the meeting of Kennedy and Khrushchev); generals, politicians, and celebrities (Lenin, Khrushchev, Shostakovich); and athletic and cultural events. A few images appear to be parts of photo essays aimed at a popular audience, including images of Jewish life in Russia and the life of a Soviet worker, while others are stock images of Soviet troops during the Second World War.

A photographer from Washington, D.C., Lloyd Wolf is a well known photojournalist and documentarian who often works on topics in social change. During the course of a career that began in the late 1970s, Wolf has worked on projects ranging from documenting the impact of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., to Jewish mothers and fathers, Moroccan Jewry, drug rehabilitation in prison, and Black-Jewish dialog.

The 13 images in the collection are part of Wolf’s series, “Acid Reign,” a project conducted in 1989 with a sociologist from UNC-Greensboro, Rebecca Adams, exploring the lives of dedicated Deadheads. The prints were made for exhibition at the symposium, Unbroken Chain: the Grateful Dead in Music, Culture, and Memory, held at UMass Amherst in November 2007. All rights remain with Lloyd Wolf.

Frankie “Ashbuloh” Ziths, born Frank Gumbs, Jr. on December 6, 1933 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, was a vital member of the Black Panther Party, joining in the late 1960s. Ziths served as the official New York photographer for the Party’s newspaper, The Black Panther, and covered the Panther 21 trial first for The Black Panther, then for Right On!, the East Coast Panther newspaper. As more of the members of the Harlem Branch were arrested and jailed or forced underground, Ziths kept the Branch’s business and programs moving forward until it closed in 1981. One of the programs Ziths took over was the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, which raised awareness and funds to support political prisoners in the US. Through the NCDPP, Ziths maintained long-standing correspondences with incarcerated fellow activists and sent them money, often from his own pocket. In the late 1970s, Ziths began honing his skills as a photographer and became a respected New York paparazzi, eventually working as one of the city’s most sought-after news photographers and a stringer for the Associated Press and The New York Times. Ziths died of lung cancer on December 31, 1990.

Prompted by his wife Barbara Dee Ziths (now Barbara Heller), who recognized the historical significance of the work of Black community activists in New York, Ziths began preserving material documenting the Panther 21 trial, and eventually the activities of the Harlem Branch of the Black Panther Party. Heller and Ziths saved all the material that was in the branch when it closed in 1981. The Frankie Ziths Collection includes administrative files, publications, posters, original artwork and layouts, and memorabilia from the Party’s Harlem Branch, documenting the ideological split of the Black Panther Party in 1971 and support for the Black Liberation Army; administrative files and correspondence from the NCDPP; Ziths own notebooks and journals, including notebooks recording his experiences at the Panther 21 trial; and Ziths complete archive of photographic negatives, slides, and prints, representing his career as a paparazzi and press photographer and documenting activism in New York and elsewhere in the East Coast Black Panther Party community.