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Black and White is a book of 32 evocative images of political conflict and confrontations in the streets taken by Howard Epstein when he was a photographer for Liberation News Service.
The collection of images is a visceral flashback to the political turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Epstein’s photographs will resonate both for people who lived through those struggles and those organizing and protesting today.
“Howard Epstein’s photos from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s are amazingly evocative, even tender, yet without being sentimental. In several, it’s as if Epstein caught the protagonists at moments when they were trying to explain themselves and their passions to their uncomprehending antagonists (usually, but not always, police officers). They were angry, fearful, defiant, hopeful, but not cartoonish, versions of those emotions—rather, they were compounds of beliefs and disbeliefs on the part of human beings thinking and feeling their ways toward justice and the public good under high pressure. This is very fine work.”
—Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism, Columbia University
“The photographs in Black and White are a vital part of the history of this country’s socially conscious documentary photography. Howard Epstein’s pictures show dramatically what anti–Vietnam War demonstrators were up against when the police, and even soldiers, were called out against them. Whether fighting for childcare, against budget cuts, or in defense of labor and civil rights, Liberation News Service brought these and other photographs to the people’s movement. Especially relevant for photographers shooting today, this book is a link to the courageous work of our movement’s history.”
—David Bacon, photojournalist and political organizer