Thank you, Anne, for inviting me to speak and to Alex for the memories we have been rehashing these past couple of weeks, to Marilyn Jordan Taylor for moderating and to Ben Levy who has done such a heroic job over the years of organizing our reunions, along with Eleanor Hobbs, and to all of you who came today. It is an honor to speak to you.

The topic Anne proposed, "Photography as a Political Art," was one I was sure applied to my work. I have photographed McGovern, Reagan, Carter, Holtzman, Abzug, Barbara Jordan, Gloria Steinem, marches for the ERA, the Women’s Pentagon Action, etc. But the topic quickly became more challenging when I actually assumed the role of reviewer and presenter. My ex used to say that the artist should never talk about their own work, but step aside and let the critics do that. Since I don’t right now have the luxury of escaping through that door, although my friend Doug Matthews class of ‘66 did offer to present for me, I had to take the challenge and look at my work in historical perspective.

Yes, it has been on book covers, in books, magazines and scholarly journals, but during the years the photographs were taken there were very few places the images were seen, outside of brochures, poster, flyers and tee shirts for mostly doomed political campaigns. I had no MFA connections and only on the job training - the Crimson was my trade school. That, perhaps, is why someone rich and famous is not speaking to you now. But my lack of academic inculcation and life-long contrarianism have also kept me free.

Can photographs retroactively be of political import? How are photographs political until they are seen, used, and often, misused? Fortunately, we have had Anne’s presentation of Lange’s unseen photographs to help us mull over some of those questions. My images were mostly self-assigned. If I did not want to take them, I did not. When I was photographing, I was consciously photographing for history. If I was doing political campaign photographs, I wanted the candidate to leave their mark on history.

If I did not want someone to be remembered, like Grace Paley after she backed me away from the graveyard scene at the Women’s Pentagon Action,  I did not photograph them. The one time I accepted to photograph someone I did not respect, for money (Ramsey Clark) I have regretted it ever since.

There are questions now in my mind not only about how much impact the photographs had on the unfolding of American politics, since they were seen only as the ephemera of campaign materials or in rarified circumstances as illustrations for textbooks, but also, now, and in future, how they will be used.

At the very same time that I publicize the campaign to have my photographs of women leaders of the 1970’s used on US postage stamps (Please sign and send in the petition or drop it off for me to do so) I am shocked and  saddened by the recent deplorable abuse of Sarah Palin suffered in the last Presidential election. A man from a small state like Arkansas or Georgia could reach the Presidency on the issues and sex-appeal, while the debate about a woman similarly placed rarely rose above excoriating her professional wardrobe expenses, oggling her in a bathing suit, or criticizing her children’s personal lifestyle choices or a personnel firing.

As I reach out to women studies departments to show my work, it is obvious from almost all their web sites that the field now promotes violent anti-Israel action as a priority, while only Phyllis Chessler who has actually lived and suffered in Islamic society has evolved her feminist thinking to encompass the global pandemic of female genital mutilation and honor killings, all others giving them a pass because of cultural and moral relativism, fear, or fashion. What in feminist thinking could make it okay for children to be taught to blow themselves up and kill others with them? What holds feminists back from advocating that women in all societies be allowed the basic freedoms to divorce, exercise professions, and drive a car? Where are the young photojournalists who are taking on these topics?

On the other hand, some feminists I met along the way have focused on the use and abuse of power as metaphor and crux of any matter of human relations, and have moved on to animal rights activism, a theme in my work too.

It would be my fondest wish that my photographs would convey a kernel of truth about the past, as we approach the world envisioned by George Orwell in 1984. The photographs most incapable of being distorted are those that are not of famous people, but my early, early photographs of anonymous subjects.

So while my sympathies are no longer in step with many of  the descendants of my original subjects, or with the subjects themselves any longer, you could never tell from the  photographs. Coretta Scott King looks as beautiful as Betty Ford, Jane Fonda as inspirational as Bella Abzug, and Grace Paley as respectable as Shirley Chisolm, the most revered of them all. Their portraits will all end up in a book or museum, each looking as beautiful as the next. I comfort myself with the thought that Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote to me recently, that my photographs  “certainly evoke a time in our lives when all things seemed possible.”

I hope you will enjoy the tour that starts at Harvard in 1967 and touches on the exhibit I created in 1986 while in the Visual Arts Administration MA program at NYU, and exhibited in 1988 and 2007: Libel, which challenges our acceptance of photographs and captions as truth. You will also see photographs of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, the subject of my research for the last 25 years, translating, writing, and presenting. I hope whatever you think of me and my work, that you will continue to evaluate very skeptically the images and scenarios being pedaled on the front pages of the NY Times and on the internet as truth, and keep looking in the rearview mirror for what lies ahead. Thank you.

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