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Indelible Images

"He'd go down there [to the docks] in the middle of the night sometimes," Bodine's daughter says.

Photographing Baltimore’s Working Class

Baltimore’s A. Aubrey Bodine cast a romantic light on the city’s dockworkers in painterly photographs

Esther Renee Adams, "Mamaw," was laid to rest in her own home. In the mountains of eastern Kentucky, such "country wakes" could last for days.

Capturing Appalachia’s “Mountain People”

Shelby Lee Adams’ 1990 photograph of life in the eastern Kentucky mountains captured a poignant tradition

Perez (at home in Guatemala in 2001) "really had a foot in both worlds," Donna DeCesare says.

Out of the Guatemalan Gang Culture, an Artist

Carlos Perez could have been an artist or a gangster. Photographer Donna DeCesare helped him choose

"Here is business enough for you," Gage told the first doctor to treat him after a premature detonation on a railroad-building site turned a tamping iron into a missile.

Phineas Gage: Neuroscience’s Most Famous Patient

An accident with a tamping iron made Phineas Gage history’s most famous brain-injury survivor

Norman Rockwell recruited Stockbridge neighbors, including state trooper Richard Clemens and 8-year-old Eddie Locke, to model for The Runaway.

Norman Rockwell’s Neighborhood

A new book offers a revealing look at how the artist created his homey illustrations for The Saturday Evening Post

Hugh Van Es spent much of the day on Saigon's streets but saw the line of evacuees from his office window.

A Photo-Journalist’s Remembrance of Vietnam

The death of Hugh Van Es, whose photograph captured the Vietnam War’s end, launched a “reunion” of those who covered the conflict

First baseman Frank Chance was known as "the Peerless Leader."

Portraits of Baseball’s Tinker, Evers and Chance

The famed Chicago Cubs infielders were immortalized in verse—as well as through Paul Thompson’s lens

On their first July 4 in America, Andrej (left) and Alec took in the horse races at the Gillespie County Fair.

Escaping the Iron Curtain

Photographer Sean Kernan followed Polish immigrants Andrej and Alec Bozek from an Austrian refugee camp to Texas

Two in half a million: Bobbi Kelly and Nick Ercoline greet the dawn on August 17, 1969.

A Woodstock Moment – 40 Years Later

On a whim, a young duo went to the legendary festival only to be captured in a memorable image by photographer Burk Uzzle

Now serving grief: Irwin (right) gives Holcomb (left) a lesson on why no plebe should ever forget the menu.

Up in Arms Over a Co-Ed Plebe Summer

The first women to attend the Naval Academy became seniors in 1979. Photographer Lucian Perkins was there as the old order changed

Weegee danced and screamed to get the beach crowd's attention. The masked man called himself the Spider.

Weegee’s Day at the Beach

For the noir photographer Weegee, bathers at Coney Island had another kind of gritty reality

The "loyalty dance" was a fixture of China's Cultural Revolution, and Kang Wenjie's performance at a giant Maoist teach-in was boffo.

Dancing for Mao

A photograph of a 5-year-old girl made her famous in China—and haunted the man who took it

"That cigar bit [that] folks like to tell about is phony," said W.D. Jones, whose photograph of Bonnie was seized in a police raid.

The Irresistible Bonnie Parker

A pistol-wielding, cigar-chomping bank robber hams it up shortly before she and Clyde Barrow met their violent end

Sherman has said she "didn't want to compete with the landscape," but she cleared space for a new Western woman.

Cindy Sherman: Monument Valley Girl

The artist’s self portrait plays with our notions of an archetypal West

Newborn David B. Miller had the company of his mother (covered by sheets), grandfather (masked) and photographer father.

Family of Man’s Special Delivery

It took three generations to produce Wayne F. Miller’s photograph of his newborn son

"Very seldom do a bunch of Santas get together," says Jerry Clarke, the right-most Santa, who manages apartments by day.

The More the Merrier

Photographer Neal Slavin captures the night some Santas bent the rules

As James Chaney's family awaited the drive to his burial, 12-year-old Ben gazed outward. "There were a dozen questions in that look," says photographer Bill Eppridge.

The Lasting Impact of a Civil Rights Icon’s Murder

One of three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964 was James Chaney. His younger brother would never be the same

Frank sought to compile "a spontaneous record of a man seeing this country for the first time." Indianapolis, 1956 is typically short on particulars but laden with symbols.

Robert Frank’s Curious Perspective

In his book The Americans, Robert Frank changed photography. Fifty years on, it still unsettles

"No one else would be up here"—Montana's Little Belt Mountains in winter—except Gerald Mack, with his horse, Sky, and dog, Cisco Kid, a rancher told the photographer.

The Cowboy in Winter

Gerald Mack lived the life—and photographer Sam Abell went along for the ride

"Only one photo from the 12 I took of her was good, because it was the only one where the iguanas raised their heads as if they were posing," Iturbide says of the picture Nuestra Senora de las Iguanas, 1979

Day of the Iguanas

On a morning in a Oaxacan market, photographer Graciela Iturbide made one of the most enduring images of Zapotec life

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