This image became the opening spread of a photo essay in Life magazine about the Million Man March in 1995. I wanted to show how large the crowd was, and the three men of varying ages and taste in hats worked for me, too
An hour after President Obama took the oath of office in Washington, D.C., I looked at the woman standing next to the poster and I felt that she was thinking what I was thinking: The new president was not going to have an easy time
Along with three other photographers and our driver, I was caught in a rocket attack in 1983. We had to make a run for it under heavy shelling in Tripoli, Lebanon
A friend in the military took me to Ground Zero on September 12, 2001. Walking through the rubble, we met an undercover police officer who had lost 11 of his friends
After making a portrait of this Guatemalan soldier under tense conditions, I entered a village where a mass funeral was taking place. I was informed that he and his men were responsible for having eight people taken out of a funeral wake and killed. The word was that the people had voted the wrong way in the last election
The three-day Atlanta Pop rock festival that took place in Byron, Georgia in 1970 attracted as big a crowd as Woodstock had the previous year
A mother with her children, sleeping in the car to escape her violent husband, subsequently found help at a shelter for battered women and their children
I always have a camera on me or very near so I can keep up a visual diary of my life. Long before my first photographs were published, I explored my surroundings through my photography. It has helped enlarge my understanding of the external world in ways that I perhaps would have found difficult if not for the camera in my hands.
When I embark on creating a photographic essay, all of my energies are propelled in the direction of finding the core of what is happening inside the story and the heart of my subjects. Nothing is more important to me than sitting down with the elements of truth that transport me to places that I have not visited before. The legendary documentary photographer W. Eugene Smith, once stated, “Let truth be the prejudice!” I believe that is still a good way of doing work that is important to me.
Eli Reed, a 1983 Nieman Fellow, has been a photojournalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin since 2005. His photography career started in 1970. Over the years, Reed, a member of Magnum Photo since 1988, photographed around the world for numerous publications, including The New York Times, National Geographic, Time and Life magazines. He has produced two photography books, “Beirut: City of Regrets” and “Black in America.” The text for this photo essay was adapted from what Reed wrote upon hearing that he was the recipient of the Lucie Foundation’s 2011 award for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Photography.