From wars and political campaigns in its origins to the migration struggles, pandemic grief, and protest lines of recent years, Mother Jones has treated photography as a core instrument of investigative storytelling—anchoring every era in people, not spectacle
For decades. Mother Jones has asked readers to look longer—at the faces in front of them. the harm behind events. and the systems that keep producing the same damage. Long-time contributing photographer Ken Light puts it plainly: “For decades Mother Jones has seen photography as an essential component of its reporting. ” adding that “photographers and their work have had and been an important voice within the magazine to reveal the truth.”.
That belief runs through the magazine’s 50-year photo retrospective. a journey organized into five distinct eras—each shaped by the changing texture of the world and by shifts in art direction. technology. and geography. but anchored in one steady purpose: using immersive. engaged photography to expose injustice. demand accountability. and build empathy meant to evoke change.
The story begins with Mother Jones’ origins. from 1976 to 1985. when the magazine’s photography drew heavily from the traditions of humanist documentary. The work brought readers face-to-face with Central American wars. political campaigns. and the struggles of American life. using an unsentimental approach grounded in the idea that visceral images could expose injustice and build empathy to spark change. Under the leadership of founding art director Louise Kollenbaum. the visual identity took shape as serious. immersive. and engaged with the world.
Even in the early years, the magazine didn’t treat photography as a decorative add-on. One example centers on Richards’ photo essay about his first wife. writer Dorothea Lynch. and her battle with breast cancer. which ultimately led to her death in 1983. Some of the images became part of the book Exploding Into Life. combining Lynch’s journals and Richards’ photos in a meditation on mortality.
In the same early period. the retrospective also includes a sign left behind in the aftermath of violence: the mano blanca. or “white hand. ” marked the homes of rebels Salvadoran paramilitary death squads killed during the country’s civil war. Another early milestone in the magazine’s photo history is described through the work of Goldberg. His first photo published in a magazine became the basis of his first book. Rich and Poor (1985). and it established a signature style of displaying handwritten messages by the photo subjects directly on the images.
By 1986 to 1995, the magazine enters its social documentary era. In 1988. Kerry Tremain took the reins as art director. and with photographers Michelle Vignes and Ken Light. launched the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography. The fund supported, and often published, long-term photojournalism projects from photographers including Joseph Rodriguez and Nan Goldin. Light’s description of photography as essential to reporting still applies here. but the work shifts in tone: closer. quieter. more intimate—reflecting a broader turn in documentary photography toward extended relationships and subjective experience.
A representative image from this period comes from the 1988 book To the Promised Land. It shows three migrants being apprehended while hiding in the trunk of a car 50 yards from the Mexican border in Southern California. The magazine doesn’t blur the tension of that moment.
Rodriguez’s perspective adds another layer to the decade’s emphasis on intimacy and viewpoint. Speaking about his subject, Rodriguez said, “Coming out of the streets of New York myself, I felt connected in some sense.” He continued, “I was tired of seeing the news covering gangs as animals.”
Nan Goldin’s work, meanwhile, is presented as forward-looking through its focus on people “who ‘are going in and out of drag,’” and through Carole Naggar’s accompanying description: “They embody the fantasy that gender is malleable.”
From 1996 to 2007. Mother Jones’ photography tracks globalization and war. following the magazine’s reporting as it increasingly focused on global dynamics like war. migration. and the environment. The retrospective describes a consistent shift in how images were framed—away from spectacle and toward aftermath and impact: wounded soldiers. displaced families. polluted landscapes. and communities caught in cycles of conflict.
One photo is tied to two years of travel: Šlezić spent two years traveling Afghanistan. documenting the impact of the war on women’s lives. The image features Malalai Kakar. who worked as a police officer before the rise of the Taliban and who later went unveiled to educate women about their rights. The retrospective also includes a portrait of a different kind of war work. through Hetherington—specifically. a posthumous documentary about him titled In Which Way Is the Front Line From Here?. The document describes Hetherington talking about working in Liberia, searching for photos that tell a side of war less seen. The featured image is described as tender and reflective: a young Liberian man saying goodbye to his sweetheart before heading to battle.
Even when the story turns to El Salvador, the retrospective keeps returning to how decisions reverberate across borders. DeCesare returned to a country featured prominently in Mother Jones’ early years. but this time the focus turned to the United States sending Salvadoran immigrant gang members back to their home country—returning the children of those who fled violence of the 1980s and. in the process. creating new problems for the beleaguered Central American country.
Homecoming can look like an unraveling. As the first waves of soldiers returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. frequent contributor Berman turned her camera on how veterans processed being back home. One subject. 22-year-old Luis Calderon—a former Army tank operator—was destroying a mural of Saddam Hussein when part of the wall crashed down. breaking his neck and paralyzing him. The photo era isn’t only about what war does abroad; it’s about what comes back and stays.
Then, from 2008 to 2015, crisis at home reshapes the magazine’s gaze. The retrospective points to the financial collapse of 2008 and its long tail. When I came on as photo director in late 2007. the description says. more visual work was added to a rapidly growing website. and the late 2000s and early 2010s brought photo essays exploring economic collapse. environmental damage. gun violence. and the erosion of working-class life in America. There was room for fun as well. with photographers like Bryce Duffy. Gregg Segal. and Chris Buck contributing oddball and often humorous portraiture.
Politics also enters through the image as performance. Longtime Republican operative Fred Karger dressed as the Lone Ranger for his portrait in a story about his fight against Proposition 8, the California initiative aimed at preventing same-sex marriage.
The Detroit story stands out as the retrospective’s description turns to consequences and accountability. Pairing Wilcox Frazier with reporter Charlie LeDuff gave readers an “unparalleled insight” into the decimation of Detroit. The retrospective emphasizes that while many photographers documented blight. this piece told a unique story: cops shot and killed a 7-year-old girl when they burst into her home with a television crew in tow. It also says the investigation led to an outcome it describes as rare—accountability for the police.
Not every project takes the form of outrage. Kranitz remembers a story about how police in rural Kentucky were playing whack-a-mole trying to stop the theft of Sudafed for use in meth, describing it as one of the craziest projects she’d been part of.
The most recent era. 2016 to 2025. is framed as protest and pandemic—a decade where photography trained its sights on resistance movements and unfolding political crises including Black Lives Matter protests. climate organizing. immigration and the US–Mexico border. labor struggles. and the Covid pandemic. The retrospective underscores that many of the photographers represent a new generation working within or alongside the communities they photograph.
Trillo, raised on the southern border, gave readers an inside perspective on a migrant caravan headed to the United States and the panic that was “ginned up” around it. The photo shows a young Honduran boy scrambling under a heavy gate at the Mexico–Guatemala border, where the caravan was stopped.
Lefort embedded with groups protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in the Dakotas in 2016. In the retrospective. Lefort remembers the experience directly: “I shared their daily lives—the freezing nights. the meals. the silences. the stories. ” and “I was 23; we were almost all the same age. and that shared youth bound us together with a kind of quiet certainty.”.
During the pandemic, grief and infrastructure collide. Dermansky’s photo essay. published in a special issue focused entirely on the Covid pandemic. looked at the work of funeral home operator Courtney Baloney. The business was located in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” and catered largely to the African American community. which the retrospective says was hit particularly hard by the pandemic.
By 2017, Dundon is described as photographing political confrontations that rocked the country, including a faceoff at a Milo Yiannopoulos rally at the University of California, Berkeley.
For all of the shifts—black-and-white humanist traditions to today’s multiplatform chronicle—the retrospective insists on one through-line: commitment to immersive. engaged photography as the visual arm of longterm independent journalism. The magazine points readers to more on its 50th anniversary through Exploding Cars. Office Monkeys. Watergate: The Origins of Mother Jones; The Cover Stories That Put Mother Jones on the Map; and Women’s Work: My Barrier-Breaking Early Years at Mother Jones. It also highlights the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos. Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and a conversation featuring MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild on KQED’s Forum.
What lingers through the retrospective isn’t only the range of subjects—from Central American wars to border gates. from cancer alley funeral work to devastated Detroit. It’s the insistence that images can’t be neutral in the face of harm. They can show what is done. They can show what it costs. And, in Mother Jones’ own telling, they can help force the country to look again.
Mother Jones photojournalism investigative reporting U.S. politics protest photography documentary photography immigration Covid pandemic Black Lives Matter Detroit Proposition 8 Dakota Access Pipeline