The second Black woman ever hired as a staff photographer at the New York Times, Michelle V. Agins’s groundbreaking assignments offer some of the most important documentation of race relations, celebrity culture, sports, spirituality, and economic disparity in the United States. Work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist is featured in the exhibition Michelle V. Agins: Storyteller, now on view at Rutgers’ Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Over the course of her five-decade career, Agins has covered a vast array of news moments, from early photography of the protests surrounding the murder of Black teenager Yusef Hawkins and the 1992 Democratic National Convention, through more recent images of Kamala Harris on the 2020 campaign and portraits of Stormé DeLarverie, a Stonewall Riots survivor. She has captured other iconic figures, such as James Baldwin, Prince, Aretha Franklin, Serena Williams, Anthony Mason, and Anita Hill, among many others. Each photograph demonstrates her powerful, humanizing vision.
“Storytelling is the only way I’ve done my work,” Agins said. “My words are my images.” Her visual storytelling also brings to light the lives of many New Yorkers (some on view here) who have been aided by the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, now called the Communities Fund. Her series Another America: Life on 129th Street (1994), also on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum, studies the effects of gun violence on a Harlem neighborhood.
This museum exhibition, Agins’s first, comprises 68 images taken during her 35 years at the New York Times.
Open at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, through December 8, the show is organized by Maura Foley, picture editor at the New York Times, and Maura Reilly, director at Zimmerli Art Museum.
For more information, visit zimmerli.rutgers.edu.
Generous support for bilingual wall text was provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program. This exhibition is also supported by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, with additional support provided by Beth Schiffer’s Fine Photographic Arts.
