The Stunning Photojournalism That Made Mother Jones

Since its founding in 1976, Mother Jones has operated on a foundational premise: Visual storytelling goes hand-in-hand with investigative reporting to expose injustice, demand accountability, and build empathy needed to evoke change.

“For decades, Mother Jones has seen photography as an essential component of its reporting,” says longtime contributing photographer Ken Light. “Photographers and their work have had and been an important voice within the magazine to reveal the truth.” The magazine’s photography has served as an uncompromising mirror to the world, evolving from the gritty black-and-white traditions of humanist documentary into an expansive, multiplatform chronicle of our time.

Across five distinct eras, this retrospective highlights a small fraction of great work from that 50-year journey. While the magazine’s editors could never have known at the time what a decade would bring, trends about each time period emerged when recently going through back issues.

Beginning with the magazine’s Origins (1976, 1985), Mother Jones photography brought readers face to face with foreign wars and raw realities of American life. During the second era, Social Documentary (1986, 1995) took center stage. The photography became a bit quieter and more intimate, capturing personal, subjective experiences of people living within systemic problems at home and abroad.

By the late 1990s, our photography followed the friction of Globalization and War (1996, 2007), emphasizing the human aftermath of political and economic choices over spectacle on the battlefield. The devastating fallout of the 2008 financial crisis brought us a Crisis at Home (2008, 2015), with many projects tracking economic collapse, gun violence, and environmental degradation.

Most recently, a decade of Protest and Pandemic (2016, 2025) highlights a new generation of photographers working directly alongside communities, documenting our fractured, fast-moving world.

Through every shift in art direction, technology, and geography, one constant remains: a commitment to immersive and engaged photography as a vehicle for storytelling. This work represents the visual arm of a Mother Jones core focus: powerful, long-term independent journalism.

1976-1985: OriginsEarly Mother Jones drew heavily from the traditions of humanist documentary photography, which focused on the everyday experiences of ordinary people. The magazine championed visual storytelling that brought readers into Central American wars, political campaigns, and the struggles of American life. Much of the work took a direct and unsentimental approach, grounded in the idea that visceral photo­graphy could expose injustice and build empathy to spark change. The visual identity of Mother Jones under the leadership of founding art director Louise Kollenbaum took shape: serious, immersive, and engaged with the world.

Eugene Richards, “This Strange Knowledge,” May 1981

Richards’ photo essay centered on 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, which combined Lynch’s journals and Richards’ photos in a meditation on mortality.

Susan Meiselas, “White Hand of Terror: How the Peace Was Lost in El Salvador,” June 1981

The mano blanca, or “white hand,” was a sign left by Salvadoran paramilitary death squads on the homes of rebels they killed during the country’s civil war. (Magnum Photos)

Jim Goldberg, “Living at the Hotel California,” August 1978

This photo, the first Goldberg published in a magazine, became the basis of his first book, Rich and Poor (1985). It established his signature style of displaying handwritten messages by the photos’ subjects on the images. (Magnum Photos)

1986-1995: Social DocumentaryIn 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, which supported, and often published, long-term photojournalism projects from the likes of Joseph Rodriguez and Nan Goldin. The magazine considered photography “an essential component of its reporting,” Light says. The stories of this decade were closer, quieter, and more intimate, reflecting a broader shift in documentary photography toward extended relationships and subjective experience. Often unsettling, many of the images explored the emotional terrain of people confronting the country’s biggest problems.

Ken Light, “I Will Send for You or I Will Come Home Rich,” November 1988

This piece, which shows three migrants being apprehended while hiding in the trunk of a car 50 yards from the Mexican border in Southern California, was taken from the 1988 book To the Promised Land. (Contact Press)

Joseph Rodriguez, “Gangstas,” January 1994

“Coming out of the streets of New York myself, I felt connected in some sense,” Rodriguez says of his subject. “I was tired of seeing the news covering gangs as animals.” (Gallery Stock)

Nan Goldin, “Among Friends,” January 1992

Goldin’s work here feels ahead of its time in its focus on people who “are going in and out of drag,” as Carole Naggar wrote in an essay accompanying the photos: “They embody the fantasy that gender is malleable.” (© Nan Goldin, courtesy the artist and Gagosian)

1996-2007: Globalization and WarWith troops on the ground in the former Yugoslavia, Liberia, and of course Iraq and Afghanistan, the magazine’s reporting increasingly focused on global dynamics such as war, migration, and the environment. Our photography followed suit, documenting the human consequences of political and economic decisions. Images of this period often emphasized aftermath and impact over spectacle: wounded soldiers, displaced families, polluted landscapes, and communities caught in cycles of conflict.

Lana Šlezić, “Hidden Half: Women in Afghanistan,” July 2007

Šlezić spent two years traveling Afghanistan, documenting the impact of the war on women’s lives. This photo 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.

Tim Hetherington, “Soldiers in a Forgotten War,” January 2004

In Which Way Is the Front Line From Here?, the posthumous documentary about Hetherington, he talks about working in Liberia, looking for photos that tell a side of war less seen. This quiet shot of a young Liberian man saying goodbye to his sweetheart before heading to battle exemplifies Hetherington’s work: unexpectedly tender, reflective images of young men caught up in tumultuous times. (Imperial War Museums)

Donna DeCesare, “Deporting America’s Gang Culture,” July 1999

DeCesare returned to a country featured prominently in Mother Jones’ early years: El Salvador. This time, though, the focus turned to the United States sending Salvadoran immigrant gang members back to their home country, returning the children of those who fled the violence of the 1980s and in turn creating new problems for the beleaguered Central American country.

Nina Berman, “Returning From Iraq, the Damage Done,” March 2004

As the first waves of soldiers returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, frequent contributor Berman turned her camera on the complicated ways in which these veterans processed being back home. One of her subjects, 22-year-old Luis Calderon, was a former Army tank operator who was destroying a mural of Saddam Hussein when part of the wall crashed down, breaking his neck and paralyzing him. (Redux)

2008-2015: Crisis at HomeThe financial collapse of 2008 and its long tail turned the magazine’s gaze toward more domestic stories. When I came on as photo director in late 2007, I added more visual work to the rapidly growing website. Throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, photo essays explored economic collapse, environmental damage, gun violence, and the erosion of working-class life in America. There was room for fun, too, photographers like Bryce Duffy, Gregg Segal, and Chris Buck contributed oddball and often humorous portraiture.

Bryce Duffy, “Of Mormons and (Gay) Marriage,” March 2010

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.

Danny Wilcox Frazier, “What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?” November 2010

Pairing Wilcox Frazier with reporter Charlie LeDuff gave readers an unparalleled insight into the decimation of Detroit. A lot of photographers documented the blight, but this piece told a unique story of how cops shot and killed a 7-year-old girl when they burst into her home with a television crew in tow. And it led to an all-too-rare outcome: accountability for the police. (VII/Redux)

Stacy Kranitz, “Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business,” July 2013

Kranitz remembers this story, which looked at how police in rural Kentucky were playing whack-a-mole as they tried to stop the theft of Sudafed for use in meth, as one of the craziest projects she’s ever been part of.

2016-2025: Protest and PandemicOver the past decade, Mother Jones’ photography has often trained its sights on resistance movements and unfolding political crises: Black Lives Matter protests, climate organizing, immigration and the US, Mexico border, labor struggles, and the Covid pandemic. Many of the photographers represent a new generation working within or alongside the communities they photograph.

Ada Trillo,“‘Our Country Is Full,’” November 2020

Raised on the southern border, Trillo gave readers an inside perspective on a migrant caravan headed to the United States, and the ginned-up panic about it. In this photo, a young Honduran boy scrambles under a heavy gate at the Mexico, Guatemala border, where the caravan was stopped.

Zen Lefort, “‘I Didn’t Come Here to Lose’: How a Movement Was Born at Standing Rock,” January 2017

Lefort embedded with groups protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in the Dakotas in 2016. “I shared their daily lives, the freezing nights, the meals, the silences, the stories,” Lefort remembers. “I was 23; we were almost all the same age, and that shared youth bound us together with a kind of quiet certainty.”

Julie Dermansky, “A Portrait of a ‘Last Responder’: The Funeral Director Serving Louisiana’s Virus-Stricken Communities,” August 2020

Published in a special issue focused entirely on the Covid pandemic, Dermansky’s photo essay looked at the work of funeral home operator Courtney Baloney. His business, located in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” catered largely to the African American community, which was hit particularly hard by the pandemic.

Rian Dundon, “Blood on the Sidewalk: A Look at the Political Clashes of the Trump Era,” October 2019

Beginning in 2017, Dundon has been photographing the political confrontations that have rocked the country, including this faceoff at a Milo Yiannopoulos rally at the University of California, Berkeley.

For more on our 50th anniversary, check out 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. And don’t miss the More to the Story episode “Exploding Pintos, Imploding Politics: Celebrating 50 Years of Fearless Journalism” and MoJo Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery and co-founder Adam Hochschild’s conversation on KQED’s Forum.

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