The stunning photojournalism that made Mother Jones

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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 long-time 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 know 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 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, Immigration, COVID, and Climate (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, longterm, 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