Michelle V. Agins: Storyteller

Michelle V. Agins is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist whose images tell unforgettable stories about life in America. The second Black woman ever hired as a staff photographer at The New York Times, Agins’s groundbreaking assignments offer some of the most important documentation of race relations, celebrity culture, sports, spirituality, and economic disparity in America.

Over the course of her five-decade career as a photojournalist, Agins has covered a vast array of news moments, from her early pictures 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. Agins 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 Agins’s powerful humanizing vision. “Storytelling is the only way I’ve done my work,” Agins said, and “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 here, studies the effects of gun violence on a Harlem neighborhood.

This museum exhibition, Agins’s first, comprises sixty-eight images taken during her thirty-five years at The New York Times.

Organized by Maura Foley, Picture Editor, The New York Times, and Maura Reilly, Director, Zimmerli Art Museum.

Generous support 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.

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See Michelle Agins discuss her new exhibition on YouTube.