I found the website design unfortunate. Normally I expect to easily scroll screen-sized photos, and without the watermark showing through much of the photograph. Big emphasis on the Shop, not so much on a good viewing experience - unless I'm just daft this morning.
Thank you, Søren — I did not know this at the time of posting. I was responding to the photographs themselves, but I agree that this part of Withers’s history is important and makes any appreciation of his work much more complicated.
Indeed, it’s impossible to separate the man as a paid interlocutor/spy from the images themselves once you know the story. The information he provided Hoover was instrumental in the government strategy called COINTELPRO—to track, discredit, and disrupt civil rights, Black Power, and antiwar movements at the height of the 1950s–70s struggle.
I found the website design unfortunate. Normally I expect to easily scroll screen-sized photos, and without the watermark showing through much of the photograph. Big emphasis on the Shop, not so much on a good viewing experience - unless I'm just daft this morning.
A great photographer, but with a long shadow, he worked for Hoover inside the MLK orbit.
Thank you, Søren — I did not know this at the time of posting. I was responding to the photographs themselves, but I agree that this part of Withers’s history is important and makes any appreciation of his work much more complicated.
For sure, but his photographs are still fantastic, and if nothing else historically important. His ‘I am a man’ photograph is huge!
Indeed, it’s impossible to separate the man as a paid interlocutor/spy from the images themselves once you know the story. The information he provided Hoover was instrumental in the government strategy called COINTELPRO—to track, discredit, and disrupt civil rights, Black Power, and antiwar movements at the height of the 1950s–70s struggle.