John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

#Charlottesville

What's it like when your hometown becomes a hashtag? When the Virginia Quarterly Review asked me to write some reflections on the white supremacists' terrorism of August 11th and 12th, 2017, and their aftermath, I was glad to say "yes." And to try to answer that question. Read more →

Why Charlottesville?

Short answer. White supremacists capitalized on the city's decision to remove a statue of Confederate hero Robert E. Lee from a park in the center of the city. Read more →

PS To the Black Photographers Annual at the Virginia Museum Fine Arts

The Black Photographers Annual is now freely available online. This is a very big deal for anyone who cares about photography and American cultural history -- and for anyone who teaches the subjects. Forty-five years after the first volume of the annual appeared, copies are very hard to find. As part of the exhibition, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has digitized the annuals, and they're now freely available to anyone with an internet connection Read more →

The Black Photographers Annual at the Virginia Museum Fine Arts

We'll probably look back on 2017 and say that A Commitment to the Community, an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts that celebrates the Black Photographers Annual of the 1970s and '80s, was the most important photographic exhibition of the year. Read more →

Women Photograph Grant Winners, 2017

Nobody moves faster than Daniella Zalcman. A big claim, but I'm pretty sure it's true. The organization that she created, Women Photograph, went from idea to reality in no more than as year. And what a tremendously impressive reality -- an online database of female visual journalists in 87 countries, a mentoring program for younger visual journalists, and a source of funding for travel and for long-term projects. Along the way, she's continued to work on Signs of Your Identity, some of the most innovative and moving documentary photography that I've seen in years. Read more →

The Kiss: A Mystery from the C.M. Bell Studio Archive

This photo shouldn't exist. Two women. A passionate embrace. A deep kiss. What's it doing in a respectable 19th-century photographer's archive? Read more →

This Is Not a Lynch Mob: Charlottesville and the KKK

This is not a lynch mob. That might seem like a strange thing to say about this photo. But perhaps not, depending on your knowledge of history or the color of your skin. There's no question that a black man or woman who came across a scene like this, in 1917 -- it's somewhere just outside Charlottesville, Virginia -- would proceed with a great deal of caution. Read more →