© 2024 Public Radio Tulsa
800 South Tucker Drive
Tulsa, OK 74104
(918) 631-2577

A listener-supported service of The University of Tulsa
classical 88.7 | public radio 89.5
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

"Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project"

Photo by Matt Herron
Aired on Tuesday, July 22nd.

Fifty years ago, in 1964 -- during what would come to be called Freedom Summer in the American South -- a young photographer named Matt Herron, who'd recently relocated to Mississippi from the North (with his wife and kids) in order to work on civil rights issues while also shooting photo-stories for Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post, put together a group of talented photographers that was known as the Southern Documentary Project. Herron drew upon the advice of his friend, the noted documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, to both establish and lead this small but active group, which traveled all over the segregated South, cameras at the ready, and thereby assembled a file of unforgettable photographs. Some 160 of those black-and-white photographs have now been collected by Herron in a new book: "Mississippi Eyes: The Story and Photography of the Southern Documentary Project." Herron is our guest today on ST. He looks back on that fearful, exciting, and historic time while telling us how this striking book was created.

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
Related Content