Uploaded April 2018 | Updated September 2026, 13 hours ago
Maurice Berger is a writer, cultural historian, and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of race and visual culture. He is research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Race Stories, his monthly column, for the Lens section of the New York Times, explores the relationship of photography to concepts and social issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, Pen America, Wired, National Geographic, and the Los Angeles Times. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), a finalist for Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University, and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2010). Berger has received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, International Association of Art Critics, as well as an Emmy Award nomination. For his work on Race Stories, he was awarded the 2014 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation ArtsWriters Grant.
Maurice Berger is a writer, cultural historian, and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of race and visual culture. He is research professor and chief curator at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Race Stories, his monthly column, for the Lens section of the New York Times, explores the relationship of photography to concepts and social issues about race not usually covered in the mainstream media. His writings have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, Village Voice, Brooklyn Rail, Pen America, Wired, National Geographic, and the Los Angeles Times. His books include White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), a finalist for Horace Mann Bond Book Award of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University, and For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Yale, 2010). Berger has received honors and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Association of Art Museum Curators, International Association of Art Critics, as well as an Emmy Award nomination. For his work on Race Stories, he was awarded the 2014 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation ArtsWriters Grant.






![The Lower East Side: Then & Now
The Lower East Side may look very different today, but much of its history still exists through the work of photographers like Weegee, Lee Sievan, Andreas Feininger, and Bill Witt who preserved fleeting moments of everyday life across the rapidly changing neighborhood.
For Lower East Side History Month, we revisited several streets photographed during the 1940s, pairing historic images from ICP’s collection with the same locations nearly 80 years later.
Images:
Bill Witt, [Greeting at $2.00 Shoes, Lower East Side, New York City}, 1947, Gift of Gary Witt, 1996 (3.1996)
Lee Sievan, [Orchard & Rivington Streets Pushcarts], 1946, Gift of Lee Sievan, 1990 (20.1990)
Weegee, [Juggler Bill Brown, Lower East Side, New York], 1947, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993 (2008.1993)
Andreas Feininger, [Lower East Side shops], 1940, Gift of Andreas Feininger, 1976 (781.1976)
Bill Witt, [The Eye, Lower East Side, New York], 1948, Gift of Gary Witt, 1996 (4.1996)
Lee Sievan, [Chatham Square], 1946, Gift of Lee Sievan, 1990 (1.1990) The Lower East Side: Then & Now](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mx0ZxSvnu94/mqdefault.jpg)
![Economics and activism in American Job
From the Montgomery bus boycotts to the Poor Peoples Campaign in Washington—guest curator Makeda Best outlines some of the images on view in American Job: 1940–2011, which, as Forbes says, underscores the enduring connections between labor and human rights.
Visit to learn more about the history of labor and its deep ties to politics, activism, and resistance.
Images:
1: Installation view © Jeenah Moon
2: Dan Weiner, Bus boycott. Montgomery, Alabama, 1956. Museum Purchase, International Fund for Concerned Photography, 1974 (1012.1974)
3: Dan Weiner, [Bus boycott, Montgomery, Alabama], 1956.
4: Unidentified Photographer, [Crowd, the Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, DC], May–June 1968. Museum Purchase, 2002 (670.2002.94)
5: Gordon Parks, [Steps of Lincoln Memorial littered with debris after March on Washington], August 28, 1963. The LIFE Magazine Collection, 2005 (1643.2005) © Gordon Parks Economics and activism in American Job](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nPhoZUdpo8k/mqdefault.jpg)


