Pictures and People: A Search for Visual Truth and Social Justice

Over 130 black and white photographs and text, highlight the years from 1951, to images of Monet''s garden taken in 2007. Joan has photographed Martin Luther King in 1962, and President Barack Obama during his campaign in 2007. Her images document the people who have worked for civil rights in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the 1960s, as well as many photographs showing women''s roles during the last half of the twentieth century. At age 22, Joan photographed the birth of her first son. Initially the photographs were rejected nationwide by magazines as unfit to print, although the only medically graphic image was her baby with the umbilical cord still attached. The Des Moines Register''s Picture Magazine published the photographic series as subsequently LOOK magazine used the essay, and LIFE used one photograph. This series is in the autobiography, called one of the outstanding photographic essays of the 1950s. Two of her photographs, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are in the book. They are of Nan Wood Graham, model for the painting American Gothic (1975) and one of the Junior League Christmas Party (1962). As a photographer for The Des Moines Register and The Iowan, Joan covered Iowa''s ethnic groups and farm life in four states for children''s educational books showing Iowa cornbelt farming, Wisconsin dairy farming, Texas cotton farming, and apple growers in Washington. Her sixty-plus-year career as a photographer gives insight into her three marriages and family background.