This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement is a paradigm-shifting publication that presents the Civil Rights Movement through the work of nine photographers who participated in the movement as activists with SNCC, SCLC, and CORE. Unlike images produced by photojournalists, who covered breaking news events, these photographers lived within the movement—primarily within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) framework—and documented its activities by focusing on the student activists and local people who together made it happen. The core of the book is a selection of 150 black-and-white photographs, representing the work of photographers Bob Adelman, George Ballis, Bob Fitch, Bob Fletcher, Matt Herron, David Prince, Herbert Randall, Maria Varela, and Tamio Wakayama. Images are grouped around four movement themes and convey SNCC's organizing strategies, resolve in the face of violence, impact on local and national politics, and influence on the nation's consciousness. The photographs and texts of This Light of Ours remind us that the movement was a battleground, that the battle was successfully fought by thousands of "ordinary" Americans among whom were the nation's courageous youth, and that the movement's moral vision and impact continue to shape our lives.

"Mississippi Eyes" is the chronicle of the events and the powerful witness of five young photographers in The Southern Documentary Project, working during the pivotal summer of 1964 in the segregated South. Together they captured the sometimes violent, sometimes miraculous process of social change as segregation resisted then gave way to a new beginning toward social justice.

With 160 black-and-white photographs, this chronicle begins in the winter mud of the Mississippi Delta and ends in Atlantic City's convention hall as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation challenged the official Mississippi delegates to the National Democratic Convention. The Southern Documentary Project was the brain child of Matt Herron, a budding photojournalist who had moved with his family to Mississippi in 1963 to work in civil rights and shoot picture stories for "Life," "Look," and the "Saturday Evening Post." Drawing on advice from his friend, the noted documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, he pulled together a shoestring budget, recruited photographers with civil rights experience, and completed the summer with a file of unforgettable photographs.

Along the way, Southern Documentary photographers suffered beatings and nearly died at the hands of a sheriff's posse in Selma, Alabama. They documented a moving service in a sharecropper's church, and captured inspirational encounters between Ivy League student teachers and black children in Freedom Schools. They followed the heartbreaking struggle of a young boy to confront the murder of his older brother by Klansmen. "Mississippi Eyes" is the only book to provide a firsthand account of what it was actually like to photograph the civil rights struggle in the Deep South.