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AP story:

RALEIGH, N.C. — A haunting 150-year-old photo found in a North Carolina attic shows a young black child named John, barefoot and wearing ragged clothes, perched on a barrel next to another unidentified young boy.

Art historians believe it's an extremely rare Civil War-era photograph of children who were either slaves at the time or recently emancipated. . . .

New York collector Keya Morgan said he paid $30,000 for the photo album including the photo of the young boys and several family pictures and $20,000 for the sale document. Morgan said the deceased owner of the home where the photo was found was thought to be a descendant of John.

A portrait of slave children is rare, Morgan said.

"I buy stuff all the time, but this shocked me," he said.

What makes the picture an even more compelling find is that several art experts said it was created by the photography studio of Mathew Brady, a famous 19th-century photographer known for his portraits of historical figures such as President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Stapp said the photo was probably not taken by Brady himself but by Timothy O'Sullivan, one of Brady's apprentices. O'Sullivan took a multitude of photos depicting the carnage of the Civil War.

Read the rest: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ijneQuOSPKFWdnTgmKYGkm6Zxta...

Or maybe not:

http://cwmemory.com/2010/06/11/is-this-a-photograph-of-north-carolina-slaves/

Update on June 16: the debate about this image is ongoing: 

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2010/06/16/1503384/authenticity-of-photo-dis...

Update on July 2: Still more nay-saying: 

http://michaelchardy.blogspot.com/2010/06/rare-photograph.html

Sammy Davis Jr. and May Britt, photographed in 1960 by Brian Duffy. The British photographer died last week.

Guardian obit:

The photographer Brian Duffy, who has died of pulmonary fibrosis aged 76, captured the swinging 60s in a series of stylish and iconic images, but then disappeared from the world of glamour for 30 years. With David Bailey and Terence Donovan, he broke the mould of fashion photography. The three men became far more famous than many of the models with whom they worked, and were – for a while – bigger than the glossy magazines that published their pictures. The photographer Norman Parkinson called Duffy, Bailey and Donovan the "black trinity". There was some merit in the label. The cravat-wearing old guard felt threatened by these freewheeling young men in leather jackets, who took their models on to the streets and snapped them with newfangled, small 35mm cameras.

Their inventive compositions were looser than the stiff, stuffier studio portraits of the 50s. Duffy later explained: "Before 1960, a fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual. We were great mates but also great competitors. We were fairly chippy and if you wanted it you could have it. We would not be told what to do."

Duffy was argumentative and awkward, but never grumpy, as he is often portrayed. Bailey remembers him being "sublime at solving technical problems". He expected high standards from everybody around him, but he liked his models to have a drink, and even to sing when they were being photographed. "He was very scary, but he was the business," recalled Joanna Lumley, who posed for him in the 1960s.

Read the rest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/06/brian-duffy-obituary

Gallery of portraits: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/sep/28/brian-duffy-photog...

By Bob Keefe
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

WASHINGTON -- The two black men boarded the buses in Washington along with 11 others, both white and black, bound for an unforgettably harrowing journey through the segregated South.

By the time they arrived in Mississippi in May 1961, John Lewis had been beaten for trying to use a "Whites Only" bathroom.

Hank Thomas barely escaped a firebombed bus, was arrested for trying to use a white man's bathroom and was left by police at the hands of Ku Klux Klan.

"It was my good fortune," said Thomas, who was 19 at the time, "that I could run fast."

Today, John Lewis is a Democratic congressman representing Atlanta. Thomas is a Stone Mountain businessman who with his wife owns two McDonald's restaurants and a Marriott hotel franchise.
Together, Lewis, Thomas and other members of that first "Freedom Ride" are planning to once again retrace their hellish 1961 journey, which was intended to be a nonviolent protest of Jim Crow laws and segregation in the South.

http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/georgians-other-freedom-riders-536975.html

http://mississippifreedom50th.com/

Another Dog’s Death
in
Collected Poems, 1953-1993
by John Updike
Knopf

For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave

in preparation for the certain. She came along,
which I had not expected. Still, the children gone,
such expeditions were rare, and the dog,
spayed early, knew no nonhuman word for love.

She made her stiff legs trot and let her bent tail wag.
We found a spot we liked, where the pines met the
    field.
The sun warmed her fur as she dozed and I dug;
I carved her a safe place while she protected me.

I measured her length with the shovel’s long handle;
she perked in amusement, and sniffed the heaped-up
    earth.
Back down at the house, she seemed friskier,
but gagged, eating. We called the vet a few days later.

They were old friends. She held up a paw, and he
injected a violet fluid. She swooned on the lawn;
we watched her breathing quickly slow and cease.
In a wheelbarrow up to the hole, her warm fur shone.

mimi thi nguyen writes:

Originally published in the photo collection Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freed Riders, this archival police photograph of then 19 year-old Freedom Rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland has been making the rounds. There is much debate about what troubling discourses of race and beauty might be operating in its reception right now, as there should be — the manifold dangers in conflating beauty with truth, or in attributing to whiteness a special heroism, are real and run deep.

But I admit that I keep looking too. Why? I’m reminded of Roland Barthes’s notion of the photograph’s punctum, “that accident [of photographic detail] which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Camera Lucida, of course). For me, it’s the flower on her label catching in its petals the chain from the police identification board hanging around her neck, after her arrest. Evoking both vulnerability and defiance, that “minor” sartorial detail, as Barthes puts it, bruises me, is poignant to me.