Charles Harbutt

I became a photojournalist because I wanted to see for myself what was going on in the world. Photographers actually have to see and live through what they show, so I felt like a kind of front-line historian, getting down on paper the look of today for the future. After all, we cover peak events: wars, revolutions, famine, disease, the marauding and follies of the rich and powerful.

But I came to feel I was missing something. What about all those things that are just funny or curious or even triumphantly, overwhelmingly there? Or meaningless, banal, chaotic? What I really see in the course of a normal day. So I shot a lot of that, too.

In the early seventies, the U.S. government began to use agent provocateurs to discredit the antiwar and civil rights movements by fomenting riots to justify severe repression. The only way a photograph could show the thugs were cops would be if they wore T-shirts with “POLICE” on them. The government had become sophisticated at getting its propaganda out and I didn’t want to be a messenger. Things aren’t always what they appear to be.