Smithfield Baptist Church, Charlotte, North Carolina
Maker
Haun, Declan
American, 1937-1994
Date1963
MediumGelatin silver print
Dimensionsimage: 6 7/8 in x 10 1/8 in; paper: 11 IN x 14 in
Credit LineGift of Jack A. Jaffe, Focus/Infinity Fund
Object number1994:9
About the ArtistFor much of his career, Declan Haun was active as a freelance photographer, and he is perhaps best known for his photographs of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Like those photographers, his later work devoted to subjects such as street scenes in Gary, Indiana, or Charlotte, North Carolina, follow from a strong sense of social conscience and compassion for his subjects. Haun was also closely attentive to the formal aspects of his photographs, many of which have a pared down but powerful graphic quality, and he was a meticulous printer of his own work. Haun began his career as a photographer in 1958, at the age of 21, at the Charlotte Observer. In 1963, he moved to Chicago, where he would spend the next fifteen years as a freelance photographer. His photographs would featured in publications such as Life magazine, National Geographic, Look, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post. From 1976 to 1982, Haun served as the photo editor at the National Geographic Magazine, before taking the comparable position at Smithsonian Magazine, where he worked from 1982 to 1984. He later founded a marketing and multi-media company, Odyssey Communications, in 1990, and taught photography at George Washington University. He passed away in 1994 in Washington D.C.
![The morning after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, heavily armed members of the Alabama Highway Patrol make a show of force near the [bombed Sixteenth Street Baptist] church. The bomb exploded next to the wall and up through the floor of a Sunday school class. Four girls were buried in the bathroom and died.](/internal/media/dispatcher/3517/thumbnail)
