A Haunting Portrait of Newark’s Bloody Summer of Unrest | The New Yorker

The photographer who captured Bass, Jr., for the cover of Life was Bud Lee, a twenty-six-year-old who had spent the past three years as a military photographer for Stars & Stripes before being recruited to Life by Peggy Sargent, the magazine’s photo editor. Prior to the Newark assignment, he had been dispatched to document the first legal abortion in the United States, in Denver. (The magazine never printed the images.) On the day he was assigned to cover the events in Newark, he had been shooting a portrait of a Wall Street stockbroker. The summer meant a dearth of other available photographers, and he was asked to step in, accompanied by the reporter Dale Wittner.