Chicago, 1973: children riding a tricycle along a balcony in the Robert Taylor Homes, a high-rise public housing project for low-income families. Or a woman reading in church, teenagers leaning against a chain-link fence, a red motorcycle parked in the sun. The colors are the rich, slightly shifted tones of period Kodachrome. Those images have a creator. With a name.
The archive of John H. White
From June to October 1973, and briefly in the spring of 1974, twenty-eight-year-old John H. White, a photographer for the Chicago Daily News, worked for the federal government to portray Chicago, specifically its Black community. He did so for DOCUMERICA, a project by the Environmental Protection Agency that—modeled on the 1930s Farm Security Administration—commissioned dozens of photographers to document American environmental degradation before expanding into a broader portrait of life across the country. In 1982, White would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.
The question of the gaze
The easiest reading would be the colonial one: a white, institutional federal agency sending someone to photograph Black bodies in the ghetto to file them away as a symptom of an environmental issue. Easy, and wrong. White was a Black photographer documenting his own people. The National Archives describe his work as the vision of a city and a community that few outside of it truly knew. He himself spoke of the assignment as an opportunity to capture a slice of life, to capture history. His images, he said, were portraits reflecting pride, love, beauty, hope, struggle, joy, and even anger and frustration.
It is an insider's gaze. It doesn't point fingers, offer pity, or exoticize. It looks at eye level, not from above. This is precisely what sets these photographs apart from the sociological catalog the client might have expected: it is a man documenting his own world in the language of those who inhabit it.
The third gaze is ours
Then comes the third layer of gaze. Ours. Half a century later, these exact images resurface on social media accounts, stripped of context. There is no mention of John H. White or the EPA on the feed. Instead, there is only a vague category—"Black community in 1973"—and perhaps a prompt to follow the account for more. The artist has been replaced by the reposter. The context has evaporated. What remains is purely surface: the film grain, the silhouettes, the street style, the Afro as a graphic element. It becomes ideal fuel for the second-hand nostalgia that algorithms reward, where someone else's past is converted into a ready-to-use aesthetic for everyone.
It is a dynamic Gen Z knows well, even if they rarely put a name to it. The same feeds that celebrate the graffiti-covered New York subway, post-industrial Detroit, or any subculture born from the margins operate by subtraction: they retain the visual codes while letting go of the social context. The result is striking and recognizable, but severed. In the case of John H. White, the severance is twofold. The context is lost—the segregated Chicago of the 1970s, the material hardships of those families—and the photographer is lost, the very element that prevented those images from being the gaze of an outsider. Without White's name, we revert straight back to the colonial framing his photographs actively disproved. Anonymity surrenders them to anyone wishing to project their own narrative onto them.
Public domain does not mean nameless
There is a distinct irony in all of this. John H. White photographed for a project concerned with erasure: DOCUMERICA aimed to capture an America on film that was changing, fading, and deteriorating. Fifty years later, his images survive effortlessly, circulating more widely than ever, yet what gets erased is the photographer himself. Not the subject, but the creator.
Because they were produced for a federal project, these shots belong to the public domain. Anyone can legally and freely republish them. But public domain does not mean nameless. The freedom to share an image doesn't negate the fact that someone conceived, framed, and selected it. And that someone, in 1973 Chicago, was capturing the scene from the inside, not looking in from the outside.
Perhaps that is the question an Instagram carousel cannot ask, but one worth keeping open: when we look at those photographs today, what are we truly looking at—Chicago's Black community, or merely the way we like to imagine it? And whose gaze, in the end, are we holding in our hands?
PHOTO: Black residents on a balcony at the Robert Taylor Homes, John H. White
Photography
John H. White
