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Thirty Years Later, Ten Years Ago: Mark Tucker for Newsweek

Eric Etheridge’s Breach of Peace post got a lot of deserving praise last week, and I received many related emails. One was from Mark Tucker, who ...

Eric Etheridge’s Breach of Peace post got a lot of deserving praise last week, and I received many related emails. One was from Mark Tucker, who told me about an assignment he was given for Newsweek ten years ago, to mark the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Tucker worked with picture editor Debbie Edelstein at the magazine, and traveled around the country to photograph the men who had been closest with King at the time of his death. He was given tremendous freedom in how to create the images:

“Debbie was the ultimate picture editor for this project — she just
said, ‘Go do what you do’. Who could not love that? We traveled across
the country, finding these men in their current occupations, and I
think we shot the whole project on 665 Polaroid, and cleared the
negatives at night in the hotel room. Looking back now, it seems pretty
crazy to have done the whole project on 665 neg, but it felt right at
the time. I can’t remember now whether David Halberstam’s book, The
Children, had come out yet when we did this assignment, but it gives
further intimate details about the climate of that period.”

Here are the results:
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Jesse Jackson, Chicago

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Representative John Lewis, on the Edmund Pettus bridge, Selma, Alabama

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Ambassador Andrew Young, Atlanta

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Hosea Williams (now deceased), Atlanta

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Dexter King, Atlanta

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Dr. Joseph Lowery, Atlanta

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Julian Bond, Charlottesville

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Marion Barry, Washington DC

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C.T. Vivian, Atlanta

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Walter Fauntroy, Washington DC

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