Robert Houston

Robert Houston was born on the thirteenth of November 1935 in Baltimore, Maryland, and came of age in the segregated Black neighborhoods of East Baltimore that would remain the wellspring of his life's work. Placed with foster parents in infancy, he grew into a young man whose eye for his own community never dimmed, and photography became, in his own words, his first true love.

His calling crystallized in the spring of 1968. In the days after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Houston left steady employment to become a full-time documentary photographer. Beginning that May he worked for Life magazine, assigned to the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. He did not merely visit the story — he lived it, dwelling for weeks among the residents of Resurrection City, the tented community of nearly three thousand souls raised on the National Mall to demand economic justice.

The images he made there endure as some of the most intimate and dignified records of that struggle. His photographs and the journal he kept are today held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, and his work has been honored in exhibitions including the National Gallery of Art's survey of photography and the Black Arts Movement.

For more than half a century he turned his lens on Baltimore's Black community — its freedom rallies, its poverty, and above all the vibrancy of its street life — becoming its principal chronicler. Robert Houston died on the twenty-sixth of April 2021, aged eighty-five. He is remembered as a photographer whose camera was guided by his heart, and whose faithful witness lets a people tell its own story still.