The Erasure of Political History at the National Archives

Last month, a photographer named Ellen Shub died, near Boston, at the age of seventy-three. I had got to know Shub in the nineteen-eighties, when I worked for gay and lesbian publications. At that time, she was already well known as a chronicler of social protest—a role that she continued to perform up until she unexpectedly fell ill, just weeks before she died. Many of her pictures were compositionally similar—frontal, focussed on one person and one sign. In 1975, she took a picture of a woman holding a placard that said “no more back room back alley abortions.” In 1981, at a Boston rally for the Equal Rights Amendment, she photographed a woman who held a sign on which she had pasted “59c”—the amount of money, it was said, that a woman made for every dollar earned by a man. In 2004, when the Republican National Convention was held in New York, Shub took a picture of a protester with a large sheet of cardboard printed with the words “ ‘dissent is the highest form of patriotism’ —thomas jefferson.” In 2014, at a rally in Boston, she photographed a young man holding one that said “#icantbreathe.” There were many more, and, in each case, the message of the photograph was the message of the sign.