The intimate black-and-white ... the photography canon with his images of sharecroppers in the South during the Great Depression, which was part of the book, 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ...

The photos from ... was that the old woman next door deserved a photograph just as much as John Coltrane. The black man on the stoop merited a frame as much as the white supermodel.

The year was 1969, and French curator Jean-Claude Lemagny was just settling into his role as the first person appointed to oversee the library’s contemporary photography collection.