Reed, Ellis “Eli”

Impact on the world

After a chance encounter with photographer Donald Greenhaus, who became his mentor and told him “there’s a bigger war here at home” than the one Reed hoped to cover in Vietnam, Reed began freelancing in 1970 and built a reputation covering conflict in El Salvador and Guatemala that drew Magnum Photos’ attention in 1982; he became a Nieman Fellow at Harvard that year and a full Magnum member in 1988, the agency’s first Black photographer in its four-decade history. His 1988 book Beirut: City of Regrets grew out of four and a half years documenting the Lebanese Civil War, and beginning in earnest around 1980 he built a parallel, decades-long documentation of Black American life — from the Crown Heights riots to the 1995 Million Man March — collected in his 1997 book Black in America, for which Gordon Parks, also profiled in this collection, wrote the preface. Reed has also worked as a motion-picture still photographer on films including Rosewood and 8 Mile, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, and has taught photojournalism as a clinical professor at the University of Texas at Austin since 2005.

Life & background

Born in 1946 in Linden, New Jersey, and raised largely in a low-income housing project in Perth Amboy after his mother’s death, Reed graduated in 1969 from the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts with a degree in illustration and began working as a freelance photographer in 1970. He documented conflicts across Central America, Lebanon, Haiti, Panama, and Rwanda for Magnum from the 1980s through the 1990s, joined the University of Texas at Austin faculty in 2005, and continues to photograph, teach, and lecture into his eighth decade.

Sources

1. Magnum Photos; Huck magazine; University of Texas School of Journalism and Media