Risking Life and Lens

For more than forty years, Helen M. Stummer has captured images depicting the dignity, humanity, and suffering of people living in conditions of poverty. Her efforts taught her to understand firsthand the resilience of people living in insufferable conditions. In her inspiring memoir, Risking Life and Lens, Stummer recounts her experiences as a socially-concerned documentary photographer whose passion for her work overcame her fears.

Stummer’s images, from the mean streets of Manhattan and Newark, New Jersey, to the back woods of Maine and the mountains of Guatemala, expose the myths of poverty and serve as a metaphor for her challenges in her own life. The 159 photographs reproduced here recount Stummer’s journey as an artist and her personal quest for truth.

Risking Life and Lens shares Stummer’s work and educational efforts and it provides valuable insights about race, class, and social justice—issues that continue to divide the country and the world. Her work has created change in both her own life and the lives of those who view it.

Helen M. Stummer is a New Jersey-based social documentary photographer and Visual Sociologist whose work is included in the collections of the Library of Congress, the International Center of Photography, Manhattan, the Museum of the City of New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and Rutgers University Libraries Special Collections in New Brunswick. She is Emerita Associate Professor of Photography and Photojournalism at the County College of Morris and the author of No Easy Walk: Newark 1980–1993 (Temple). She received grants from the George and Helen Segal Foundation in 2011–12 as well as the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 1995 and 2003, and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Kean University in 2012.