Paul Fusco

Paul Fusco was born in Leominster, Massachusetts. He became interested in photography around 1945 and pursued it as a serious hobby, eventually gained some awareness and experience as a photographer in the United States Army Signal Corps in Korea in 1951-53. After the war he studied photojournalism at Ohio University and received his B.F.A. in 1957. Fusco worked as a staff photographer for Look until 1971. During that period he produced significant works on destitute miners in Kentucky, Hispanic ghetto life in NY, runaway youths trying to survive in NYC, cultural changes and experimentation and clashes in California, everyday life across the U.S.: farming, Indian reservations, small towns, migrant labor, Black life in the Mississippi delta, religious proselitizing in the south and many other topics. He also looked at life and social issues in other countries: Russia, England, Israel, Egypt, Japan, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and an extended study of the "Iron Curtain" stretching from Northern Finland to Iran. After LOOK folded Fusco approached Magnum Photos and in 1973, became an associate and then a member in 1974. His photography has been published widely in many major U.S. magazines: Time, Life, and Newsweek, NY Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Psychology Today and others. Paul's work has also been widely published in magazines throughout the world through Magnum Photos. Mr. Fusco has spent most of his career trying to understand what life is like and means to the people he works with and to try to make the reality of those lives emotionally and intellectually understandable to others from his photographs. Fusco left New York in the early 1980s to live in Mill Valley, California, and devoted himself to exploring the lives of the oppressed and those with alternative life styles. In one of his early works, La Causa: The California Grape Strike (1970), he made a thorough examination of the strikers' case for reform. His outlook on photojournalism is explained in The Photo Essay: Paul Fusco & Will McBride, where a chapter is given to one of his photo essays on the living and working conditions of coal miners in the Appalachians, George Branch, and Kentucky. Fusco has recently relocated to the New York City area. Among his most recent work are those living with AIDS in California, homelessnes and the Welfare System in NY, the Zapatista uprising in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and extended work on the children and adults in