A Photographic Memoir
Helen M. StummerFor 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’s Risking Life and Lens is an extraordinarily personal glimpse into the life and work of a photographer who has spent her career consumed with documenting social injustice and those it has affected most. Stummer turns her lens on the Lower East Side and Newark with a levity reminiscent of Helen Levitt’s photographs of children and a direness evocative of Jacob Riis's images of the tenements of New York. These seemingly disparate qualities combine to make Stummer’s photographs both captivating and relevant. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the humanity of our urban cities."
—John Cyr, photographer and author of Developer Trays
" Helen M. Stummer is of that rare breed of humans who seek a personal path of enlightenment that ends up teaching us all. In this case, as a social documentary photographer who opens windows for viewing extraordinary social worlds. Worlds of real, diverse people living out everyday lives criss-crossed by realities of race, class, gender in intensely urban settings of East Coast metropolises. Her always emotion-laden, highly humanized, and vividly realistic black-and-white photos speak much beyond the thousand words of the old cliché to universal lived truths no number of words can convey."
—Joe Feagin, Distinguished Professor, Texas A&M University
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