Michelle Agins near her home in Bedford-Stuyvesant. (Briana Ellis-Gibbs)
Photojournalist Michelle Agins built her career at a time when editors gave very few assignments to women—much less to women of color.
“I stayed the course,” says Agins, the second Black woman ever hired as a New York Times staff photographer. “But sometimes I feel like because I had to fight so long, I really just missed the whole point of me being a photojournalist.”
Agins has won a Gordon Parks Award, was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team honored in 2001 for the Times series “How Race is Lived in America” and this year became the first woman of color to receive the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award from the National Press Photographers Association, its highest honor.
On Oct. 25, Agins will receive the Lucie Award for Photojournalism at Carnegie Hall.
