Steve Schapiro - Boy with Pepsi, Arkansas, 1961

Black-and-white digital print with glossy lamination.. Hot-surface lamination. Old copy from the Misomex editing process (a machine for reproducing film or CTP—Computer-to-Plate—files for imposing offset plates).
SERAG printer.
Format 14 x 21 cm, glued onto 24 x 30 cm cardstock.

Arkansas in the 1960s. A young boy proudly holding his bottle of Pepsi. In 1961, at the age of 25, Steve Schapiro went to Arkansas to photograph a migrant camp. He later showed the photographs to an editor at LIFE magazine. The migrants’ plight moved him: the exhausting work, the low wages and, above all, the fate of the migrant children, constantly on the move with little hope of receiving a decent education.
He spent four weeks in Arkansas, and when he returned to New York and developed the film, he discovered that his photographs conveyed what he had hoped they would. A small Catholic magazine, Jubilee, published “The Migrants” as his first photo essay, devoting no fewer than eight pages to it; and the New York Times chose one of the photographs for the cover of its Magazine section.