Passing of John Kouns (1929–2019)

By José Luis Benavides

January 21, 2019— The Tom & Ethel Bradley Center regrets to inform the passing of photographer John Kouns on Saturday, January 5, 2019, in Sausalito, California. Kouns (1929–2019) was not only an accomplished photographer but also an outstanding and generous human being who fought for social justice.  

His images, housed at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, are meant to document people’s history. They portray people making history by struggling for worker’s rights, for civil rights, and for social justice. Above all, they portray people that hoped for a better future for their country.

A self-described “concerned photographer,” Kouns’s images open an intimate window to the work of these anonymous history makers. He spent years documenting two of the most important social movements of the 1960s and 1970s in America—the civil rights struggle in the South and the worker’s and civil rights struggle of the United Farm Workers Union in California.

Born in Alameda, California, on Sept. 21, 1929, John Alexander Kouns grew up in San José. A high-school teacher introduced him to Richard Wright’s novel Native Son, a book that shaped Kouns’s perspective on race in America. “It affected me tremendously,” said Kouns. After finishing the book, he went and ask his teacher what he could do. “John,” the teacher said, “what you should do is belong to the NAACP.” And that’s exactly what he did. He joined the organization at age 15.

In the late 1950s, Kouns studied at New York Institute of Photography where he met and got inspired by Eugene (Gene) Smith. After working for a couple of years for UPI in San Francisco, he became a successful industrial photographer who practice, on the side, what he described as Social Work Photography, a free-of-charge work for agencies on deaf and handicapped, the blind, and the Salvation Army.

In 1963, he decided to give himself a “self-imposed Guggenheim in the South” as a prelude to a plan to visit the South. He traveled to the March on Washington where he took photographs of the participants. Later, while he was in Birmingham, he photographed the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four girls. In Selma, he photographed the struggle for civil rights from 1963 to 1965, including two of the three marches from Selma to Montgomery.  

Later, Kouns went to California’s San Joaquín Valley because the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) was trying to unionize farmworkers and he wanted to photograph that process. He ended up staying with the workers and continue following the struggle of Filipino and Mexican-American farmworkers during the 1960s and 1970s.

Here is a short video with some of his images during an oral history interview conducted by James Moore in 2004 as part of his MA thesis work at California State University, Northridge.