Alan's work fearlessly crosses a line beyond which many practitioners of modern
journalism and fine art will not go. Long ago he rejected the technical distance
and objectivity many prefer in favor of a committed caring for human beings, often
in the midst of frightening circumstances.
Beautiful and captivating, Alan's images subtly but powerfully resonate in
the soul and in the conscience. They stir us to do something, or to support or
vote for something or somebody that can make a difference if we get the chance.
In 1968, when he came home from his tour of duty as a battlefield medic in Vietnam,
Alan Pogue began using photography to look into society's wounds for the possibility
of cultural healing. On a battlefield, a medic has to be able to see clearly,
honestly and to be strong in the love and mercy required for the work of healing.
Alan Pogue's first great body of work,
resulted from living and marching with Texas migrant farmworkers as they struggled
for better working conditions in an environment in which people were getting shot.
Some of those images were widely circulated as posters and became movement icons.
Alan's photographs helped change the way the Texas public saw
farmworkers, and Mexicans in general. His images were more than mere photographs. They
helped achieve real political progress.
If you were at all sensitive, when you shopped for vegetables, particularly organic produce, you
had to have visions in mind of the dignity of working people whose hands had pulled those
same grape or spinach bundles from the ground. This changed you.
Over the years, his photos have appeared in several national and international
publications including the New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post,
The L.A. Times, The Austin American Statesman, The Dallas Morning News, Kyodo News and Asahi
Shimbun in Japan, and Texas Monthly. Alan has also served as staff photographer for the
Texas Observer since 1971.
Alan's many honors include a Dobie-Paisano fellowship and being named Austin's "Best
Photographer" by the Austin Chronicle's Readers Poll ten years running, 1990-1999. His work has been widely
exhibited nationally and internationally. In 1989 Alan's National Farmworker show, sponsored
by the National Center for Farmworker Health, was shown in the Cannon House office building in
Washington, D.C. The exhibit continues to travel.
In 1995 Alan was invited to present his work on border issues in North
America at an international conference at The Sorbonne. In 1998, at the request of C.U.R.E.
(Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants), and with the help of a grant from
Resist, Alan produced a nationwide show on prison reform that opened in 1999 at the
Washington Center for Photography which is still traveling.
Alan made several trips to Iraq with Veteran's For Peace, (he was on the national board for three
years and helped found the Austin Neil Bischoff Chapter), in a campaign to repair water treatment
facilities and raise international awareness of the suffering caused by U.S./U.N. sanctions. An
exhibit from this work is also circulating nationally.
More recently, Alan was commissioned by a Japanese peace group to travel to Peshawar, Pakistan
to document conditions among refugees displaced from Afghanistan by the war there, and to
show photographs from this trip in Tokyo. He traveled to Antrim, Ireland to exhibit his
work in May, 2005. He is also exhibiting work from trips to Haiti, to call attention to
conditions there.
