Lester Sloan is a writer and photographer. He worked as a staff photographer for Newsweek Magazine for twenty-five years, documenting the 1967 uprising in Detroit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the OJ Simpson Trial. Prior to that he worked as cameraman/reporter for the CBS affiliate in Detroit. For a period, he was a contributing editor to Emerge magazine and an essayist with NPR’s “Weekend Edition.” He is the recipient of multiple fellowships, including the prestigious Neiman Fellowship, which afforded him a year of study at Harvard University in 1976. His was the on-set photographer for Spike Lee’s film, Get on the Bus, and he is an avid collector of oral histories. His audio/visual archives include extensive interviews with black actors from the early days of Hollywood like Joel Fluellen and Beah Richards, as well as expatriate cartoonist Ollie Harrington.

Lester is the author of a book entitled Captioning the Archives (with his daughter, Aisha Sabatini Sloan) forthcoming from McSweeney’s Publications in November of 2021.

For information about purchasing prints, please contact sloanish [at] gmail [dot] com.

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