Declan Haun

Opening September 19, 2026

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Declan Haun (1937–1994), opening September 19, 2026 from 5-8 pm.

A gifted photojournalist and perceptive observer of American life, Declan Haun worked at a time when the boundaries between documentary photography, journalism, and personal expression were becoming increasingly fluid. His photographs have the immediacy of eyewitness accounts, but they are also distinguished by a remarkable sense of composition, timing, and an understanding of human emotion.

Haun began his professional career at the Charlotte Observer at the age of twenty-one. In 1963, he moved to Chicago, where he worked for the next fifteen years as a freelance photographer. Represented by the influential Black Star photo agency, which at various times worked with many esteemed photographers including W. Eugene Smith, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Bill Brandt.  Haun was part of a remarkable tradition of photographers whose work moved between the illustrated press and a more personal photographic practice. His assignments took him across the country and appeared in publications including Life, Look, Time, The Saturday Evening Post, and National Geographic.

The social and political upheavals of the 1960s provided Haun with some of his most consequential subjects. He photographed the Civil Rights Movement in the South and Midwest, the 1963 March on Washington, the Selma to Montgomery March, political campaigns and conventions, and the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, Haun was rarely interested in spectacle alone. His attention was often drawn to the individual within the larger event, a gesture, an expression, or a moment at the edge of the crowd that revealed something more intimate about the history taking place around him.

Haun described his approach simply: “My pictures are not very complex. I try to make them simple statements of fact or feeling.”

That combination of fact and feeling is at the heart of his work. Even when made on assignment, Haun's strongest photographs move well beyond their journalistic origins. He brought a social conscience to his subjects, along with a rigorous understanding of photographic form. The pictures are direct without being didactic, compassionate without becoming sentimental.

Beyond his work for the printed page, Haun considered himself a fine-art photographer and printmaker. His carefully crafted prints reveal the importance he placed on the photograph as an object in its own right, with particular attention to tonal range, light, and the physical presence of the finished print.

In 1964, John Szarkowski included Haun's photograph Justice, 1963 for the Museum of Modern Art's landmark exhibition The Photographer's Eye. The exhibition helped locate photography according to the particular visual possibilities specific to the medium. Haun's inclusion is especially telling. Szarkowski was looking at photographs rather than categories, and Haun's picture held its own in that company.

From 1976 to 1982, Haun served as a picture editor at National Geographic, followed by a position at Smithsonian Magazine from 1982 to 1984. He was also deeply involved in photographic education, teaching for eleven years at George Washington University and leading workshops for younger photographers.

Haun's photographs are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the High Museum of Art, the Chrysler Museum of Art, Smithsonian and other institutions. His extensive archive is preserved by the Chicago History Museum.

This exhibition offers an opportunity to look again at Declan Haun, not simply as an accomplished photojournalist, but as an important photographer of postwar America. Seen as original prints, the photographs reveal a formal intelligence, tonal richness, and careful craftsmanship that can be lost on the printed page. More than half a century later, they retain the immediacy that first brought them to a wide audience, while making clear that Haun's real achievement was something larger and more lasting.