Pollution earned the city the nickname ‘Smell-A’ — “Only twenty of ten on Monday morning and already the sky was a flat canvas of smog haze pulled taut to its combustible edges as far as the eye could see.” Helena Maria Viramontes, Their Dogs Came with Them Urban air pollution is often seen as an unfortunate but inevitable…

Photos of anti-abortion protests in the 1990s show what intolerance and religious fervor look like — There was a storm brewing above Florida State Prison on September 3, 2003, the day Paul Jennings Hill was put to death. …

Meanwhile, homeless families huddled under their shadows — Americans didn’t have a whole lot of money to spend in the 1930s. Great Depression and all. Nevertheless, people weren’t without wants, and advertising persisted as all manner of products were peddled to struggling folks desperate for something to hold on to. Like cigarettes. Billboards were one high-visibility mode by…

Nina Leen’s work was some of the best — and least remembered — of all Life’s celebrated photographers — Not much is known about Nina Leen, the Russian-born Life photographer who moved to New York in 1939 and proceeded to spend the next four decades making some of the best — and least remembered — images the magazine ever printed. Leen was one of Life’s first female photographers when…

Daily activities continued along Beirut’s Green Line — This story is brought to you in partnership with Beirut, the new movie starring Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike. Coming to theaters April 11. For 15 long years, Beirut was a city divided by religion. Christian on the east side, Muslim on the west. Between 1975 and 1990, the Lebanese…

Some of the heaviest fighting in the Lebanese Civil War happened in Beirut’s ritzy hotel district — This story is brought to you in partnership with Beirut, the new movie starring Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike. Coming to theaters April 11. “Artillery side or car-bomb side?” That was the question posed to guests checking into Beirut’s Commodore Hotel in 1982. …

Arlene Gottfried’s photography is a lesson in being with people — Images don’t just document the way cities change; they inform and influence the process. The ongoing development of New York City, to cite perhaps the most conspicuous example, is intimately tied to the way its working-class communities have been imaged and imagined since the 19th century. Jacob Riis’s photographs of…

The 1991 Gulf War initiated the “CNN effect” — By the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975, the Pentagon had learned its lesson about granting reporters unrestricted access to overseas ground deployments. When the Gulf War began, a decade and a half later, journalists were tightly corralled into “pools” of camera operators and radio and print reporters and…