Gary Street #2, Gary, Indiana

About the Photographer

Haun, Declan

American, 1937-1994

For much of his career Declan Haun was active as a freelance photographer and he is perhaps best known for his photographs of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Like those photographers, his later work devoted to subjects such as street scenes in Gary, Indiana, or Charlotte, North Carolina, follow from a strong sense of social conscience and compassion for his subjects. Haun was also closely attentive to the formal aspects of his photographs, many of which have a pared down but powerful graphic quality, and he was a meticulous printer of his own work. Haun began his career as a photographer in 1958, at the age of 21, at the Charlotte Observer. In 1963 he moved to Chicago, where he would spend the next fifteen years as a freelance photographer. His photographs would featured in publications such as Life magazine, National Geographic, Look, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post. From 1976 to 1982 Haun served as the photo editor at the National Geographic Magazine, before taking the comparable position at Smithsonian Magazine, where he worked from 1982 to 1984. Since that time he has founded a marketing and multi-media company, Odyssey Communications, in 1990, and taught photography at George Washington University. He passed away in 1994 in Washington D.C.