Photographing America’s 20th century rebels

In 1964, Jean-Pierre Laffont was in New York, trying pull together work as a photographer. He had moved to the USA from France that year with very little money to his name, and while he had a visa, he didn’t have a green card and the credentials to fully work as a photojournalist.

But on arrival he found a city that towed the line between beauty and being on the brink. It was a situation that felt ripe for documentation. ​“New York was broken, dirty and completely bankrupt – they couldn’t pick up the garbage each day, there were strikes everywhere and the subway wasn’t working well,” Jean-Pierre remembers. ​“Of course, I was very much attracted to [documenting] all these problems, plus what was happening around me all the time.”

He found a solution collaborating with the sanitation department to gain access to further flung areas of the city, such as The Bronx, where the department had launched a campaign to try and get residents to clean up their alleyways. ​“It was a very dangerous city, and very difficult to go to the suburbs with a camera around your neck and alone,” he continues. ​“I went with a truck and had a little team of two or three men around me, and I could photograph their work when they passed through the ghetto. This was how I started taking my first pictures of New York.”

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He soon managed to secure his green card, and began a long lifetime of work documenting the USA from the frontlines of change. He became a founding member of the Gamma Press Images agency and Sygma, and covered several of the country’s most important moments of historical change, including anti-Vietnam War protesters and the hippie subculture, the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Rights movements and the birth of the Gay Rights Movement in the wake of the Stonewall Uprising.

Jean-Pierre’s new photobook, Rebels With a Cause, collates and presents 150 of his photographs documenting these counterculture movements, while providing a reflection on how they shaped modern America. It’s edited by his wife Eliane Laffont, who he opened the US office of Gamma with, and who first had the idea for the book.

The photographs show off Laffont’s unique eye for moments of upheaval, unity and change. Large scale demonstrations are printed along with shots of huge gatherings over music – notably the huge 600,000 free Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, which held the Guinness World Record for the largest audience at a pop festival for several years. Meanwhile, key icons of rebellion, such as Muhammad Ali, who defiantly stood in the face of conscription, and Martin Luther King Jr appear side-by-side.

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“When I started to look at some of his work 10 years ago, I realised that Jean-Pierre is the only French-born photographer to photograph the US between the ​’60s and the ​’90s consistently,” Eliane explains. ​“Jean-Pierre shows an America that maybe Americans didn’t actually see was happening.”

Rebels With a Cause is published in an era when federal agents are targeting migrants with seemingly little accountability, money and power is increasingly controlled by a small handful of ultra wealthy people, and protests are being met with harsher surveillance. It makes for a particularly prescient moment to reflect on the people who came before.

“In the ​’60s and ​’70s, you had protests everyday somewhere, about something,” she says. ​“They didn’t accept the world that their parents wanted to pass on to them – they didn’t accept it, they fought it. And these revolutions happened without guns, it happed with music, art, defending your ideas and standing up for who you want to be. This generation can learn a lot from these rebels.”

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Jean-Pierre is a photojournalist in the traditional sense – a fly on the wall documentarian of the world around him. As such, rebellion becomes an attitude, rather than a specific political viewpoint in the book – rebels appear through activism, fashion, art, music and even religion in his photographs. And it’s an attitude that ultimately Jean-Pierre and Eliane see themselves reflected in. 

One of the last photos in the book is a portrait of the couple in 1966, soon after they arrived in the USA. ​“America was a totally different country, and these rebels changed the country for the better,” Eliane remembers. ​“Between the young people protesting the war, hippies with their music, women wanting more freedom and gangs in the ghetto creating hip hop music and fashion. 

“And in many ways Jean-Pierre and I were also rebels,” she continues. ​“Jean-Pierre’s family wanted him to be a doctor, and my family wanted me to be a writer – we didn’t want any of that so we escaped to this country to find freedom. We were very lucky because in the ​’60s and ​’70s we did find that freedom.”

Rebels With A Cause by Jean-Pierre Laffont is published by Damiani Books.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s digital editor. Follow him on Bluesky.

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