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Michelle Obama: It's Up to Us as Mothers to Give Girls the Support That Keeps Their Flame Lit

"I see now how important that kind of freedom is for all children, particularly for girls with flames of their own," Michelle Obama says

In honor of Mother’s Day this year, Michelle Obama shares memories of her mom, Marian Robinson, and women who shaped the extraordinary life of the girl from Chicago’s South Side who would grow up to be America’s first lady. In a special personal essay, excerpted here, for the new issue of PEOPLE, Obama reflects on what she learned about parenting from her own mother:

My mother is a woman who chooses her words carefully. She’ll sometimes speak in clipped sentences, her wisdom packed into short bursts and punctuated with an infectious smile or a wry laugh. It’s a style that makes her a favorite of everyone she meets — a sweet, witty companion who doesn’t need the limelight.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen how her manner in conversation also reflects her approach to parenting. Because when it came to raising her kids, my mom knew that her voice was less important than allowing me to use my own.

That meant she listened a lot more than she lectured. Growing up, she was willing to endure endless questioning from me — Why did we have to eat eggs for breakfast? Why do people need jobs? Why are the houses bigger in other neighborhoods? She didn’t chide me if I scrapped with some of the neighbor kids or challenged my ornery grandfather when I thought he was being a little too ornery. She listened intently to the lunchtime conversations I had with my schoolmates over bologna sandwiches, and nodded patiently along to tales of my contentious piano lessons with my great aunt Robbie.

In today’s world, it’s easy to hear all that and think that Marian Robinson was bordering on negligent, that she was letting the kids rule the roost. But the reality was far from that. She and my father, Fraser, were wholly invested in their children, pouring a deep and durable foundation of goodness and honesty, of right and wrong, into my brother and me. After that, they simply let us be ourselves.

… I see now how important that kind of freedom is for all children, particularly for girls with flames of their own — flames the world might try to dim. … It’s up to us, as mothers and mother-figures, to give the girls in our lives the kind of support that keeps their flame lit and lifts up their voices — not necessarily with our own words, but by letting them find the words themselves.

For Mrs. Obama’s complete personal essay on motherhood, pick up the new issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.

Below is an excerpt from Michelle Obama ’s bestselling memoir, Becoming , in which she recalls how her great-aunt Robbie’s tough love and piano lessons helped shape who the woman she is today:

At home, I continued to work on my own progress as a musician. Sitting at Robbie’s upright piano, I was quick to pick up the scales — that osmosis thing was real — and I threw myself into filling out the sight, reading worksheets she gave me. Because we didn’t have a piano of our own, I had to do my practicing downstairs on hers, waiting until nobody else was having a lesson, often dragging my mom with me to sit in the upholstered chair and listen to me play. I learned one song in the piano book and then another. I was probably no better than her other students, no less fumbling, but I was driven. To me, there was magic in the learning. I got a buzzy sort of satisfaction from it. For one thing, I’d picked up on the simple, encouraging correlation between how long I practiced and how much I achieved. And I sensed something in Robbie as well — too deeply buried to be an outright pleasure, but still, a pulse of something lighter and happier coming from her when I made it through a song without messing up, when my right hand picked out a melody while my left touched down on a chord. I’d notice it out of the corner of my eye: Robbie’s lips would unpurse themselves just slightly; her tapping finger would pick up a little bounce.

This, it turns out, was our honeymoon phase. It’s possible that we might have continued this way, Robbie and I, had I been less curious and more reverent when it came to her piano method. But the lesson book was thick enough and my progress on the opening few songs slow enough that I got impatient and started peeking ahead—and not just a few pages ahead but deep into the book, checking out the titles of the more advanced songs and beginning, during my practice sessions, to fiddle around with playing them. When I proudly debuted one of my late-in-the-book songs for Robbie, she exploded, slapping down my achievement with a vicious “Good night!” I got chewed out the way I’d heard her chewing out plenty of students before me. All I’d done was try to learn more and faster, but Robbie viewed it as a crime approaching treason. She wasn’t impressed, not even a little bit.

Nor was I chastened. I was the kind of kid who liked concrete answers to my questions, who liked to reason things out to some logical if exhausting end. I was lawyerly and also veered toward dictatorial, as my brother, who often got ordered out of our shared play area, would attest. When I thought I had a good idea about something, I didn’t like being told no. Which is how my great-aunt and I ended up in each other’s faces, both of us hot and unyielding.

“How could you be mad at me for wanting to learn a new song?” “You’re not ready for it. That’s not how you learn piano.” “But I am ready. I just played it.” “That’s not how it’s done.” “But why?”

RELATED VIDEO: Michelle Obama Shares the Advice She’d Give Meghan Markle : ‘Don’t Be in a Hurry to Do Anything’

Piano lessons became epic and trying, largely due to my refusal to follow the prescribed method and Robbie’s refusal to see anything good in my freewheeling approach to her songbook. We went back and forth, week after week, as I remember it. I was stubborn and so was she. I had a point of view and she did, too. In between disputes, I continued to play the piano and she continued to listen, offering a stream of corrections. I gave her little credit for my improvement as a player. She gave me little credit for improving. But still, the lessons went on.

Upstairs, my parents and Craig found it all so very funny. They cracked up at the dinner table as I recounted my battles with Robbie, still seething as I ate my spaghetti and meatballs. Craig, for his part, had no issues with Robbie, being a cheerful kid and a by-the-book, marginally invested piano student. My parents expressed no sympathy for my woes and none for Robbie’s, either. In general, they weren’t ones to intervene in matters outside schooling, expecting early on that my brother and I should handle our own business. They seemed to view their job as mostly to listen and bolster us as needed inside the four walls of our home. And where another parent might have scolded a kid for being sassy with an elder as I had been, they also let that be. My mother had lived with Robbie on-and-off since she was about sixteen, following every arcane rule the woman laid down, and it’s possible she was secretly happy to see Robbie’s authority challenged. Looking back on it now, I think my parents appreciated my feistiness and I’m glad for it. It was a flame inside me they wanted to keep lit.

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Michelle Obama Shares Her Lessons on Motherhood in a Moving Personal Essay

By Stacey Leasca

Former first lady Michelle Obama has always had sage advice to share in speeches; in her best-selling book, Becoming ; and now in a new personal essay in People . In honor of Mother's Day, Obama penned a deeply personal essay in which she describes the important lessons her own mother, Marian Robinson, passed onto her.

"My mother is a woman who chooses her words carefully. She’ll sometimes speak in clipped sentences, her wisdom packed into short bursts and punctuated with an infectious smile or a wry laugh. It’s a style that makes her a favorite of everyone she meets—a sweet, witty companion who doesn’t need the limelight," Obama wrote.

Obama added that as she grew older, she realized just how important that manner of conversation really was and how it truly reflected her mother's parenting style. "Because when it came to raising her kids, my mom knew that her voice was less important than allowing me to use my own," she wrote.

According to Obama, that meant her mother "listened a lot more than she lectured" when answering all the questions a younger Michelle threw her way.

"Why did we have to eat eggs for breakfast? Why do people need jobs? Why are the houses bigger in other neighborhoods? She didn’t chide me if I scrapped with some of the neighbor kids or challenged my ornery grandfather when I thought he was being a little too ornery," Obama wrote. "She listened intently to the lunchtime conversations I had with my schoolmates over bologna sandwiches and nodded patiently along to tales of my contentious piano lessons with my great aunt Robbie."

Obama continued that in today’s world, it may be easy to see her mother's actions as "negligent" because she allowed her children to "rule the roost." But, she noted, the reality was far from that.

"She and my father, Fraser, were wholly invested in their children, pouring a deep and durable foundation of goodness and honesty, of right and wrong, into my brother and me. After that, they simply let us be ourselves," she wrote.

Obama added that now, as a mother of two nearly grown women, she sees just how important that freedom is.

"I see now how important that kind of freedom is for all children, particularly for girls with flames of their own—flames the world might try to dim," she wrote. "It’s up to us, as mothers and mother figures, to give the girls in our lives the kind of support that keeps their flame lit and lifts up their voices—not necessarily with our own words, but by letting them find the words themselves."

By Julyssa Lopez

By Abby Gardner

Help inform the discussion

Michelle Obama

When Michelle Obama became First Lady of the United States in 2009, she had traveled a long way from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois. Still she pledged to remain grounded and focused on her children and their well-being. She also expressed interest in focusing attention on women's efforts to balance work and family. First Lady Obama commented that "My first priority will always be to make sure that our girls are healthy and grounded. Then I want to help other families get the support they need, not just to survive, but to thrive."

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, to Marian and Fraser Robinson in the South Side of Chicago where she and her older brother Craig grew up in a one-bedroom apartment. Craig and Michelle shared a "bedroom," which was the living room split down the center. The family was a close-knit one that stressed the importance of honesty, hard work, and education. Fraser worked as a city pump operator as well as a Democratic precinct captain. Although he suffered from multiple sclerosis, he rarely missed a day of work and taught Michelle and Craig to value achievement as a result of hard work. Marian was a stay-at-home mother until Michelle went to high school to maintain a steady household which included teaching both children to read by the age of four.

Michelle excelled in school, skipping second grade and entering a gifted program in sixth grade. She moved on to Chicago's first magnet school for gifted children called the Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, graduating as salutatorian in 1981. Although originally discouraged from applying, she then followed Craig to Princeton University. There she focused her studies on Sociology and African American Studies and graduated cum laude in 1985. Michelle faced further discouragement when she applied to Harvard Law School, but once again she excelled in her studies and graduated in 1988.

After graduating from Harvard, Michelle returned to Chicago and joined the law firm Sidley and Austin. While working there in the summer of 1989, she was assigned to be the adviser to Barack Obama, a new summer intern. Originally Michelle said no when Barack asked her on a date, but finally she gave in; he proposed two years later. They were married on October 3, 1992, and had two daughters, Malia (1998) and Natasha, known as Sasha (2001).

In 1992, shortly after her father's death, Michelle decided that corporate law was not her ideal lifelong occupation. She decided to move into public service, and she started as an assistant to Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. She then became the assistant commissioner of planning and development for the city of Chicago. In 1993, Michelle began working as the executive director for the non-profit, Public Allies. This AmeriCorps program, initiated during the administration of President Bill Clinton, helped young adults develop the skills and training needed for careers in public service. Michelle joined the University of Chicago in 1996 as the associate dean of student services where she developed the school's first community service program. She became the executive director of community and external affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals in 2002. Her role as executive director ended in 2005 when she became vice president of community relations and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

When Barack Obama announced his decision to run for president in 2007, Michelle decided to cut back her work hours to balance her husband's campaign with their family life. Although she campaigned for her husband, traveling across the country giving speeches to thousands of Americans, she limited her time away from home to two days a week. Her mother helped with childcare while the Obamas were campaigning. Once Barack Obama won the election, the family began to prepare for the move to the White House. Both the Obamas talked about the trade-offs of being in the public eye while still trying to maintain some privacy. They emphasized the need to keep life consistent and steady for their daughters. Malia and Sasha attend Sidwell Friends School, a private Quaker day school. When Obama took office, Sasha was a second-grader at the school's Bethesda, Maryland, elementary school campus, and Malia was a fifth-grader at its middle school campus in Washington, DC. Michelle's mother moved to the White House with the Obamas to help ease the transition.

As First Lady, Michelle Obama was the subject of much focus and speculation. The Obamas received more than the usual amount of attention because of being the first African American family to live in the White House. The press covered the choice of a family dog, and contests were held to choose the First Lady's Inaugural gown. As the Obama family settled into their new life in Washington, DC, the Obamas protected the privacy of their daughters, the first young children to live in the White House since President John Kennedy and his family in the early 1960s. As First Lady, Michelle focused on childhood nutrition, exercise (Let's Move campaign), military families, and LGBT rights. She was a popular First Lady who was also influential as a partner to President Obama. 

The Critical Lessons Michelle Obama Is Passing Down from Her Mom to Malia and Sasha

Number one: Don't be afraid to use your voice.

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• The essay highlights the valuable lessons Mrs. Obama learned from her mother, Marian Robinson, as a child growing up in Chicago. Now, she's taking these lessons and passing them down to her daughters, Malia, 20, and Sasha, 17.

There's an old Indian proverb and quote by Revathi Sankaran that says "mother is the best and the first teacher to the child." For former First Lady Michelle Obama, her 81-year-old mom Marian Robinson was nothing but a positive influence in her life.

In a personal essay for People on May 12, Mrs. Obama wrote about the valuable life lessons her mother instilled in her and how she's passing them down to her two daughters, Malia Obama, 20, and Sasha Obama, 17. The Becoming author highlighted how her mom allowed both she and her brother, Craig Robinson, 47, to express themselves and ask questions, no matter how pointless they seemed.

"As I’ve grown older, I’ve seen how her manner in conversation also reflects her approach to parenting," Mrs. Obama wrote. "Because when it came to raising her kids, my mom knew that her voice was less important than allowing me to use my own. That meant she listened a lot more than she lectured. Growing up, she was willing to endure endless questioning from me."

Mrs. Obama recounted those inquiries from her childhood growing up in Chicago's South Side in the People essay, pondering over everything from eggs for breakfast to the size of homes in various neighborhoods.

"She and my father, Fraser, were wholly invested in their children, pouring a deep and durable foundation of goodness and honesty, of right and wrong, into my brother and me," Mrs. Obama added. "After that, they simply let us be ourselves."

Allowing kids the space and freedom to be themselves, listening to young adults rather than lecturing, and empowering children to express their views are three things Robinson taught Mrs. Obama by example.

And now, not only is Mrs. Obama handing down those positive messages to her own daughters, but she's working to uplift other young girls all over the world through her post-White House initiative The Global Girls Alliance and the educational programming she and former President Barack Obama have coming to Netflix .

"I see now how important that kind of freedom is for all children, particularly for girls with flames of their own—flames the world might try to dim," Mrs. Obama wrote. "It’s up to us, as mothers and mother-figures , to give the girls in our lives the kind of support that keeps their flame lit and lifts up their voices—not necessarily with our own words, but by letting them find the words themselves."

For more ways to live your best life plus all things Oprah, sign up for our newsletter !

Michelle is the Culture & News Writer for OprahMag.com, where she writes about celebrities (she considers herself an expert on Beyoncé and Reese Witherspoon), plus the latest in pop-culture news, binge-worthy TV shows, and movies. The transplanted Southerner turned ambitious New Yorker lives her best life by listening to hip-hop and Pod Save America, watching The Office on repeat, quoting Oprah-isms, eating dessert before dinner, and avoiding avocado. Seriously, she doesn’t get the hype.

It should say, “Michelle is the former Culture & News Writer for Oprahmag.com...”

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Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama is a lawyer, writer, and the wife of former U.S. President Barack Obama. Prior to her role as first lady, she was a lawyer, Chicago city administrator, and community outreach worker.

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1964-present

Latest News: Michelle Obama Wins Second Grammy Award

Talk about a talented former first family!

Michelle Obama, 60, was not in attendance in Los Angeles, where the award was announced during the Grammys pre-show on Sunday afternoon. She previously won in the same category for the audio version of her 2018 memoir Becoming .

Barack previously received two Grammys for Best Spoken Word Album for Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream .

Quick Facts

Career in law and public service, marriage to barack obama and daughters, campaigning for her husband, causes and accomplishments as first lady, notable speeches, obama foundation, books and podcasts, partnership with netflix, who is michelle obama.

Michelle Obama is a lawyer, writer, and philanthropist who was the first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She was the first Black woman to hold this position. Michelle is the wife of America’s 44 th president, Barack Obama . As first lady, Obama focused her attention on social issues such as poverty, healthy living, and education. She won a Grammy Award for her 2018 memoir, Becoming , which discusses the experiences that shaped her, from her childhood in Chicago to her years living in the White House.

FULL NAME: Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama BORN: January 17, 1964 BIRTHPLACE: Chicago, Illinois SPOUSE: Barack Obama (1992-present) CHILDREN: Malia and Sasha ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago. Her father, Fraser Robinson, was a city-pump operator and a Democratic precinct captain. Her mother, Marian, was a secretary at Spiegel’s catalog store but later stayed home to raise Michelle and her older brother, Craig. At 21 months apart in age, Craig and Michelle were often mistaken for twins .

The Robinson family lived in a small bungalow on Chicago’s South Side. Michelle and Craig shared quarters, sleeping in the living room with a sheet serving as a makeshift room divider. They were a close-knit family, typically sharing meals, reading, and playing games together. She later said of her childhood: “I had a very stable, conventional upbringing, and that felt very safe to me.”

Raised with an emphasis on education, both Michelle and her brother learned to read at home by age 4. Both skipped the second grade. By the sixth grade, Michelle was taking classes in her school’s gifted program, where she learned French and completed accelerated courses in biology. Michelle went on to attend Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, the city’s first magnet high school for gifted children, where, among other activities, she served as the student government treasurer. She graduated in 1981 as class salutatorian.

Following in her older brother’s footsteps, Michelle applied for Princeton University. Some teachers tried to dissuade her from applying, telling her she would never get accepted: “Some of my teachers straight up told me that I was setting my sights too high.” Nevertheless, she was accepted, and ultimately graduated cum laude in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. Michelle went on to study law at Harvard Law School, where she took part in demonstrations calling for the enrollment and hiring of more minority students and professors. She was awarded her juris doctor in 1988.

After graduating law school in 1988, Michelle worked as an associate in the Chicago branch of the firm Sidley Austin. Her focus was marketing and intellectual property. In 1991, she left corporate law to pursue a career in public service, working as an assistant to Mayor Richard Daley and then as the assistant commissioner of planning and development for the City of Chicago. In 1993, Michelle became executive director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a nonprofit leadership-training program that helps young adults develop skills for future careers in the public sector.

In 1996, Michelle joined the University of Chicago as associate dean of student services, developing the school’s first community-service program. Beginning in 2002, she worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals as executive director of community relations and external affairs. In May 2005, Michelle was appointed vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she continued to work part-time until shortly before her husband’s inauguration as president. She also served as a board member for the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Michelle met Barack Obama in 1989 at the Chicago firm Sidley Austin. He was a summer intern, and Michelle was assigned to him as an adviser. They were among the few Black people working at the firm at the time. Initially, Michelle refused to date Barack, believing that their work relationship would make the romance improper. She eventually relented, however, and the couple soon fell in love.

Barack described their early relationship as an “opposites attract” situation because he had a different background and a more adventurous personality than Michelle. After two years of dating, Barack proposed, and the two married on October 3, 1992.

The couple has two daughters: Malia , born in 1998, and Sasha , born in 2001. Both Michelle and Barack have stated that their personal priority is their children. The Obamas tried to make their daughters’ world as “normal” as possible while living in the White House, with set times for studying, going to bed and getting up. “My first priority will always be to make sure that our girls are healthy and grounded,” Michelle has said . “Then I want to help other families get the support they need, not just to survive, but to thrive.”

Obama had long known her husband might pursue a political career and said in as early as 1996: “I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.” She opposed Barack’s decision to run for the U.S. House of Representatives but nevertheless campaigned for him during his unsuccessful primary campaign in 2000. She first caught the eye of a national audience while at her husband’s side when he delivered a high-profile speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Barack was elected as U.S. Senator from Illinois that November.

As her husband’s political role pushed the family into the spotlight, Michelle was publicly recognized for her no-nonsense campaign style as well as her sense of fashion. In May 2006, she was featured in Essence magazine as one of “25 of the World’s Most Inspiring Women.” In September 2007, Michelle was included in 02138 magazine as number 58 in “The Harvard 100,” a yearly list of the school’s most influential alumni. She also twice appeared on the cover of Vogue and made the Vanity Fair best-dressed list two years in a row as well as People magazine’s 2008 best-dressed list.

Michelle had reservations about Barack’s decision to run for president, too; she worried about how it would affect their daughters. Those concerns proved unfounded, as Michelle said they “could care less” about the campaign. In 2007, Michelle scaled back her own professional work to attend to family and campaign obligations during Barack’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination. When they were out on the trail, they would leave their daughters with Michelle’s mother, Marian. Barack won the nomination and later defeated Republican challenger John McCain in the general election to become the 44 th president of the United States . He was inaugurated on January 20, 2009.

When her husband sought reelection in 2012, facing a challenging race against Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney , Michelle diligently campaigned on his behalf. By this time, she had a more established public image and was widely popular. Politico described her as “the most popular member of the Obama administration” and an invaluable asset when it comes to raising money and delivering speeches. She traveled the country, giving talks and making public appearances. On November 6, 2012, Barack was re-elected for a second term.

As first lady of the United States, Michelle focused her attention on issues such as the support of military families, helping working women balance career and family, and encouraging national service. During the first year of the Obama presidency, Michelle and Barack volunteered at homeless shelters and soup kitchens in the Washington, D.C. area. Michelle also made appearances at public schools, stressing the importance of education and volunteer work.

Ever conscious of her family’s diet and health, Michelle supported the organic-food movement, instructing the White House kitchens to prepare organic food for guests and her family. In March 2009, Michelle worked with 23 fifth graders from a Washington, D.C. school to plant an 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden and install beehives on the South Lawn of the White House. The garden expanded its footprint throughout the Obama administration, and Michelle continued to host events with schoolchildren there. She also put reducing childhood obesity near the top of her agenda.

Michelle remained committed to health and wellness causes throughout her time as first lady. In 2012, she announced a new fitness program for kids as part of her Let’s Move initiative. Along with the U.S. Olympic team and other sports organizations, she worked to get young people to try out a new sport or activity. She also released a book as part of her mission to promote healthy eating called American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America (2012), which included her own experience creating a vegetable garden as well as the work of community gardens elsewhere.

Throughout her career, Obama has given a number of powerful speeches. In September 2012, she delivered a noteworthy speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Every day, the people I meet inspire me, every day they make me proud, every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on earth,” she said. “Serving as your first lady is an honor and a privilege.” Obama won both public and critical praise for her narrative, called a “shining moment” by The Washington Post .

In July 2016, Michelle campaigned in support of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. When Clinton was named the Democratic presidential nominee, she became the first woman in the country’s history to win a major political party’s presidential nomination. On the first night of the convention, Michelle spoke in support of Clinton, who had previously run against Barack during the 2008 primaries, and Clinton’s vision of a progressive America.

“I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, Black young women, playing with their dogs on the White House lawn,” she said. “And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.” During the same speech, Michelle alluded to the behavior of Clinton’s Republican challenger Donald Trump , saying her party would not stoop to his level, with the famous phrase : “Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

On January 13, 2017, Michelle made her final speech as first lady at the White House, saying “being your first lady has been the greatest honor of my life, and I hope I’ve made you proud.” In an emotional moment, she addressed young Americans:

“I want our young people to know that they matter, that they belong. So don’t be afraid. You hear me, young people? Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered. Empower yourself with a good education. Then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise. Lead by example with hope; never fear.”

In 2014, Barack and Michelle established the Obama Foundation that is overseeing the creation of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago’s South Side. The nonprofit also runs numerous programs aligned with its mission “to inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world.” Michelle is particularly involved with the foundation’s Girls Opportunity Alliance, which supports education for girls around the world.

On November 13, 2018, Michelle published her critically acclaimed memoir, Becoming . Describing the “deeply personal experience” of writing the book, she tweeted : “I talk about my roots and how a girl from the South Side found her voice. I hope my journey inspires readers to find the courage to become whoever they aspire to be.” In just 15 days, it became the best-selling book in the United States for the year 2018 and also became a bestseller in several other countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, South Korea, and South Africa. In 2020, Michelle won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for the audiobook version of Becoming .

Michelle published a second book in 2022 called The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times . In it, Michelle shared the contents of what she described as her “personal toolbox,” including attitudes, habits, and practices used to overcome feelings of fear, helplessness, and uncertainty. In particular, it addressed the “low-grade form” of depression that gripped the nation during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michelle premiered a podcast in 2020 called The Michelle Obama Podcast . Podcast critic Nicholas Quah of Vulture said it explored similar themes as the former first lady’s memoir Becoming , calling it entertaining and writing that he was “deeply moved and taken by its comforts, so parched am I for any modicum of moral leadership in the public sphere.” In March 2023, Michelle launched Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast , to accompany her book The Light We Carry .

In February 2024, the audiobook version of The Light We Carry earned Obama her second Grammy Award .

In May 2018, Michelle and Barack announced that they signed a multi-year deal to produce TV series and films for Netflix through their company, Higher Ground Productions. “Barack and I have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire us, to make us think differently about the world around us,” the former First Lady said in a statement .

Their first joint effort resulted in Netflix’s release of American Factory (2019), a documentary about the 2015 launch of a Chinese-owned automotive glass factory in Dayton, Ohio, and the clash of differing cultures and business interests. A hit with critics, American Factory earned an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in February 2020. Michelle was an executive producer and presenter on the Netflix children’s cooking series Waffles + Mochi . Additionally , Netflix and Higher Ground Productions partnered on the documentary Becoming (2020), based upon Michelle’s memoir of the same name.

• Every day, the people I meet inspire me. Every day, they make me proud. Every day, they remind me how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on Earth. Serving as your first lady is an honor and a privilege.
• When I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don’t invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.
• Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.
• One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.
• I have the privilege of working on the issues that I choose and the issues that I feel most passionate about.
• These are the moments that define us—not the day you get the promotion, not the day you win teacher of the year, but the times that force you to claw and scratch and fight just to get through the day; the moments when you get knocked down and you’re wondering whether it’s even worth it to get back up. Those are the times when you’ve got to ask yourself, “Who am I going to be?”
• That’s what’s always made this country great—embracing the diversity of experience and opinion that surrounds us everywhere we go.
• The only difference between me and every other woman that I know is that my challenges are publicized, and I’m doing this juggling in front of cameras.
• We should always have three friends in our lives: one who walks ahead who we look up to and we follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journeys; and then, one who we reach back for and we bring along after we’ve cleared the way.
• People told me, ‘You can do it all. Just stay the course, get your education, and you can raise a child, stay thin, be in shape, love your man, look good, and raise healthy children.’ That was a lie.
• Exercise is really important to me—it’s therapeutic. So if I’m ever feeling tense or stressed or like I’m about to have a meltdown, I’ll put on my iPod and head to the gym or out on a bike ride along Lake Michigan with the girls.
• It would be hard for me to edit myself and still be me.
• We learned about dignity and decency—that how hard you work matters more than how much you make... that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.
• As women, we must stand up for ourselves. As women, we must stand up for each other. As women, we must stand up for justice for all.

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Story of a Woman: “Becoming” by Michelle Obama Report (Assessment)

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The book Becoming is a memoir written by Michelle Obama in 2018. As a former US First Lady, the author decided to share her personal experience and talk about her roots and the time in the White House. This book is not only a political source of information with several complex terms and ideas, but a story of a woman and a mother in her attempts to find out the voice.

When people are asked about Obama’s policies and impact on American history, people usually choose one of the two sides: like or hate. In other words, it is hard to stay indifferent to the decisions and contributions made by the former President and his wife. Michelle Obama does not overestimate her role in society or compare her contributions with other people. Her goal is to introduce the story of her growth and the tasks she had or wanted to complete. In the “Becoming Me” chapter, Obama focuses on her personal qualities, intentions, and life before meeting Barack Obama, saying about “the sound of people trying” and “the soundtrack to our life” (4). The second chapter, “Becoming Us”, covers the events before the elections in 2008. “Becoming More” is the final chapter about the life of a presidential family and the obligation to meet social expectations and personal demands. Racial and gender issues are properly described in the book.

Becoming may become a source of inspiration and motivation for many young ladies of different races. This story helps to realize that even an ordinary girl who lives in a block, has friends, and respects parents can become a good leader and an example to be followed. This book is a political and personal story with several social, psychological, and economic issues being discovered in a simple and clear language.

Obama, Michelle. Becoming. Penguin Random House, 2018.

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Michelle Obama

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 4, 2021 | Original: November 6, 2009

Michelle Obama (1964-), the wife of 44th U.S. president Barack Obama, served as first lady from 2009-2017. An Ivy League graduate, she built a successful career, first as a lawyer, and then in the private sector, which she maintained throughout her husband’s early political career. Concerned about the effect the campaign would have on their young daughters, Michelle was initially reluctant to support the idea of her husband’s run for the presidency. Despite her initial misgivings, she proved to be an effective surrogate for him on the campaign trail. After her husband’s election, she chose a number of causes to support; advocating for support for military families and encouraging healthy eating to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity. As a young mother, a fashion icon and the first African American first lady, Michelle Obama became a role model to many Americans.

WATCH: Michelle Obama

Michelle obama's childhood.

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago , Illinois , to parents Marian and Fraser Robinson. Although Fraser’s modest pay as a city-pump operator led to cramped living in their South Shore bungalow, the Robinsons were a close-knit family, with Michelle and older brother Craig pushed to excel in school. Both children skipped the second grade, and Michelle was later chosen for a gifted-student program that enabled her to take French and advanced biology courses.

Making the lengthy daily trip to attend Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Michelle became student council treasurer and a member of the National Honor Society before graduating as class salutatorian in 1981. She then followed her brother to Princeton University, where she created a reading program for the children of the school’s manual laborers. A sociology major with a minor in African-American studies, she explored the connections between the school’s black alumni and their communities in her senior thesis, graduating cum laude in 1985.

Career and Life Before Becoming First Lady 

After earning her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1988, Michelle joined the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin as a junior associate specializing in marketing and intellectual property. Assigned to mentor a summer intern named Barack Obama , she deflected his initial romantic advancements before they began dating. They were engaged within two years, and married at the Trinity United Church of Christ on October 3, 1992.

Michelle left corporate law in 1991 to pursue a career in public service, enabling her to fulfill a personal passion and create networking opportunities that would benefit her husband’s future political career. Initially an assistant to Chicago mayor Richard Daley , she soon became the city’s assistant commissioner of planning and development. In 1993, she was named executive director for the Chicago branch of Public Allies, a leadership-training program for young adults. Moving on to the University of Chicago as associate dean of student services, she developed the school’s first community-service program.

When Obama decided to run for Illinois state senator in 1996, Michelle proved a disciplined campaign aide by canvassing for signatures and throwing fundraising parties. However, their victory presented the family with new challenges; following the births of daughters Malia (1998) and Sasha (2001), Michelle often had to juggle the demands of work and child-rearing alone with her husband tending to business in the state capital of Springfield.

Successful despite the difficulties, Michelle was named executive director of community relations and external affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals in 2002. She was promoted to vice president after three years, and served on the boards of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, but eventually scaled back her work hours and commitments to support Obama’s entry into the U.S. presidential race.

Tenure as First Lady 

Initially criticized for her candor, Michelle soon proved an asset on the campaign trail with her knack for delivering relatable stories about her family. In addition to becoming the first African American first lady upon Obama’s Election Day victory in 2008, she became the third with a post-graduate degree.

Michelle sought to tie her own agendas to her husband’s larger legislative goals, notably targeting the epidemic of childhood obesity while the Affordable Care Act was being created. In 2009, she worked with local elementary school students to plant a 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the White House . The following year she launched the Let’s Move! initiative to promote healthy eating and physical activity.

In 2011, Michelle co-founded the Joining Forces program to expand educational and employment options for veterans and to raise awareness about the difficulties plaguing military families. After helping Obama win a second term in office, she formed the Reach Higher initiative to inspire young people to explore higher education and career-development opportunities.

Continuing the family theme of her campaign speeches, the first lady stressed the importance of remaining a diligent parent and brought her mother to live with her in the White House. She was also recognized for an ability to connect to younger generations by remaining attuned to popular culture. Embracing the use of social media, she encouraged fans to follow her progress on her Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts, and proved willing to bring her messages to audiences by appearing in humorous sketches online and on television.

WATCH: The Best Photos of Obama's Presidency

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Yamiche Alcindor Yamiche Alcindor

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/4-lessons-from-michelle-obama-on-being-true-to-yourself

4 lessons from Michelle Obama on being true to yourself

Former first lady Michelle Obama brought lessons about becoming the best version of yourself when her book tour stopped Saturday in Washington, D.C.

For about an hour and 30 minutes, Obama chatted on stage at the Capital One Arena with Valerie Jarrett, who served as a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama and is a close friend of the couple.

Before former President Obama dropped in for a quick surprise chat at the end of the event, the former first lady and Jarrett talked at length about balancing motherhood and professional success, as well as how to value self-care while serving society.

Here are four important takeaways from Michelle Obama’s tour and book.

1. Becoming your best self means taking care of yourself

During one of the most candid moments of the evening, Obama talked about going to marriage counseling. After struggling to conceive children, she said she found herself doing the lion’s share of the parenting as then-state senator Barack Obama commuted from their home in Chicago to Springfield, Illinois, for work.

“I was exhausted and that’s when the tension starts building up,” Obama said. “So we go to marriage counseling. And in my mind, I thought, I’m going to bring him to marriage counseling and the counselor is gonna basically tell him to get himself together because I’m like, ‘I know I’m right.’”

But that’s not what happened. Instead, she said, counseling was a personal “turning point” where she realized that she needed to change her approach to happiness.

“I was looking to my husband to make me happy,” she said. “And I realized I’m responsible for my happiness. I’m responsible for how I prioritize my life. And I can’t be mad at him because he prioritizes his life differently and better.”

In the end, she said, it was important for her daughters to grow up with a mother who valued herself. “I learned how to put my workouts in and how to get my rest, and how to ask for help,” Obama said.

2. Being your true self can lead to big wins

Obama told a story about bringing her youngest daughter, Sasha, to a job interview with her when the youngster was just 4 months old.

“I got called in by the president of the University of Chicago Hospital who had heard about me and he wanted me to come in and consider a big job,” she said. “And I thought, well, I don’t want this job. So let me take Sasha because it was like, ‘If you want me then you’re going to see all of me.’ I walked up in there with a big stroller and secretaries were watching her and because I didn’t think I had anything to lose, I asked for everything and I was like, ‘Okay You want me? This is how much I want to make — a lot of money. OK. A lot of money. Because I’m worth it and I will have flex time.'”

To her surprise, she was offered the job, including her demands.

3. Children know when you’re not investing in them

Obama said her working-class parents valued her opinion at an early age and gave her agency in her own home. She tells the story of her mother advocating for her to get better schooling when in elementary school she and her friends complained that they weren’t getting enough homework and learning enough in school.

“Sometimes we like to pretend that kids don’t know when they’re being shortchanged and devalued,” Obama said. “I’m here to tell you that I knew that at second grade. So as we look at school inequality and things aren’t right, kids know when they are not being valued. And it makes them feel some kind of way.”

4. Your stories are what connect you to others

Obama’s book tour feels like a concert held on your couch. The D.C. stop was held in a massive space but it was also so intimate that people felt like she had bared her soul.

That, it turns out, is the former first lady’s gift, one that helped her husband get elected president and led her to the East Wing of the White House, she said.

While campaigning in Iowa during her husband’s first presidential campaign, she found that stories about her life resonated with voters.

“This is sort of at the core of why I’m writing this book, because what I learned in Iowa is what I think is true, period,” she said. “It’s that what really connects us isn’t race. It isn’t party. It’s not religion. It’s the stories that we remember. It’s those conversations around the dinner table. It’s the kind of baloney sandwich you had at lunch. It’s the kind of furniture you’re used to sitting on. It’s the relationship with your grandfather. It’s values. It’s the life you’ve lived that you remember up here. It’s those memories. And if you know that’s in you and you can tap into that and share that with people, that’s what connects us.”

It’s a lesson anyone running for office might value.

Yamiche Alcindor is the former White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour.

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Advocacy — Why Is Michelle Obama Influential

Why is Michelle Obama Influential

• Categories: Advocacy

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Published: Mar 19, 2024

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Table of contents

I. introduction, thesis statement: michelle obama is influential for various reasons, including her advocacy for education, health, and women's rights., ii. michelle obama's advocacy for education, iii. michelle obama's advocacy for health, iv. michelle obama's advocacy for women's rights, v. michelle obama's influence on popular culture, vi. conclusion.

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Home Inspiring Leadership Now

First lady or fearless leader michelle obama’s 10 most admirable leadership qualities.

Last updated: 4 August 2020

Here’s a fun fact for you about the Obamas:

When they left the White House in January, Michelle was more popular than former President Barack Obama.

Don’t believe us? Check out the results of the final Gallup poll published in the Washington Post to get a better idea of their “popularity” at the moment they were packing up their bags and leaving the White House.

Surveys aside, there was clearly something about Michelle many people loved and admired.

Some of her celebrated qualities? She stood out as one of the most passionate and accomplished First Ladies in history because of her charisma, compassion and powerful speech-making.

That said, even before Michelle’s rise to fame during her time in the White House, she was already an accomplished lawyer, writer and community activist.

Once in the White House, her special mix of talents and accomplishments made Michelle a role model for millions of women around the world.

Especially given that First Ladies have the freedom to define their roles as they see fit, during her 8 years in Washington, Michelle chose to address racism, women’s rights and public health.

She called herself “Mom-in-chief,” and applied herself to issues ranging from children’s education to the needs of military families.

This included launching the Let Girls Learn initiative to fund girls’ education projects tackling everything from leadership to poverty.

She was also a risk-taker and stepped outside traditional first lady stereotypes.

Given her achievement and clear leadership skills, rumor says many Democrats wanted Michelle to run for office after her husband’s presidency ended in January 2017.

Although for now, the Obamas have ruled out a political career for Michelle… that said, it pays never to say never.

After all, Hillary Clinton went from First Lady to within an eyelash of becoming the first female president in U.S. history.

The Obamas have been an inspiration to many, and the legacy they leave behind is partly owed to Michelle.

Regardless of your political beliefs, it’s hard not to feel inspired by Michelle’s achievements as First Lady… but also as a leader.

So why don’t we take a look Michelle Obama’s 10 greatest leadership qualities to see how they’ve shaped her legacy and inspired millions.

1. Strong Character

We said it before – Michelle Obama wasn’t your typical First Lady. Her capacity to motivate, inspire and call others to action was rooted in her strong personality.

Her strong character helped her fight for social issues, regardless of how controversial they were.

She was also vocal and honest about some of the harsh realities faced by minorities in America.

This came to a head in a 2015 commencement speech at Tuskegee University where she reminded black students to stay strong and persevere against the odds.

Michelle’s stance on social issues made her an iconic figure – and will remain her legacy.

To truly lead and inspire others means standing up for what you believe in and living by your values – regardless of opposing views or fear of rocking the “status quo” boat.

This is what will inspire courage in others to do the same. Plus, you’ll build a sense of purpose by sticking by your convictions when the going gets tough.

2. Compassionate

“All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do — that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.” – Michelle Obama

When it comes down to it, leadership is about much more than having a “type-A” personality. It’s about being compassionate to people from all walks of life.

Before Michelle was First Lady, she was a practicing lawyer and fought against injustice through her work at Chicago City Hall where addressed her community’s social issues.

Later, she went on to establish the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, a national service network to help prepares youth for a career in the civil service.

But being a successful leader is more than just having good business skills. You also need empathy and compassion in order to build healthy relationships within an organization.

Make no mistake: compassion is your ticket to people’s hearts. It will also help you earn the trust and respect of your employees – which is essential if you want to be an influential and inspiring leader.

3. Self-Confidence

“One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.” – Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama demonstrated her self-confidence in numerous ways. Whether it was her uplifting DNC inauguration speeches or championing courage and self-esteem for women , Michelle never shied away from standing up for what she believes in.

Biographers say Michelle’s willingness to speak her mind goes all the way back to her college years, where she criticized one of her professor’s teaching methods. She credits her parents and older brother for helping her find her “voice” at an early age.

That voice would later resonate with the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world.

While not everyone is as fortunate as Michelle to have had a strong support network growing up, the great thing about confidence is that it can be improved once you make the decision to do so and start appreciating who you are and what unique qualities you have to offer.

Yes, these efforts take time – but most worthwhile pursuits in life usually do.

The former First Lady’s example showed that everyone matters and everyone has a voice that can change the world.

But remember, it all starts with one thing… your choice to believe in yourself. Once you do, your capacity as a leader will rise ten fold.

4. Powerful Speaker

Michelle Obama had an uncanny way of captivating her audience during her husband’s 8 years in office.

She had an amazing way of making people feel as if they were part of something bigger. And she did it by relating her own experience.

As First Lady, she also gave powerful speeches about her experience as a black woman competing in academia, as well as the need to stand up for women’s rights.

She also didn’t shy away from calling out lewd behavior, including sexist remarks by politicians. And when doing so, she never lost her cool.

Some of her most inspirational speeches include:

2012 DNC Speech:

International Women’s Day speech:

5. Perseverance

Here’s a simple fact: life isn’t always easy. Many great accomplishments take a significant amount of time and hard work. As the saying goes:

The only time “success” appears before “work,” is in the dictionary.

So to achieve amazing feats, perseverance is key.

Michelle became the first African-American First Lady in U.S. history – all while the odds were firmly stacked against her and her husband.

She also achieved several important milestones while in the White House, such as passing a bipartisan School Lunch program to provide free and reduced-price meals to more than 20 million low-income children.

In 2014, she also launched the Reach Higher Initiative to inspire young people across the country to put their education first.

Even her life before becoming First Lady was filled with accomplishments that demonstrated her perseverance.

This included graduating cum laude from Princeton University before finishing up her law degree at Harvard.

Michelle’s life story shows us how a strong commitment to one’s values can lead to tremendous change in the world.

Not all of us will get to influence public policy like Michelle, but you can all learn to stay committed to your goals regardless of what life throws at you.

To sum it up, the art of perseverance sets great leaders – and great organizations – apart.

6. Inspirational

“You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.”  – Michelle Obama

Needless to say, the former First Lady’s life story has inspired millions of people.

Her ongoing efforts to fight poverty, inequality and obesity gave her a sense of purpose that transcended political lines and racial divides.

Michelle was adamant in her claim that the power of the individual is paramount, and why you shouldn’t underestimate your ability to inspire real change in your community.

“We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.”  – Michelle Obama

Great leaders are honest about their strengths, weaknesses and expectations. This applies to the business world and any other life endeavour.

Michelle Obama was dedicated to many important social causes before and during her husband’s presidential tenure.

And authenticity was one of her most valued leadership traits . Michelle’s success can largely be attributed to her honesty as well as her dedication to show up each day and work towards her goals.

So here’s a tip: if you want to be an inspiring leader – start off by being honest. Honesty is more than just telling the truth – it’s about creating a culture of transparency.

8. Graceful Under Pressure

A lot of attention has been paid to Michelle Obama’s sense of style. But her sense of style was more than just fashion.

She spoke eloquently, walked with grace and portrayed herself in a positive and respectful light.

Whether you supported her husband or didn’t agree with him at all, it was difficult not to like the former First Lady.

Make no mistake: the way you carry yourself says a lot about you and your values.

Make it your aim to carry yourself with confidence and composure, even when no one is watching – and as if everyone was watching.

9. Relatable to Others

“My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.”  – Michelle Obama

As you can imagine, when you’re the First Lady, it’s very easy to become detached from reality.

Not Michelle Obama.

Throughout her husband’s 8-year term, she talked openly about her personal life. Everything from her experience at school to her first date with Barack – her story resonated with millions of women across the country.

She also empowered African-American women to fight against stereotypes. She did all this by being relatable. Many women saw some of themselves in Michelle Obama.

Although your business or passion might not be political, your ability to inspire others to action is an important leadership quality.

That’s why it’s important to speak from the heart and show vulnerability when expressing your hopes – and even your weaknesses. Effective leaders inspire others to see their vision – so when it comes to relating to others, remember to be genuine!

10. Time Management

“My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief. Making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.”   – Michelle Obama

From her dozens of accomplishments to raising Malia and Natasha, Michelle made it a priority to manage her time so she could focus on what was most important to her – with her children always at the top of the list.

The fact of the matter is – there often aren’t enough hours in the day, so you need to define your non-negotiables and be realistic about what you can manage – and what you need to delegate or say no to.

So there you have it. Our pick of Michelle Obama’s top 10 most inspiring leadership qualities and how she used them to inspire change.

Inspiring Leadership Now

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First Lady Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is a lawyer, writer, and the wife of the 44th and current President, Barack Obama. She is the first African-American First Lady of the United States. Through her four main initiatives, she has become a role model for women and an advocate for healthy families ,  service members and their families , higher education , and  international adolescent girls education .

When people ask First Lady Michelle Obama to describe herself, she doesn't hesitate to say that first and foremost, she is Malia and Sasha's mom.

But before she was a mother — or a wife, lawyer, or public servant — she was Fraser and Marian Robinson's daughter.

The Robinsons lived in a brick bungalow on the South Side of Chicago. Fraser was a pump operator for the Chicago Water Department, and despite being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at a young age, he hardly ever missed a day of work. Marian stayed home to raise Michelle and her older brother Craig, skillfully managing a busy household filled with love, laughter, and important life lessons.

A product of Chicago public schools, Michelle Robinson studied sociology and African-American studies at Princeton University. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1988, she joined the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she later met Barack Obama, the man who would become the love of her life.

After a few years, Mrs. Obama decided her true calling was working with people to serve their communities and their neighbors. She served as assistant commissioner of planning and development in Chicago's City Hall before becoming the founding executive director of the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program that prepares youth for public service.

In 1996, Mrs. Obama joined the University of Chicago with a vision of bringing campus and community together. As Associate Dean of Student Services, she developed the university's first community service program, and under her leadership as Vice President of Community and External Affairs for the University of Chicago Medical Center, volunteerism skyrocketed.

Mrs. Obama has continued her efforts to support and inspire young people during her time as First Lady.

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Michelle Obama calls her late mom her ‘rock’ in touching tribute

In a moving Instagram post, Michelle Obama reflected on the loss of her mother, Marian Robinson, who died Friday, May 31, at the age of 86 .

The former first lady and her family eulogized Robinson and the vibrant life she led in a statement, received first by NBC News and later posted on Michelle and Barack Obama's Instagram pages.

Accompanying the statement on Instagram was Michelle Obama's touching caption, calling her mom her "rock."

“My mom Marian Robinson was my rock, always there for whatever I needed,” the former first lady wrote.

“She was the same steady backstop for our entire family, and we are heartbroken to share she passed away today.”

The former first lady went on to express her desire to “offer some reflections on her remarkable life” in a tribute that detailed her mother’s early life and her marriage to Michelle Obama’s father, Fraser C. Robinson III, who died in 1991 . The statement was signed by Michelle Obama, her brother, Craig Robinson, and other members of their family. It touched on Robinson’s role as a grandmother to her grandchildren — including Malia and Sacha — and mother-in-law to former President Barack Obama.

“On Election Night in 2008, when the news broke that Barack would soon shoulder the weight of the world, she was there holding his hand. With a healthy nudge, she agreed to move to the White House with Michelle and Barack. We needed her. The girls needed her, and she ended up being our rock through it all,” the family statement reads in part.

“There was and will be only one Marian Robinson. In our sadness, we are lifted up by the extraordinary gift of her life. And we will spend the rest of ours trying to live up to our example.”

Friends of the Obamas commented on the post with their own memories of Robinson and their condolences.

“When you invited me to perform at the White House in 2009, I was too intimidated (to) look any of you in the eye from the stage. It wasn’t until I looked over and saw your mom’s encouraging smile that I relaxed and was able to proceed,“ Lin-Manuel Miranda commented. “It’s unimaginable that she’s no longer here. All our love and prayers to you and your family in the days and weeks ahead.”

“What a wonderful tribute to your amazing mom. Thinking of you and sending you hugs during this difficult time,“ Melinda French Gates wrote.

“Sam and I had the great pleasure of meeting and speaking at length with Ms. Robinson. Out of the million people she met while in the White House,“ LaTanya Jackson wrote in response to the post. “She always made us feel as if she was truly glad to see us as she inquired about what we were working on. We celebrate her life as you navigate her transition.”

Alex Portée is a senior trending reporter at TODAY Digital and is based in Los Angeles.

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Marian Shields Robinson, mother of former first lady Michelle Obama, dies at 86

Marian Shields Robinson once said she had the “easiest job” at the White House as the “first grandmother.”

Marian Shields Robinson, mother of former first lady Michelle Obama, was a major pillar during former President Barack Obama’s 2008 bid for the White House. 

Taking on the task of caring for granddaughters Malia and Sasha, Robinson made their meals, ran their baths and tucked them into bed. She drove them to school, and to piano and dance lessons with Secret Service in tow. Once she became the nation’s first grandmother, she helped the girls settle into their home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The transition would prove to be just as challenging for the Chicago native. 

“I’ve never lived outside of Chicago, so I don’t know,’’ Robinson said in an interview with the New York Times , expressing her hesitations on permanently moving into the White House which reminded her of a museum. “In the end, I’ll do whatever. I might fuss a little, but I’ll be there.”

In her 2018 memoir, “ Becoming ,” Michelle Obama shared that her mother was forthright, honest and not afraid to speak her mind. “My mother, Marian, showed me how to think for myself and to use my voice,” she writes. 

Robinson, often called “Mrs. R.,” died Friday, according to a family statement shared with NBC News . “She passed peacefully this morning, and right now, none of us are quite sure how exactly we’ll move on without her,” read the statement. The cause of death was not mentioned.

Barack Obama, whom Robinson adored, shared via Facebook in 2019 to celebrate his mother-in-law’s birthday: “I’ve always appreciated her steadiness, her perspective, and the way a wisecrack from her reverberates around the room.”

A Chicago native

Born on July 29, 1937, Marian Lois Shields was the fourth of seven children of Purnell Nathaniel Shields and Rebecca Jumper. Purnell was a carpenter and painted houses, while Rebecca worked as a licensed practical nurse. Through DNA research, the New York Times revealed the Shields’ complex family lineage to slavery. The story showed Marian’s great-grandfather Dolphus T. Shields was the son of an enslaved teen girl and her white owner. 

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This discovery “underscores the entangled histories and racial intermingling that continue to bind countless American families more than 140 years after the Civil War,” the Times reported in 2012. Some of the Shields family did eventually migrate north. That included Purnell’s mother, Annie, who moved her two sons from Birmingham, Alabama, to Chicago between 1920 and 1923.    

In October 1960, Marian Shields married Fraser Robinson III, who worked for the Chicago Water Department. The couple would dedicate themselves to building a family life in their second-floor apartment of a brick bungalow located in Chicago’s South Side. 

Robinson once worked as a secretary for mail-order retailer Spiegel and at the University of Chicago, but she was mostly a stay-at-home mom for Michelle and son Craig Robinson, former head men’s basketball coach at Oregon State University and Brown University. She returned to work as an executive assistant for a local bank when her daughter began high school.

“She was one of those parents that showed up all the time at schools,” Stephen Shields, the youngest of the Shields siblings, said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune . “She kept the teachers on their toes.” 

Michelle Obama has echoed that sentiment. “We were their investment,” she wrote in “Becoming.” “Together, in our cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago, they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country. Even when it’s not pretty or perfect.”    

Robinson doted on both of her children as they grew and became successful adults. “When I look at Michelle and Craig — a big-time college basketball coach — I feel like maybe, just maybe, Fraser and I got something right,” Robinson wrote in a 2012 personal essay for Essence . “We didn’t do anything special. But I see the adults our kids have become and I can’t help but smile a little bit.” 

Fraser, who had multiple sclerosis , passed away in 1991.

Life in the White House

Robinson lived a quiet life in that very apartment until 2009, when Barack Obama officially took office. The Obamas didn’t want their girls to be taken to school by Secret Service agents, and Robinson wrote in her essay for Essence that she agreed to support her daughter and son-in-law out of concern for the family’s safety.   

“[Robinson is] a presence in a very quiet, understated way,” a longtime family friend told Politico in 2011 . “The first lady wouldn’t be as comfortable as she is traveling around the country and the world if her mom wasn’t there to pitch in.”

Robinson’s plan upon moving to the third floor of the residence was to help everyone get settled and then return to her quiet Chicago life. But after three years, she seemed to have built her own new quiet life full of family. 

“One of my biggest blessings is getting to see my granddaughters grow up before my eyes. My job here is the easiest one of all: I just get to be Grandma,” she wrote in her essay for Essence. 

Robinson made sure her granddaughters did their chores, including cleaning their rooms, and she taught the girls how to do their own laundry . 

“[My mother] laid out the blueprint for how I have raised my own girls,” Michelle Obama wrote in a 2020 Mother’s Day tribute on Instagram .    

Carving out her own space

Robinson did carve out her own space. She would spend afternoons reading in the great hall, which served as the first family’s living room on the second-floor residence. After spending some family time, Mrs. R. often retreated to her room, which had a four-poster bed and sitting area.

“There are many times when she drops off the kids, we hang out and talk and catch up, and then she’s like, ‘I’m going home.’ And she walks upstairs,” Michelle Obama told Oprah Winfrey in an interview.

Robinson kept a busy social life, and the Obamas mused that they would have to plan their schedule around hers. She made new friends among D.C. locals and often dined out, leaving the White House without the Secret Service detail. Betty Currie, who served as President Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, was among those new friends. 

Robinson participated in many events at the White House and traveled with her daughter and her granddaughters for state visits. That included trips to China and South Africa . She also joined Education Secretary Arne Duncan to read to young children as part of “Let’s Read, Let’s Move,” one of Michelle Obama’s cherished causes as first lady. 

“She [was] having a great time,” a family friend told Politico in 2011 . 

Yet she never put aside her main role, caring for Sasha and Malia. During a 2010 state dinner, the Washington Post reported that Robinson excused herself in order to tuck in her granddaughters, and then returned to the soiree. “She’s been there for us every day,” former President Obama once said. 

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Marian Robinson, mother of former first lady Michelle Obama, dies at 86

CHICAGO - Marian Robinson, the mother of former first lady Michelle Obama and mother-in-law of former President Barack Obama, has died, the former first family announced Friday.

“My mom Marian Robinson was my rock, always there for whatever I needed,” said Obama in a post on X , formerly known as Twitter. “She was the same steady backstop for our entire family, and we are heartbroken to share she passed away today.”

Robinson, who raised her daughter in the Chicago South Side neighborhoods that would become her son-in-law’s political homebase, was 86.

The Obamas paid tribute to Robinson’s character in a post on the former president’s Medium account . 

“Her wisdom came off as almost innate, as something she was born with, but in reality it was hard-earned, fashioned by her deep understanding that the world’s roughest edges could always be sanded down with a little grace,” it reads.

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The tribute, signed by the Obamas, their daughters and other family members, details her life’s journey from the heavily segregated South Side of Chicago to the White House.

She grew up one of seven children, born to Purnell Shields and Rebecca Jumper. Robinson studied to be a teacher before meeting the former First Lady’s father, Fraser Robinson, and together they raised the former First Lady and her brother, Craig. Eventually she became a constant presence in the Obamas’ life and became part of the First Family.

“At every step, as our families went down paths none of us could have predicted, she remained our refuge from the storm, keeping our feet on solid ground,” the Obamas said.

When her daughter married “a guy crazy enough to go into politics,” she supported their aspirations. When her son-in-law became the first Black man to become president in 2008, she held his hand on election night.

At the White House, she helped with the Obama children, Malia and Sasha, and doted on her “grandbabies.”

She was never one for the glamor of Washington, though she did make a point of asking to meet the Pope while she had the chance, the family said.

After the White House, she returned to Chicago, according to the tribute.

She enjoyed trips to drive-in movies with family, passing around pigs in a blanket and raising a toast on New Year’s Eve. The Obamas said she instilled confidence and self-worth in her children over discussions at dinner.

Her goal of making sure her kids had a strong voice carried over to her grandchildren. 

“From infancy through adulthood, she stood secondary watch over her grandchildren’s growth and development,” the Obamas wrote, “inspiring them, listening to them, telling them she was proud of them, making them feel loved, like they were remarkable in every way.”

In addition to the Obamas, the tribute letter was signed by Craig Robinson, his wife Kelly and their children.

“We are comforted by the understanding that she has returned to the embrace of her loving Fraser,” the family said of her husband who died in 1991, “that she’s pulled up her TV tray next to his recliner, that they’re clinking their highball glasses as she’s catching him up with the stories about this wild, beautiful ride. She’s missed him so.”

National News | Michelle Obama’s mom, Marian Robinson, dies at 86

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The former first lady mourned her “rock” Friday with a note posted to social media on behalf of the Obama family.

“My mom Marian Robinson was my rock, always there for whatever I needed,” Michelle Obama wrote on X. “She was the same steady backstop for our entire family, and we are heartbroken to share she passed away today .”

In a longer tribute on Facebook, Michelle referred to her mother as “a calm and nonjudgmental witness to our triumphs and stumbles” — someone who was “always there, welcoming us back home no matter how far we had journeyed, with that deep and abiding love.”

“We will all miss her greatly, and we wish she were here to offer us some perspective, to mend our heavy hearts with a laugh and a dose of her wisdom,” Michelle said.

That same sentiment was shared by the 44th president in a Medium blog post .

“Her wisdom came off as almost innate, as something she was born with, but in reality it was hard-earned, fashioned by her deep understanding that the world’s roughest edges could always be sanded down with a little grace,” the memorial reads.

The Obamas remembered Robinson as a woman who grew up with six siblings on “the red-lined South Side of Chicago” and studied to become a teacher before finding work as a secretary.

“With a healthy nudge, she agreed to move to the White House” after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the essay says. She wasn’t a fan of the “trappings and glamour” that came with her new home, but she made do.

“In our sadness, we are lifted up by the extraordinary gift of her life,” the Obama family said. “And we will spend the rest of ours trying to live up to her example.”

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President George Washington’s Cautionary Guidance: Insights from his Farewell Address

This essay about President George Washington’s Farewell Address highlights its timeless wisdom and relevance to modern America. It underscores Washington’s warnings against political division, foreign entanglements, and the importance of civic virtue. Emphasizing unity, integrity, and constitutional governance, the essay calls for heeding Washington’s guidance to safeguard democracy’s principles for future generations.

How it works

In the annals of American history, few documents carry the weight and wisdom of President George Washington’s Farewell Address. Delivered in 1796, it was a profound moment in which the first President of the United States imparted invaluable guidance to his fellow citizens and the nation’s leaders. More than just a farewell speech, Washington’s Address stands as a timeless testament to the principles of democracy, civic duty, and national unity.

At its core, Washington’s Farewell Address was a cautionary tale, a heartfelt plea for the preservation of the young republic he had helped to build.

He foresaw the dangers of factionalism, sectionalism, and foreign entanglements, urging his fellow Americans to prioritize the common good above partisan interests and to cultivate a spirit of national unity.

One of the central themes of Washington’s Address was the importance of preserving the unity of the young nation. He warned against the divisive influence of political parties, which he saw as a threat to the stability and cohesion of the republic. Washington recognized that political parties could easily devolve into factions, driven by narrow self-interest rather than the welfare of the nation as a whole. His warning against the “baneful effects of the spirit of party” remains as relevant today as it was more than two centuries ago, serving as a reminder of the dangers of excessive partisanship and political polarization.

In addition to cautioning against the dangers of domestic factionalism, Washington also issued a stark warning against the perils of foreign entanglements. He urged his fellow Americans to maintain a policy of neutrality and non-intervention in the affairs of other nations, arguing that such entanglements could undermine the nation’s independence and sovereignty. Washington’s warning against “permanent alliances” and “overgrown military establishments” resonates with contemporary debates over America’s role in the world, reminding us of the importance of exercising prudence and restraint in foreign affairs.

Washington’s Farewell Address was also notable for its emphasis on the importance of civic virtue and moral character in public life. He stressed the need for leaders of integrity and honor, who would prioritize the public good over personal ambition. Washington’s call for a “government of wise and just men” reflects his belief in the fundamental importance of character and virtue in the exercise of political power. His words serve as a reminder that the success of a republic depends not only on its institutions but also on the character of its citizens and leaders.

Furthermore, Washington’s Address underscored the importance of preserving the principles of the Constitution and the rule of law. He warned against the dangers of undermining the authority of the government or disregarding the Constitution for short-term gain. Washington’s commitment to the rule of law and constitutional governance remains a guiding principle for the United States, serving as a bulwark against tyranny and arbitrary rule.

In reflecting on Washington’s Farewell Address, it is clear that his insights remain as relevant today as they were in 1796. His warnings against the dangers of factionalism, foreign entanglements, and the erosion of civic virtue serve as a timeless reminder of the fragility of democracy and the importance of vigilance in its defense. As we confront the challenges of our own time, we would do well to heed Washington’s guidance and strive to uphold the principles of unity, integrity, and constitutional governance that he so eloquently articulated. In doing so, we can honor the legacy of our nation’s first President and ensure that his vision of a free and prosperous republic endures for generations to come.

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Barack and Michelle Obama share devastating news: 'We're heartbroken'

Marian, 86, was mom to michelle and brother craig.

Michelle Obama' s beloved mother Marian has died at the age of 86.

“As a sister, aunt, cousin, neighbor, and friend to so many, she was beloved beyond words by countless others whose lives were improved by her presence,” the statement from Barack and Michelle Obama, Michelle's brother Craig and his wife Kelly, and their children, said in part.

“She passed peacefully this morning, and right now,  none of us are quite sure how exactly we’ll move on without her ."

Michelle later posted a tribute to Marian, whom she called her "rock," writing on social media: "My mom Marian Robinson was my rock, always there for whatever I needed. She was the same steady backstop for our entire family, and we are heartbroken to share she passed away today. 

"We wanted to offer some reflections on her remarkable life." 

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The carousel featured a beautiful picture of Marian in recent years, and went on to feature an obituary written by Michelle and her husband Barack , and their two daughters Malia and Sasha, and Michelle's brother Craig and his wife Kelly, and their children, Avery,  Leslie, Austin, and Aaron. 

Reflecting on her childhood in Chicago, it read: " Her father, because of the color of his skin, wasn’t allowed to join a union or work for larger construction firms,  and he grew mistrustful of a world that seemed to have little place for him. Yet many mornings, he would wake the kids up at sunrise by blasting jazz records as an alarm clock. She learned early that even in the face of hardship, there was music to be found ."

Marion raised Michelle and Craig, "giving them the strength and confidence to walk to school — and out into the world — all on their own," with her husband Fraser Robinson, and when  Barack and Michelle moved to the White House in January 2009, she moved with them.

"We needed her. The girls needed her. And she ended up being our rock through it all," they said. 

"She relished her role as a grandmother. ... And although she enforced whatever household rules we’d set for bedtime, watching TV, or eating candy, she made clear that she sided with her 'grandbabies' in thinking that their parents were too darn strict ." 

However, despite the many glamorous and notable guests who may be in attendance at any given moment, "she preferred spending her time upstairs with a TV tray, in the room outside her bedroom with big windows that looked out at the Washington Monument," the family continued of Marian.

"The only guest she made a point of asking to meet was the Pope."

It went on to share some of her favorite sayings, including 'Don't sweat the small stuff,' and 'Know what's truly precious,' and concluded: "In our sadness, we are lifted up by the extraordinary gift of her life. And we will spend the rest of ours trying to live up to her example."

Mr Obama tweeted on his personal X account that "there was and will be only one Marian Robinson”.

“In our sadness, we are lifted up by the extraordinary gift of her life,” he added. “And we will spend the rest of ours trying to live up to her example.”

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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

A group of experts met to discuss the images that have best captured — and changed — the world since 1955.

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By M.H. Miller ,  Brendan Embser ,  Emmanuel Iduma and Lucy McKeon

• June 3, 2024

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Of the dozens of photographers not represented here that a reasonable person might expect to have been included, the most conspicuous absentees include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. Putting together a list of the 25 most significant photographs since 1955 — both fine art photos and reportage — proved a difficult task for the panelists (even the chosen time frame was controversial). They were: the Canadian conceptual photographer Stan Douglas , 63; the Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê , 64; the acting chief curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, 66; the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas , 75; the American photographer Shikeith , 35; and Nadia Vellam, 51, T’s photo and video director. Each participant (including myself, the moderator, 36) submitted up to seven possible nominees for the list. We gathered at The New York Times Building on a morning last February (with Shikeith joining on video from a shoot in Los Angeles) to begin our deliberations.

We chose judges from the realms of both fine art and reportage because, increasingly, the line between the two has collapsed. The modern age has been defined by photographs — images that began their lives in newspapers or magazines are repurposed as art; art has become a vehicle for information. Therefore, it was important to us and our jurors that we not draw boundaries between what was created as journalism and what was created as art. What was important was that the photographs we chose changed, in some way, how we see the world.

The conversation naturally turned into a series of questions. Like how important was it for a photograph to have expanded the possibilities of the medium? And how much did it matter who took a photo and what their intentions were? The list that emerged is less concerned with a historical chronology or an accepted canon than it is with a set of themes that have been linked indelibly to the photographic medium since its inception: labor and activism; war; the self and the family. Intriguingly, beyond an image by Wolfgang Tillmans from the ’90s, fashion photography is largely absent. So, too, are many world historical events that have been captured in landmark photographs, including the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall and anything from the pandemic lockdown or the presidency of Donald Trump. There were just too many other photographs to consider.

The process of producing the final list was clearly not scientific. It was more of a debate among a certain group of people on a certain day and is best considered that way. At the end of nearly four hours, jittery from caffeine, the group stood before a pile of crumpled masterworks on the floor as we assembled our chosen 25 images on a conference table. Many of our questions weren’t resolved (indeed, are unresolvable), but the results — which aren’t ranked but rather presented in the order in which we discussed them — are nothing if not surprising. — M.H. Miller

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

M.H. Miller: I thought we should start by talking about the time frame we settled on, starting in 1955.

Stan Douglas: It’s an agenda.

Miller: A little bit. It certainly shows an American bias, so I apologize to our Canadian representative — 1955 is really the beginning of the American civil rights movement, an era from which a number of us nominated photographs, and photography was so important in just making people aware of what was going on in the country. An-My, you chose Robert Frank’s picture of a streetcar in New Orleans, taken that year.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

Robert Frank used “Trolley — New Orleans” as the original cover of his influential photo book “The Americans,” first published in the United States in 1959. Frank, a Swiss émigré, spent two years traveling the States and capturing what he saw. In this photograph, two Black passengers sit at the rear of a New Orleans streetcar while four white passengers sit at the front; all look out from a row of windows, the mullions between them emphasizing their strict separation. At the time of its publication, “The Americans” was considered by several critics to be a pessimistic, angry portrait of the country. (The magazine Popular Photography famously called it a “warped” and “wart-covered” depiction “by a joyless man.”) Many more viewers and artists, however, found inspiration in the direct, unromantic style pioneered by Frank, whose outsider status likely let him view America’s contradictions from a clarifying distance. He had “sucked a sad poem out of America onto film,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in an introduction to the book. This image, shot in the months before the Montgomery bus boycotts made segregation a national debate, showed America to itself, as if for the first time. The faces in the photographs, Kerouac wrote, don’t “editorialize or criticize, or say anything but ‘this is the way we are in real life.’” — Emmanuel Iduma

An-My Lê: I tried to look for things that spoke to me, but also spoke to a generation.

Douglas: If I had to choose a civil rights image, I wouldn’t choose this one. Great photograph. But something happening on the street would be more appropriate, I think, like the dog attacking protesters , or the photo with the firemen .

Roxana Marcoci: But this was the cover of “The Americans,” and it does happen in the street, actually. I think that what you’re saying is, it’s not a photojournalistic image.

Douglas: The most important thing to me is: does a photograph reveal a new reality, or reveal something that’s been hidden previously? I think that’s a key criterion for making it significant. What impact on the world can that image have? A European might not have recognized that this was happening in the U.S. Maybe a lot of Americans in the North didn’t realize this was happening in the U.S. And I love this photograph, so I’m very happy to keep it.

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

Mamie Till fixes her eyes on her dead son, as her fiancé, Gene Mobley, holding her, stares at the viewer. Emmett Till , 14, is laid out on a cot in a Chicago funeral home, his face disfigured and bloated. His mother allowed the photojournalist David Jackson to take this picture in September 1955, a few days after two white men had abducted and murdered Till while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Quickly acquitted by an all-white jury, the men would go on to sell their confession to Look magazine for $4,000. When this photo was published, first in Jet magazine and then in The Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers, it incited an unprecedented level of outrage in America over racial violence; Jet had to reprint the Sept. 15, 1955, issue in which it appeared because of high demand. For the same reason Mamie Till let this picture be taken, she chose to keep her son’s coffin open during the funeral. “The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all,” she said. An estimated 100,000 people came to view his body. Jackson’s photograph was a call to action for many, including Rosa Parks, who said she thought of Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus later that same year. — E.I.

Miller: I feel like you can’t have this conversation, especially with the year we designated as the starting point, without talking about Emmett Till. There’s the devastating series of photographs of Till’s funeral. But there’s also the one from the trial — when Till’s great-uncle is identifying the men who murdered his nephew. The judge didn’t allow that photographer, Ernest C. Withers, to shoot in the courtroom. So it’s a miracle that the picture exists, and that it’s composed as well as it is when it had to be taken in secret. And it’s a moment where you saw a larger shift taking place. Up to that point in the South, a Black witness identifying white defendants in court was unheard-of.

Marcoci: The picture [of his body] was also about the power of the witness, right?

Susan Meiselas: Oh, for sure. Mamie Till and her insistence on an open coffin: how brave an act that was. And it ran in Jet and moved around the world.

Douglas: The issue for me with the trial picture is that it needs a paragraph to explain why we’re looking at it.

Marcoci: The courtroom was a travesty. They went free. But this, Mamie Till with her son, created a generation of Black activists.

Shikeith: I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and when we were learning about Black history in the fourth or fifth grade, that picture was brazenly shared with students. It was probably the first time I learned how powerful a photograph can be in having real material change in the world. It’s an image that I’ve lived with my [whole] life, and that’s impacted how I viewed the world and racism and its violence. It scares me. But, you know, it’s the truth. The truth can be very scary for a lot of us.

Miller: Shikeith, you also selected this Gordon Parks photograph, which is one of two color images the group nominated from the 1950s and ’60s — and the second was taken from outer space.

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

In 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to document the effects of Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South through the experiences of one extended family in Mobile, Ala. Parks was one of the few Black photojournalists to work for an establishment magazine at the time, and was known especially for his fashion photography, as is easily apparent from this image. For Life, he photographed everyday scenes — a church choir singing or children drinking from water fountains — intentionally capturing signs reading “White Only” or “ Lots for Colored .” “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) was shot for the Life story, which ran at 12 pages under the title “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” but, for unknown reasons, it didn’t make the final edit, and it wasn’t published until 2012, when a five-volume collection of Parks’s photographs was released. “Department Store” has since become a belated icon, one of the most memorable images in a career that also includes directing the 1971 film “Shaft.” Notable most of all for its vivid color, a startling contrast to the predominantly black-and-white imagery from the civil rights era, the portrait depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson, then age 27, dressed in an ice-blue, A-line cocktail dress, with her young niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing beneath the red neon “Colored Entrance” sign in front of a department store. Wilson’s upright posture and outward gaze — peering in the opposite direction of the sign’s blue arrow — subtly signify defiance. But there’s an intimacy and vulnerability in the picture, too. In 2013, Wilson, who went on to become a high school teacher, told the art historian Maurice Berger that she regretted that the strap of her slip had visibly fallen. “Dressing well made me feel first class,” she said. “I wanted to set an example.” She had set an example, of course, which Parks had recorded with such clarity: Wilson also told Berger that she refused to take her niece through the “colored” entrance. — Brendan Embser

Shikeith: I think what’s beautiful about this image is that it’s brilliantly composed — it uses beauty to draw you into a poignant moment in history, becoming a record of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern U.S. I tried to pick photographs that had an influence on me, and that I thought my mother would recognize, to indicate their influence on people who might operate outside of art history conversations. It [can be used as] a tool for educating even the youngest of minds about what marginalized communities went through.

Marcoci: I think that’s a great point: the pedagogical nature of photographs. In this picture, there’s the elegance and grace of these two figures, and then the ugliness of that “Colored Entrance” sign. There’s such a tension between them.

Nadia Vellam: You don’t immediately realize the context because you’re so attracted to the two people in the image. It asks you to spend more time looking.

Douglas: It’s quite an exquisite picture. It’s basically an X, which draws your eye into the center, which then takes you to that woman’s gaze outside the frame. Inside the frame, there’s something quite sweet. But outside — both beyond that door and out in the world that’s made that door — there’s something quite ugly.

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960

Alberto Korda, a favored photographer of Fidel Castro, captured this image of a 31-year-old Che Guevara by chance during a funeral in Havana in 1960 to honor the victims of a freighter explosion. Guevara, at the time the president of the National Bank of Cuba, happened to move into Korda’s line of sight while Castro was giving a speech. His expression is one of restrained anger; the Cuban government accused the United States of being responsible for the tragedy, which it denied. Five years later, Guevara resigned from Castro’s cabinet and joined revolutionary causes abroad, including in Congo and Bolivia, where he led guerrillas in a failed coup attempt. Korda’s photo wasn’t widely published until after Guevara’s execution by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, when posters, murals and eventually T-shirts emblazoned with Guevara’s face began to appear around the world. In the original portrait, he is flanked by another man and some palm fronds, but the reproductions are cropped to show just Guevara’s head. Korda’s image made Guevara into something more than a man, or even a famous revolutionary; he became a symbol for revolution itself. — E.I.

Miller: We have two pictures of Che Guevara to consider. Stan, you picked Che following his execution , and Susan, you picked the more famous portrait of him by Alberto Korda. It’s in every college dorm.

Marcoci: It’s in every tattoo parlor.

Douglas: They’re both propaganda images. One is the revolutionary looking to the future, which we’ve seen in everything from Soviet realist paintings to Obama posters. So, in many ways, a cliché, even though it’s had this huge impact. The image of Che dead [which was taken by the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta] is both iconic in that it’s like [an Andrea] Mantegna [1431-1506] painting of the dead Christ [“ Lamentation Over the Dead Christ ,” circa 1480], but also as evidence, on the part of the people who killed him, that the guy is dead. It’s just such a weird photograph: the officer on the right who’s poking at Che’s body to prove he’s just a human. Just mortal. And it somehow seemed like the end of the export of revolution from Cuba, which very much shut down after Che’s death.

Meiselas: And then he’s resurrected as a tattoo.

5. Diane Arbus, “Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C., 1967”

The boy in “Boy With a Straw Hat” doesn’t look like a typical Arbus subject. Wearing a prim collared shirt, bow-tie and boater hat, with one American flag at his side and another, much smaller one twisted into a bow on his lapel, the thin-lipped paradegoer seems like the paragon of anodyne conservatism. He’s nothing like the cross-dressers, carnival entertainers, nudists and others relegated to the margins of society that fascinated Arbus, whose work prompted one of the more protracted debates on the ethics of photography, as her images were so often said to skirt the lines of voyeurism and exploitation. Yet his steady gaze prompts a similar sense of unease in the viewer, as does the small pin on his jacket that reads Bomb Hanoi. “Boy With a Straw Hat” was the cover image of Artforum’s May 1971 issue, published two months before Arbus’s death by suicide at age 48. In 1972, when her posthumous MoMA retrospective drew record crowds, the art critic Hilton Kramer refuted the idea that she was merely capturing her subjects for the sake of spectacle; he argued that she collaborated with the people she photographed, and that that act of participation provided dignity — or at least authenticity — especially for those individuals who are shunned or otherwise invisible. Arbus herself once said that the “best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.” — B.E.

Miller: A number of us nominated Diane Arbus photos.

Douglas: [I picked] the sitting room in Levittown [“ Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I., 1962 ”], which is one of those suburbs created in the postwar period that people could buy [homes in] with their G.I. Bill money, in which Black people couldn’t live. It’s a case of there [being] something outside the image, which is very powerful: The construction of this new suburban reality, while Emmett Till’s being killed.

Marcoci: I chose the “Giant” [“ A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970 .”], because this was one of the first pictures where I was really thinking, “Who is that person? What would it be like to be him?”

Meiselas: One of the things that photographs do is make us emotional. Some of Arbus’s most memorable pictures are the ones that make you feel more than think.

Vellam: I’d vote for “Giant” just because it spawned so many people’s idea of portraiture: Katy Grannan, Deana Lawson, Larry Sultan. Like this idea of going into a place — in her case, middle-class suburbia — that you may not even have spent any time in otherwise. I feel like that became its own genre: There’s so much photography that has come out of her idea of going into people’s homes.

Marcoci: If I were to choose just one Arbus, I’d probably choose “Boy With a Straw Hat”: A portrait of an individual that’s this very interesting collective portrait of America, too. There’s this tension between the innocent face and then those buttons: “God Bless America” and “Bomb Hanoi.”

Shikeith: He’s sort of the archetype for the Proud Boys. You can see that smirk on his face.

Meiselas: There were pictures from the R.N.C. [Republican National Convention] four years ago that looked so much like this.

Miller: Stan and An-My both nominated a very different kind of photograph from the Vietnam War era: Malcolm Browne’s picture of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation.

6. Malcolm Browne, the Self-Immolation of the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, 1963

The AP reporter Malcolm Browne was among the only photojournalists on the scene when the monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as an act of protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of the Buddhist majority. As flames engulfed Quảng Đức, hundreds of monks surrounded him, mourning while he burned. The photo, sent out as soon as possible on a commercial flight to reach the AP’s offices, was published on front pages internationally the following morning. When President John F. Kennedy saw it, he reportedly exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” and then ordered a review of his administration’s Vietnam policy. (He would later say, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”) Browne won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for the photograph, which also contributed to the collapse of support for the South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, who was assassinated in a coup that year. President Kennedy was assassinated just a few weeks later, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, would escalate the war. Browne’s photograph, which is newly resonant today, enshrined the act of self-immolation as the most extreme form of protest. — Lucy McKeon

Lê: I think it’s one of the most incredible monuments that exists as a photograph. [It documents] an extraordinary act of sacrifice for a cause. These days, you see [some] people protesting, and it’s all about their egos. And here, there’s no ego. It’s one of the few pictures I know that’s so violent and peaceful at the same time.

Douglas: He was there for five minutes, apparently, burning, and just didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. This is what you do when you have no other recourse, when you feel the suppression is so severe that this is the only way you can get your statement heard.

Meiselas: It makes me think of the Napalm Girl, as well [ Nick Ut’s 1972 image of Kim Phuc Phan Thi , age 9, fleeing a napalm attack in the village of Trảng Bàng]. That moment impacted a generation. The question is, which one mobilized us further?

Lê: The Napalm Girl picture, for me, represents the notion that all Vietnamese are victims of war. I started watching war movies in college, and every time the word “Vietnam” comes up, that is the image that people have in their mind. I think the monk speaks to [something] beyond himself. He’s not a victim.

7. NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise,” 1968

On Christmas Eve 1968, aboard Apollo 8 during its pioneering orbit of the moon, William A. Anders photographed the Earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. The picture was the first of its kind — and it was also unplanned. Anders, the youngest of the three astronauts on the spacecraft, had been tasked with taking photographs of the moon’s craters, mountains and other geological features. He spontaneously decided, however, to include Earth in the frame when he noticed how beautiful it was. “Here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament, very fragile,” Anders would recall in a NASA oral history. “And yet it was our home.” His first shot was in black and white. For the next, he switched to color, which emphasized the contrast between the moon’s gray surface and the planet’s blue-green vibrancy. “Earthrise” was the first image most of humanity saw of the planet we live on, a nature photo like none before it and a reminder of how small our world really is, in comparison with the rest of the universe. As Joni Mitchell would sing of the image, on 1976’s “ Refuge of the Roads ”: “And you couldn’t see a city on that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest or a highway/Or me here least of all. …” — E.I.

Lê: “Earthrise” isn’t the first image of the Earth seen from space. There were earlier low-resolution ones in the ’40s , made from unmanned missiles or whatever. There was one made on Apollo 4, in 1967 . But I think this one, taken by a crew member on Apollo 8 the next year with a Hasselblad, is important because it’s humbling: seeing the Earth in relationship to the Moon, and thinking about us not being the only people on this Earth. Perhaps this is when we started thinking about how we should take care of our home.

Miller: Stan, you nominated a later photo, “ Sunset on Mars ” (2005).

Douglas: I’ve always had this knee-jerk response to Apollo being American propaganda somehow, part of the arms race — who’s going to get [to the Moon] first, the U.S. or the Russians? And once the U.S. got there, they lost interest. It wasn’t really about exploration, but dominance. This image on Mars is something quite extraordinary, because in effect, the camera is a prosthesis. It’s both a very artificial one and a human one. We actually extend our vision through it.

8. Ernest C. Withers, “I Am a Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee,” 1968

In the last weeks of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. took part in a protest of Black sanitation workers striking for safer conditions and decent wages in Memphis, Tenn. In a speech, King emphasized the connection between the United States’ civil rights battle and the struggles of poor and disenfranchised people worldwide, a message that resonated with the crowd. Their protest signs bore the phrase “I Am a Man,” a stark acknowledgment of all the ways this most basic fact was disrespected. “We were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has,” one of the participants, James Douglas, recalled in a 1978 documentary titled “I Am a Man.” The defining photo of the strike was taken by the Black photojournalist Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis native who previously shot the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, and also made famous images of the Montgomery bus boycott , the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Withers’s picture became the official record of King’s last major civil rights action. Years later, however, Withers’s own story was revealed to have been more complicated. Like King, the photographer drew the attention of the F.B.I. Unlike King, he became a paid informant. Yet he continued to produce some of the most iconic images of the movement: On April 4, 1968, less than a week after taking this photo, Withers was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, photographing the blood stain at the scene of King’s assassination. — L.M.

Shikeith: I think I first saw this image around the time the Million Man March was happening [in 1995]. I have a greater understanding of manhood [now] and how much of it I want to align with, and how much I don’t. But I understand how vital the need to identify as a man was in that moment.

Meiselas: I love the contrast of “I am a man,” singular, and “I am a collective.” It’s just all there: perfect distance, perfect composition. Whether or not Withers was working for the F.B.I. …

Douglas: Was he?

Meiselas: Yeah.

Douglas: And his role was to just …

Meiselas: Report on his fellow men. They paid him to spy on his colleagues. It’s a dark story. But let’s not go there.

9. Blair Stapp, Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, 1968

In the summer of 1968, outside of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., where Huey P. Newton stood trial for the murder of a police officer, supporters held up posters of him that instantly became synonymous with the Black Panther Party. The year before, Newton, the party’s co-founder and Minister of Defense, had collaborated with fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver and the photographer Blair Stapp to stage a portrait of himself in a black leather jacket and a tipped beret, holding a shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other. He’s seated on a rattan peacock chair that recalls chairs woven by inmates in the United States-colonized Philippines decades earlier. Its oval back piece frames Newton’s head like an oversize halo. Two Zulu warrior shields are propped against the wall. Stapp’s portrait and the peacock chair itself have since become an enduring symbol of Black Power. Michelle Obama sat in one for her 1982 prom portrait . Melvin Van Peebles recreated the photograph in his 1995 film “Panther.” The visual artist Sam Durant memorialized Newton in bronze in 2004 , and Henry Taylor painted it in 2007 . After two hung juries, the murder charges against Newton were dropped in 1971. For him, the struggle was about survival — or as he put it, “survival pending revolution.” — B.E.

Shikeith: I was trying to think of images that my grandmothers revered in a way. I think this is one of those images that exists in a lot of Black domestic spaces as a symbol for strength and determination. And it has this royal demeanor that’s been continuously emulated in Black photographic practice, whether amateur or professional.

Marcoci: The beret is almost [like] Che’s.

Shikeith: You can see people replicating this pose on the wicker chair throughout Black portraiture in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m really interested in photographs that’ve had a long-lasting effect on our daily lives.

10. W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko in Her Bath,” 1972

In the Magnum photojournalist W. Eugene Smith’s picture of Tomoko Kamimura, 15, she is being bathed by her mother at their home, in Minamata, Japan. Kamimura had been born with a kind of mercury poisoning that would later come to be known as Minamata disease, caused by a chemical factory contaminating the city’s water and food supply for more than 30 years. Smith and his wife, the photographer and activist Aileen M. Smith, lived in Minamata in the early 1970s, taking thousands of photographs to document the toll of the disaster — 1,784 people died after contracting the disease and thousands were left with severe neurological and musculoskeletal disabilities. Images from the series were printed by Life magazine in 1972, and Kamimura’s portrait became, for a time, one of the most famous images in the world. Amid the public outcry, “rumors began to circulate through the neighborhood claiming that we were making money from the publicity,” Kamimura’s father, Yoshio, would later write, “but this was untrue — it had never entered our minds to profit from the photograph of Tomoko. We never dreamed that a photograph like that could be commercial.” The Chisso Corporation, which owned the factory, has paid damages to some 10,000 victims. Kamimura died in 1977, at the age of 21. Smith died the following year. Twenty years later, after a French TV network wanted to use the photograph, Aileen M. Smith transferred control of it to Kamimura’s family. They haven’t allowed the photograph to be reproduced since. — L.M.

Meiselas: Without this documentation by Eugene Smith, I don’t think Minamata and the mercury poisoning would ever have been confronted. So when you do choose to represent a victim, I hope it’s purposeful.

Douglas: I heartily agree. And it’s a beautiful image of a loving relationship between mother and daughter.

Vellam: Smith documented people, but he was also very conscious of what he was doing while he was documenting them. I think he took a very long time after he shot everyone to figure out what he even wanted to show from them.

Meiselas: He believed that they should be better understood.

11. Photo Archive Group, “Photographs From S-21: 1975-79”

Some photographs, taken in the darkest moments of history, end up saying very different things from what their creators intended — like the images that Stalin’s secret police took during the Great Purge, or the ones white spectators took of lynchings in the United States. One of the more extensive photographic records of an authoritarian regime comes from the Khmer Rouge army, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and whose genocidal purges of minority groups and political opponents led to the murder of almost a quarter of the country’s population. Before killing most of its victims, the army took their portraits, in part to prove to leaders that the supposed enemies of the state were indeed being executed. Of the nearly 20,000 people sent between 1975 and 1979 to what was known as the S-21 death camp, the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, only about a dozen survived. In 1994, the American nonprofit organization Photo Archive Group cleaned and cataloged more than 5,000 photographs taken of prisoners before their executions. A selection of the images, known as “Photographs from S-21: 1975-79,” was published as a book called “The Killing Fields” in 1996 and shown at MoMA the following year. Who was the girl pictured here? What had she seen? It’s impossible to know. And yet the regime’s photographic record offers a way into humanizing and remembering the victims of one of the most ruthless atrocities of the 20th century. S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where a number of the images from “Photographs From S-21: 1975-1979” are on permanent display. — L.M.

Lê: So these pictures were found in an archive in Cambodia [in 1993]. After the Khmer Rouge took over [in 1975], they went on a rampage, killing teachers and anyone who they felt wasn’t one of theirs. The bodies were buried in different locations. But they photographed these people before killing them. There were thousands of these pictures.

Douglas: If you want to make them disappear, why do you document them?

Lê: But that’s the thing. It’s the banality of evil. It’s unconscionable, right? Civilians being just collateral damage in war. Perhaps there are other ways to speak about violence, and I think this [set of photographs] certainly does.

12. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80

Cindy Sherman was 23 when she began making her “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white staged self-portraits that explore stereotypes of women in film and mass media. As a student at Buffalo State College, where she originally studied painting, she became fascinated by performers such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, artists who put their own bodies center stage. Sherman also liked to dress up as stock characters for parties, purchasing clothes from flea markets and experimenting with cosmetics. In “Untitled Film Stills,” she plays the career girl, ingénue, librarian , mistress, femme fatale and runaway , alternately heartbroken, hung over, daydreaming or determined to escape a predator as though trapped in some film noir. But which film? That feeling of vague recognition was Sherman’s point, as well as that of other artists of the era experimenting with pictures from mass media, who would eventually be called the Pictures Generation, a name based on a 1977 exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp . They wanted viewers to almost recognize the images, so as to heighten the uncanny nature of their work. Sherman initially sold eight-by-ten prints from “Untitled Film Stills” for $50 out of a binder from her desk at her day job as a receptionist at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space in New York. Douglas Eklund, who organized a Pictures Generation exhibition in 2009, noted that the series “never ceases to astonish, as if Sherman knew how to operate all of the machinery of mass-cultural representation with one hand tied behind her back.” Her intuitive grasp of the self-portrait’s theatrical appeal, especially when that self could be manipulated — decades before anyone could have imagined camera filters on an iPhone — has kept “Untitled Film Stills” relevant ever since. — B.E.

Marcoci: There’s something about the “Untitled Film Stills.” It’s this relationship between still and moving images. Cindy Sherman has the capacity to encapsulate, in a single [work], a narrative. She calls on this pantheon of women’s roles from movies that we think we’ve seen, but none of them are based on an actual film still. There’s one [“Untitled Film Still #13,” 1978] where she looks like Brigitte Bardot in a head scarf from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), but she’s a librarian. She’s reaching for a book. She makes the Bardot type into an intellectual, which is [an agency] that most male Hollywood filmmakers of the time, or even a filmmaker like Godard, would not have given the real Bardot. She was able to see something about how we engage with mass media and tweak it.

Douglas: I’m not convinced about Sherman. [There’s] an art-world canonization of the work. How important was it? How influential? I don’t think it was that important or influential outside of a very small area.

Marcoci: On the other hand, if you ask people if they know about Sherman, they probably do.

Lê: They do. Many young women find Sherman’s work empowering.

Marcoci: I never thought that we would just be considering photojournalism.

Meiselas: No.

Douglas: I mean, looking at the art world, I would include Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” [1966].

13. Ed Ruscha, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” 1966

As a teenager in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, Ed Ruscha delivered newspapers by bicycle daily along a two-mile route. He dreamed about making a model of all the buildings on his circuit, he later recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “like an architect standing over a table and plotting out a city.” After moving to Los Angeles for art school in 1956, Ruscha became obsessed with the city’s architecture, particularly on the Sunset Strip, that part of Sunset Boulevard that stretches for about two miles, like his old paper route, across West Hollywood. In 1966, Ruscha photographed both sides of the Strip by securing a motorized camera to the bed of a pickup truck. The result was “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a nearly 25-foot accordion-fold, self-published artist’s book. Today, Ruscha is most famous for his text-based paintings, many of which reference corporate logos and advertising slogans, for which he is widely celebrated as postwar America’s answer to the Dadaist nonsense movement. But his photography shares with the paintings a repetitive, deadpan humor. In addition to the Sunset Strip, Ruscha photographed swimming pools, gas stations, parking lots and apartments, and collected the images into small books that provoked the ire of critics — and fellow photographers — who deemed the work lacking in style and meaning. (“Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but the filling stations,” the photographer Jeff Wall once complained.) But what he created was a kind of time travel, a meticulous, obsessive visual cartography of a long-lost Los Angeles. He and his brother, Paul, still make the trip to photograph the street every couple of years. — B.E.

Marcoci: I love [Ed] Ruscha, and I think we’ve barely touched on conceptual photography. Obviously superimportant, but is he really the photographer that did so much for photography through that series?

Meiselas: I know what you mean. Of course, because the photographs came way early, we rediscovered them after he became famous for painting.

Miller: Well, he’s certainly not as famous as a photographer as some people on this list, but I don’t know if we need to get hung up on that.

Douglas: I think “Sunset Strip” was extraordinary. Ruscha produces photographs governed by a hard-core conceptual procedure. In the case of “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” the procedure is in the title and, in order to fulfill it, he had to make hundreds of stops along a Los Angeles street. But I also thought this was too inside the art world.

Miller: Maybe this is a good time to talk about Nan Goldin.

14. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1979-2004

Nan Goldin originally presented “Ballad,” named after a song from Bertolt Brecht’s satirical musical “The Threepenny Opera,” as a series of 35-millimeter slides shown by a carousel projector in bars and nightclubs and backed by an eclectic soundtrack — from Dean Martin to the Velvet Underground. Goldin’s visual diary is itself a bohemian opera of New York’s downtown counterculture, a community freed from convention yet abandoned many times over by society; it documents sex, addiction, beauty, violence, powerful friendship, the AIDS crisis and the joyful struggle to live beyond the limits of the mainstream. Friends were photographed doing the twist at a party or preparing to inject heroin. In “Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984), a portrait of domestic abuse, the artist’s bloodshot eye meets the lens head-on. Goldin’s “Ballad” has since been credited with inspiring everything from selfie culture to the raw, diaristic aesthetic and saturated color now commonplace across social media and in fine art. Over the years, Goldin would revise and update the series, presenting it with new images and a different soundtrack, and it would become an ubiquitous presence in galleries and museums. But because the work has so thoroughly permeated the culture, it’s easy to overlook just how radical it was when it debuted. In “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ,” Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Goldin, the photographer describes a resistance to her art in the ’80s, “especially from male artists and gallerists who said ‘This isn’t photography. Nobody photographs their own life.’ It was still a kind of outlier act.” — L.M.

Marcoci: We’re talking about an artist who’s very much engaged with youth culture, with the cultures that transgress gender binaries. Also with the ravages of a generation that takes drugs, that loves, that dies young. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is a ballad. It shows this group of people as images set to music.

Meiselas: It was radical, it was very impactful to the photographic medium. But here’s my question: Would we be choosing either Nan [Goldin] or Cindy Sherman if we didn’t know their names?

Marcoci: Did you watch the “Ballad”?

Meiselas: Of course. I watched it in 1985.

Marcoci: How many times?

Meiselas: How many times has she changed it?

Marcoci: But even that I like. You don’t need to choose one picture. It’s interesting for me when photography is not just a moment that’s frozen in time, when it has the capacity to change.

15. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W),” 1993

A slightly different, color image of the same people in “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W)” was first published by i-D magazine in 1993 for an unconventional fashion story about camouflage. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans staged the scene in Bournemouth, England, where he’d attended art school the previous year, and captured a whorl of bodies in military fatigues, each person clasping another’s arm, thigh or chest, and all wearing camouflage patterns from different countries — a post-Cold War utopia. The black-and-white version was printed on color paper, which accounts for the warmth of its tone. On the beach, Lutz, Alex, Suzanne and Christoph appear as if from a scene in Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 short film “Powers of Ten,” which zooms out from a sunny picnic into the farthest reaches of the universe. Tillmans’s photograph “seems to model something like chosen family,” says the curator Phil Taylor, who edited a collection of the artist’s interviews. The way Tillmans envisions family in this early portrait — as a tight embrace amid the implied violence of the outside world — is emblematic of the way he would go on to depict men kissing at gay nightclubs or activists at antiwar demonstrations, each a picture of solidarity against the odds. — B.E.

Lê: I think Wolfgang [Tillmans] captured youth culture — in magazines like i-D and The Face — at a time [the early ’90s] when young people were being captured in a different way: It was very clinical and idealized, and he just came out with this very real [take on] youth culture. The pictures were a little more grainy, and I think it [changed] the way young people are seen. My students always bring up his work. I think it’s a way to photograph your family and friends and turn them into real protagonists. And I see that influence as very long-lasting.

Marcoci: What’s interesting in this image is [that] it’s four friends on a beach, dressed in camouflage. Camouflage immediately makes you think of military uniforms, of obedience, of listening to orders. But in the techno culture of these clubs in the 1990s, it had become a symbol of individuality and freedom: the exact opposite of what the uniform means.

Meiselas: This image, if I didn’t know his name, I would’ve just turned the page.

Lê: I think we need a picture that speaks about youth. And I think even though this picture was made in ’93 …

Miller: … That’s still how young people are photographed today.

16. Lee Friedlander, “Boston,” 1986, From the Series “At Work,” 1975-95

Lee Friedlander is best known for photographing America’s social landscape, from mundane street scenes in the Midwest to nudes of Madonna that were taken in the late 1970s. Between 1975 and 1995, he created six series of photographs depicting employees at different types of workplaces, including Rust Belt factories, a telemarketing call center and a New York investment firm. One of these series, commissioned by the M.I.T. Museum and produced between 1985 and 1986, looks at office workers in the Boston area who used desktop computers for their jobs. At the time, this was a fairly new development, but one that Friedlander presciently recognized would come to define not just corporate life but humanity itself. His subjects are often seemingly oblivious — or indifferent — to the presence of the camera. Likewise, his camera often omits the computers themselves, the ostensible subject of his images. Instead, the workers, sitting at brightly lit desks, are pictured from the chest up, their detached expressions familiar to any of us as they sit engrossed in (or bored by) screens just out of frame. With this series Friedlander had tapped into the dark comedy of the mundane. His influence can be seen in a generation of younger photographers who seek to question everyday life — from Alec Soth to LaToya Ruby Frazier — and whose images would mostly be viewed on screens. — E.I.

Marcoci: I love this series.

Douglas: I love it, too, but I put this in out of guilt for not having more art people in here. It’s images of these people just engaged in the world around them.

Meiselas: In autonomous labor. I remember when I first saw this series of white-collar workers in front of machines.

Lê: No one had done that before.

17. LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze,” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze,” named after the compact car made by General Motors, follows the 2019 closure of an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that had been open since 1966. Over nine months, Frazier documented the impact one corporation can have on a community, which lost thousands of jobs. The work was first presented as a multimedia installation: More than 60 portraits and video interviews with union workers and their families were mounted to orange metal trusses at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. In the accompanying monograph, Frazier included essays by artists and critics as well as members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers union. On its cover is this photograph, which she shot from a helicopter, showing a group of workers and their families protesting the plant’s abrupt shuttering and requesting a new product to work on. Other images show Lordstown residents in various states of mourning — wiping away tears or proudly displaying union memorabilia. Born in a Pennsylvania steel manufacturing town, Frazier embedded herself with the Ohio workers, producing one of the most detailed records of the gutting of America’s working class. “‘The Last Cruze’ is a workers’ monument,” she has said. “It is half-holy, half-assembly line.” — L.M.

Marcoci: LaToya Ruby Frazier is a true artist-activist. These workers were losing their pension plans, their health benefits, you name it. It’s a work that includes more than 60 pictures of union workers along with their testimonies, because she also did these interviews with them.

Miller: I think “The Last Cruze” might be the only complete photographic record we have of the impact that corporate decision-making has on a work force. GM skipped town, cut their costs and the people of Lordstown were left holding the bag. We have another picture, nominated by Susan, that also documents labor.

18. Sebastião Salgado, “Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil,” 1986

One of the most striking aspects of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of an open-air gold mine in Brazil is the scale. Several thousand men — their bodies hunched and fragile — are rendered miniature against the backdrop of a massive pit in the earth. In the photos, most of the miners are climbing into or out of that pit, holding tools or ferrying sacks up and down narrow ladders and steep slopes. In several shots, Salgado chose not to include the horizon within the frame; the viewer can’t see where the workers’ dangerous journey ends. The photographer, who was born in the state of Minas Gerais (which means “general mines”) in Brazil, spent 35 days at Serra Pelada, living alongside the miners while he took these photographs. When they were published in 1987 in The New York Times Magazine, they revealed a late-20th-century gold rush and the appalling conditions facing those at the bottom of it. In the nearly four decades since, Salgado has gone on to capture the burning oil wells in Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Some critics have labeled him an “aesthete of misery,” using the plight of the poor and disenfranchised to make visually striking pictures. When these images are exhibited in a fine art context, their size is so massive, the sheer aesthetics of the imagery threaten to eclipse the act of documentation. But in a profile in The Guardian this year marking his 80th birthday, Salgado responded, “I came from the third world. When I was born, Brazil was a developing country. The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come from. … The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt.” — E.I.

Meiselas: The scale of what he presented to us at the time was really quite amazing.

Douglas: It was like, “Holy moly, that’s still going on?”

Meiselas: Exactly.

19. Stuart Franklin, an Unidentified Man Blocking a Column of Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

On June 4, 1989, as a column of tanks rolled into formation on Chang’an Avenue bordering Tiananmen Square, the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin watched from the sixth-floor balcony of the nearby Beijing Hotel. He was holed up there with several other foreign correspondents, who were all covering the weekslong protests, led by hundreds of thousands of unarmed students, against the Chinese Community Party. The previous night, the People’s Liberation Army had cleared the area with force; that morning, they prevented parents from looking for students lost in the fray, and the soldiers fired live rounds even as medics attempted to rush the injured to safety. (Thousands are thought to have been killed in the protests, although an official death toll has never been released.) Suddenly, a young man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding shopping bags in his hands, approached the first tank. On the video footage, it attempts to maneuver around him. Like a matador taunting a bull, he flings his arms in fury and, when the tank turns back, the man jumps out again. Yet the dramatic photograph Franklin took, with five tanks and a destroyed bus in the frame, draws its power from its stillness, its potential energy. (Four other photographers are known to have captured the same scene, including Jeff Widener, whose tightly framed version for The Associated Press ran on the front page of The Times.) Authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate symbolic images of resistance and, while the Tank Man — whose identity has never been confirmed — became an inspiration for pro-democracy movements across the world, he was snuffed out from official Chinese memory. Today, image searches in China for “Tiananmen Square” only turn up cheerful pictures of a tourist destination. — B.E.

Douglas: Multiple photographers shot this image because they were all in the same corner of a hotel overlooking Tiananmen Square. They couldn’t really shoot anywhere else on the square. The first time I saw this scene, it was a video.

Meiselas: Right, there was a television camera. The stills are very different. And I don’t care whose image it is. I’m thinking about the man in front of the tank and what happens when one man stands up. And I love how this looks alongside Ernest Withers’s “I Am a Man.”

20. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” 2008

In 2008, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan during a period that was, at the time, the deadliest week since the war began in 2001. They brought a lightproof box containing a roll of photographic paper, and, occasionally, exposed six-meter segments of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds at a time. They were creating photograms, which, as opposed to conventional war photographs, display the marks of their making but little else. The resulting works — 12 in total — set out “to create a kind of post-mortem of photojournalistic representation of conflict,” as the artists wrote when the work was first exhibited. They made these images on days when a BBC fixer was executed or a suicide attack killed nine Afghan soldiers. But they also made one on the day that the title refers to — a day with no fatalities. In a literal sense, there isn’t anything to see in the images except splashes of light as abstract as a blurry sonogram. When Broomberg and Chanarin arrived in Afghanistan, the war was in its seventh year and, by then, a surfeit of photographs depicting death and violence had long been circulating. There’s hardly consensus on what to leave out when depicting war, but there is some consensus on the need to bear witness. With their photograms, Broomberg and Chanarin found a new, unexpected, but no less emotional way of doing so. — E.I.

Miller: There were a lot of different kinds of images of war from the George W. Bush era. Nadia, you nominated Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s “The Day Nobody Died,” which is very abstract.

Douglas: What is it?

Vellam: They did this project in Afghanistan where they took rolls of photo paper and put them outside, exposing them to the sun or the weather. Whatever would happen while the photo paper was exposed was the work. It’s about a new idea of photography, about it not depicting something specific but creating a mood. And this one was taken, as the title says, on a day nobody died, which is such an interesting and different way to talk about a conflict.

21. Richard Drew, “Falling Man,” 2001

When it was first published by The Associated Press, the photojournalist Richard Drew’s image of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was denounced by many readers as exploitative. Several media outlets published the image once, on Sept. 12 — including The Times, on page A7 — but it then disappeared from circulation, confined to shock websites like rotten.com. There was no shortage of graphic images of 9/11, including footage of the planes flying into the buildings. But Drew’s photo was uniquely unsettling because of its uncomfortable elegance: a single victim, framed by both north and south towers, caught in a fragile stasis before death. The image eventually began a strange afterlife as “one of the most famous photographs in human history,” according to the journalist Tom Junod, who wrote a 2003 essay in Esquire in which he attempts to identify the falling man. He couldn’t — not definitively. No one has. Recalling war photography that valorizes the unknown soldier, “Falling Man” would go on to be one of the inspirations for a novel by Don DeLillo and an opera by Daniel Levy. Long after the dust settled on the former site of the World Trade Center, the photograph of the unnamed man remains, like “an unmarked grave,” in Junod’s words, merely asking that we look at it. — E.I.

Miller: I think “Falling Man” is the defining image from the most violent day in America since the Civil War.

Shikeith: I was in middle school when 9/11 happened. Images from that day seem to seep into you. You carry them for life and they dictate certain fears and anxieties.

Miller: And then there are all the images from what happened in the years to come. The pictures of soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib military prison are arguably the most famous photographs from the war on terror.

22. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, Abu Ghraib Hooded Detainee, 2003

In early 2004, investigations into abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility had already been reported by news outlets including The New York Times and CNN. But the government had kept all photographs of torture out of view — until leaked images reached CBS. Even then, the news anchor Dan Rather would claim, the network’s executives only granted permission to show them when faced with the threat of a scoop by The New Yorker’s investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. (CBS executives justified holding the photos on various grounds, including the desire to avoid retaliation against American hostages.) The Abu Ghraib photos finally appeared in both outlets later that year. Their subject matter is brutal: men stripped naked and made to form a human pyramid with soldiers grinning behind them; a hooded man standing atop a box, hooked to electrical wires. The fact that American soldiers had recorded these scenes on their personal cameras only made them more disturbing. The photos significantly shifted American public opinion on the war on terror, further demonstrating the power of an image to alter a story. They also speak to a broader shift in news photography, in which everyone — no matter their intentions — is now a potential journalist. — L.M.

Shikeith: Both “Falling Man” and the hooded Iraqi detainee have a hard-core bodily effect on me. I think there was a sort of naïveté to the world I grew up in, just this idea that America is the greatest place on earth. For a moment there, we believed the myth. At least I did. When I started seeing these images, I developed a distrust in a lot of things. It only got worse. I have a very pessimistic outlook, but it sort of begins here, with these images.

23. Carrie Mae Weems, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” 1995-96

Carrie Mae Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is a work of appropriation that brings together 34 photographs, many of them of Black Americans, dating from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s, which collectively form a lesson on the history of racism in America. At the heart of the work are four images of people who were enslaved in South Carolina — some of the earliest known images that exist of America’s original sin — taken by the photographer Joseph T. Zealy and commissioned in 1850 by the Harvard University biologist Louis Agassiz. Originally intended to illustrate Agassiz’s baseless phrenological theories of Black inferiority, the pictures were rescaled and reframed by Weems, who also tinted them blood-red, making explicit the violence that allowed for their creation. Stored in Harvard’s archives for more than a century, Zealy’s images fell into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in 1976. After Weems used them without permission, the school threatened her with a lawsuit. “I think that your suing me would be a really good thing,” she told the university, as she later recalled to the art historian Deborah Willis. “You should, and we should have this conversation in court.” Instead of proceeding with the suit, Harvard acquired the work, further complicating the idea of ownership that Weems investigates. — E.I.

Vellam: We should talk about Carrie [Mae Weems].

Meiselas: We should definitely talk about Carrie. There are two very different options [“ Kitchen Table Series ,” 1990, and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.”]

Lê: I chose the “Kitchen Table Series” [in which Weems poses as the matriarch in various domestic scenes she staged in a single room, containing little else but an overhead lamp and a table]. The kitchen table is symbolic — it’s the intimacy of the home. In a way I always felt these pictures were about people being able to be themselves, being open and visible in a way that they maybe can’t in public.

Marcoci: To me, the “Kitchen Table Series” is a true performance for the camera in a way that Cindy’s is in “Untitled Film Stills.” But “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is an amazing work because it engages with race, with slavery, with colonialism, through an archive. The subjects here were really originally presented as specimens. But what Carrie does is give a voice back to these subjects, whose voices were completely muted. She enlarges the photographs. She tints them blood-red. The whole thing becomes a poem.

Shikeith: This particular work taught me how to use photographs to tell a story. And the fact that [Harvard threatened to sue her] introduces this whole other issue about who gets to tell what stories.

24. Deana Lawson, “Nation,” 2018

The idea for “Nation” came to Deana Lawson in a dream. She was haunted by a story that George Washington’s false teeth were made from the teeth of enslaved people . For months, she kept an image of Washington’s dentures — held in Mount Vernon’s collection — on the wall of her bedroom. Lawson dreamed about a person wearing a mouth guard and wondered if she might forge a connection between the majesty of gold — the jewelry of hip-hop and the regalia of the Ashanti Kingdom — and the fact that the first president of the United States could only speak the lofty words of liberty through teeth that once belonged to the oppressed. Lawson is known for portraits she stages in homes and other intimate spaces, often decorated with a large array of objects: family pictures, children’s toys, a Michael Jackson poster. In her images, Black men and women, their skin captured in color with meticulous attention to shade and tone, appear not as documentary subjects but as vessels. “Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory,” the novelist Zadie Smith has written of Lawson’s photography. At the photo shoot for “Nation,” Lawson offered three hip-hop artists a selection of jewelry and a mouth guard, typically worn during dental procedures, painted gold. “Someone said that I’m ruthless when it comes to what I want,” Lawson says in an interview in her self-titled 2018 monograph. “I have an image in mind that … burns so deeply that I have to make it, and I don’t care what people are going to think.” “Nation” presents an endless series of questions about Black lineage, going back centuries before the nation’s founding. Lawson later printed the picture of Washington’s teeth on a card and slipped it into the edge of the work’s golden frame. — B.E.

Miller: Deana Lawson seems to be doing something similar to Weems in “Nation.”

Marcoci: I think that’s an amazing image. It’s actually a collage, with the picture of George Washington’s dentures tucked into the top right corner. She’s said photography has the power to make history and the present speak to each other.

25. Carlijn Jacobs, “Renaissance,” 2022

On July 29, 2022, when Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” the first of what she’s envisioned as a three-act magnum opus (act two, “Cowboy Carter,” was released this March), the public was exhausted after two and a half years of pandemic restrictions and unprecedented change to their daily routines. They were stir-crazy and impatient for the dance floor. Beyoncé embraced the sounds of house music pioneered by Black and queer D.J.s, as well as the subversive, high-gloss styling of ballroom culture. The singer appears on the album’s cover in a Giannina Azar-designed silver rope dress, sitting astride a horse covered in mirrors. The image was taken by Carlijn Jacobs, a Dutch fashion photographer interested in the art of masquerade and maximalist glamour, and alludes to both rodeo and royalty. It also conjures a range of artistic references, including Kehinde Wiley’s painting “ Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon ” (2016); Rose Hartman’s snapshots of Bianca Jagger on a white horse at Studio 54 in 1977; and John Collier’s 1890s painting of Lady Godiva, the 11th-century Englishwoman said to have rode her horse naked through the streets as a form of protest. — B.E.

Vellam: Does anybody else feel like we’re missing a pop-culture celebrity moment? If we’re talking about images that go everywhere, and that people who live in the middle of the country all are going to look at, I don’t feel we have that.

Douglas: I think it’s important to include the idea of celebrity culture in photography. I’m not quite sure what that would be.

Lê: There’s the [2017] picture of Beyoncé pregnant with all the flowers .

Miller: Initially, Shikeith had also picked Beyoncé from the album cover of “Dangerously in Love” (2003).

Marcoci: But sorry, why don’t we then just choose a [Richard] Avedon of a celebrity?

Vellam: Marilyn Monroe [from 1957]. But don’t we feel like we have plenty of photographs from the past? Don’t we want to think about what celebrity is now?

Miller: What’s the iconic pop culture image from the last five years?

Douglas: Is there a Kardashian image?

Vellam: I can’t, because I hate them so much. But yes, you want the thing of [Kim Kardashian] when she broke the internet with her butt [an image that ran on the cover of Paper magazine in 2014].

Douglas: I’m going back to Beyoncé, because [you want] an image of a celebrity who’s not a person but an image. She’s like a simulacrum somehow.

Vellam: With her “Renaissance” cover, suddenly she was plastered everywhere. It was all over the city.

Douglas: I’d buy that.

Shikeith: I think it’s very important that she released this album and highlighted Black queer contributions to music in the culture because, very frequently, those same contributions are erased or attributed to someone else. Especially in pop culture.

Marcoci: Can you hold it up on your phone?

Vellam: Yeah. I listen to it all the time.

Top: Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) © the Gordon Parks Foundation; NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise” (1968); Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara)” (1960) © Alberto Korda, courtesy of the Alberto Korda Estate; Stuart Franklin, an unidentified man blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989) © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos; Deana Lawson, “Nation” (2018) © Deana Lawson, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery; LaToya Ruby Frazier, “United Auto Workers and Their Families Holding up ‘Drive It Home’ Campaign Signs Outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli Union Hall, Lordstown, OH, 2019,” from the series “The Last Cruze” (2019) © LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

M.H. Miller is a features director for T Magazine. More about M.H. Miller

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