Art Rogers was a 17-year-old aspiring photographer growing up in Raleigh North Carolina in 1965 when he made the Ku Klux Klan pictures that are featured on this site. In those days Senator Jessie Helms managed WRAL, the local, highly conservative TV station, and one of the station producers hired Art to cover a Klan march and rally in nearby Durham. It was a time when the press and the nation were focused on the marches and rallies of the civil rights movement, including the huge Selma March held that same year. The Klan, perhaps envious of the vast publicity garnered by their natural enemies, staged their own event and invited the press. Art followed their march through downtown Durham and the evening rally and cross burning in nearby Oxford.

A year later he decamped from Raleigh and the Sidetrack Coffeehouse that he and a bunch of his buddies -- students, artists and dropouts -- had created on the premises of an old steel mill. (The Klan or other racists had already registered their opinion of this budding beatnick enterprise by tossing a smoke bomb through the front window.) Settling in California, Art refocused his cameras and his mind on a 40+year career that has earned him distinction and a unique place in any listing of America's most creative photographers.

Today he is widely known for his portraits of families, children and babies, large groups, and rural scenes and landscapes of West Marin County. He has produced a series Yesterday and Today in which the same subjects have been photographed in the same place after a time span of as much as 30 years. He has documented the agricultural community of Point Reyes on California's North Coast for over 35 years. He is currently producing a new series of landscapes and portraits utilizing 100-year-old antique wooden view cameras, and making contact prints from negatives as large as 14 inches by 17 inches.

He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has also received fellowships from The National Endowment of the Arts and The Marin Arts Council and the SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Rogers's work has appeared in Life but also for over 35 years in The Point Reyes Light in his column The Point Reyes Family Album. It features a photograph every week of people and events in the community and is an ongoing historical documentation of these West Marin towns and villages.

His background includes stints as a baby photographer, a photojournalist and as a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute and Indian Valley College. His photographs are included among the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the International Center of Photography, New York; the Center for Creative Photography Archive, Tucson; Le Musee de l'Elysee, Switzerland; and the de Young Museum, San Francisco.

Art lives in rural Marin County with his wife Laura, their daughters Julia and Hannah, their dogs Nellie and Louie, Gus the turtle, and Monty the cat.