Photographer Ilka Hartmann was 15 years old, sitting in her all-girls classroom in Hamburg, Germany, when a teacher handed her a slim paperback book with a single black-and-white photograph printed among its pages—of a pile of human corpses at a Nazi concentration camp.
It was 1957, a dozen years after the war. Hartmann’s earliest memories were of the hunger and chaos that followed Hamburg’s firebombing by the U.K.’s Royal Air Force. Her father, a young doctor, had gone missing during his German military service and never returned—a loss experienced by every girl in her grade but one. Now, in class, she was learning about the Holocaust for the first time and discovering in that moment what her own country had done to systematically annihilate the Jews of Europe.
“It affected me really a lot. It was overwhelming to find out we were responsible for such things,” Hartmann says, in the first of several conversations we were to have this spring in Bolinas, the tiny, proudly insular West Marin town she’s called home since 1969.
This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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She describes being a child of war who even as a young teenager didn’t yet understand that a government could inflict such grotesque suffering on its citizens. It was as if the conflict that had shattered her family and the genocide that had taken six million Jewish lives were somehow divorced from human agency, “more like a big hurricane or a great disaster that had happened,” she says.
Now 84, Hartmann sees that being able to confront the truth of what had occurred informed her approach to photography. Taking photos has always been equal parts activism and art. Her eye was sharpened at a young age to notice injustice, and she has never been inured to it.
Hartmann has spent more than six decades documenting some of the United States’ most important social justice and civil rights movements, training her compassionate eye on the collective courage of freedom fighters and on human dignity and beauty in the face of oppression.
Think of some of the most iconic human rights campaigns of the past half century. Hartmann, who’s been called a “Zelig of history,” was there. You might not know her name. Surprisingly, there is no coffee-table monograph of her work. But her images have been reproduced widely—in more than 130 books and 25 films—and many are instantly recognizable: UC Berkeley’s anti–Vietnam War protests. Black Panther rallies. The 19-month Native American occupation of Alcatraz. United Farm Workers marching for better wages and conditions. Anti-nukes, pro-environment, and early LGBTQ rights demonstrations.
“Whenever I see the taking away of human rights, I have very strong feelings,” Hartmann told the Pacific Sun newspaper in 2005. “It’s like I’m a little child again; I want to make things better. My whole being is to do what I can to prevent such suffering.”
LEARNING BY SEEING
Hartmann, who has two artificial hips and walks slowly with a pronounced limp, possesses a youthful, exuberant love of people. She recalls the names of seemingly everyone she’s photographed and has developed lasting friendships with many of them.
In conversation, she simply cannot abide injustice or violence, and she also has a reflective side that easily turns philosophical. Each time we meet in person, she’s wearing a colorful beaded necklace—a gift from a Navajo man named Michael Jackson, who took part in the Alcatraz occupation and reconnected with her decades later.
It becomes clear as we talk that Hartmann’s life behind the camera has never been about neutrality. Forgoing the impartial-observer model of photojournalism, she has always seen her work as an unabashed service to the movements and to the people within them. She has often been warmly embraced by the communities she photographed, given rare access to their inner circles and the private sides of their lives.
It’s a stance Hartmann developed soon after taking up a camera—a pursuit she never would have guessed would be her life’s passion. As a girl in Germany, “I wasn’t good at art at all,” she says. “I couldn’t draw.”
In fact, she was an intellectual 22-year-old college student studying theology and Hebrew when her mother, who had already immigrated to California, urged Hartmann to join her in Stockton. They lived across the street from the University of the Pacific, where Hartmann’s mother taught, and Hartmann enrolled in photography classes at nearby San Joaquin Delta College—$15 per semester and a chance to escape the summer heat in a basement darkroom. Her teacher, Edward E. Schwynn, encouraged her to study Life magazine.
“I got copies at the library,” she says, “and that’s how I learned about the great West Coast photographers,” like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, and W. Eugene Smith.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Hartmann says, recalling the gratification she felt after developing her first photos and discovering she had an innate talent for portraiture and balanced composition.
“I have a feeling in my stomach, and I just know” it’s going to be a great image, she explains. She started to understand what Henri Cartier-Bresson meant by “the decisive moment.”
That first summer in Stockton brought two revelations that would shape the rest of Hartmann’s life. The extreme poverty she encountered in the predominantly Black neighborhood Boggs Tract shook her. So did the dark California history she uncovered during a driving tour with her mother to visit all 21 missions.
“They’re really beautiful, and being European, I appreciated that,” she says. “But my mother told me about what happened in California with Native Americans, and it was very hard to understand how genocidal it really was, what they had done to the Native people. What affected me most deeply was that she told me that if male Indians were shot, the white people who shot them would get a $3 bounty. Oh, it just affected me so much. I connected it to the Holocaust.”
Her idealized vision of the United States was hard to square with this violent past and the persistence of racial inequality and deprivation. “In Germany, we all had this really positive image of America, that it was so democratic and free and wonderful, and that’s why so many immigrated here. We had no idea about all the injustices and how bad it was for African Americans or Chinese or Native Americans at all.”
“I hadn’t seen such poverty in my whole life,” she recalled of her visit, during that same road trip, to the Pala Indian Reservation, near San Diego, where she took some of her earliest photos of Native people. It was the beginning of a lifelong commitment to Native American communities—one that would lead, a few years later, to Alcatraz.
POWER TO THE CAMERA
After more than a year of teaching at UC Irvine, Hartmann was thoroughly disillusioned with mainstream American middle-class suburbia. “It was super conservative, white only, practically, and I disliked it so much. I realized I could transfer to Berkeley.”
She arrived at UC Berkeley in 1967 and found a campus, and city, electrified by protest and purpose. Hartmann recalls wrapping up the German classes she was teaching before noon and then turning her full attention to the activism erupting in Sproul Plaza. Hartmann took photos for the campus paper the Daily Californian and started submitting others to the weekly underground paper the Berkeley Barb and the anticapitalist Liberation News Service.
When the Black Panthers gained national prominence following the 1968 killing of 17-year-old Bobby Hutton by Oakland police, Hartmann found a subject close to her heart and created her first photographic essay, up close and personal with the Panthers, modeled on the cinematic visual narratives by W. Eugene Smith that she’d seen in Life.
Hartmann’s strongest images somehow capture a humane portrait even within a convulsing crowd. Her eye, and now ours, is drawn to a single face whose countenance says more than most news reportage. In one, an exultant Black man is waving Mao’s “Little Red Book” at a “Free Huey” rally in San Francisco in 1969. For another, Hartmann looked up from a Panther march through downtown Oakland to capture a visually striking shot of white businessmen, each in a white dress shirt, leaning out their open windows to see the Panthers marching in the street below. (She titled it Bureaucrats Watching the Demonstration Below.)
In one of Hartmann’s favorites, Black Panthers Elbert “Big Man” Howard, Donald L. Cox, and Roosevelt “June” Hilliard are standing in front of Panther headquarters. A poster taped to the window calls out the government for “kidnapping” Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale to stand trial in Chicago on conspiracy and murder charges.
The three look fairly stoic, but Hartmann recalls them laughing just minutes before. Hilliard’s son later told her that “Newsweek had called them and wanted to take their picture for the cover in their black leather jackets. They told Newsweek, ‘We’re too poor for leather jackets. We don’t have them.’ So [without knowing their sizes] Newsweek sent them these $250 jackets, which is like $800 now. That’s why they’re a little too tight.”
Hartmann still fields calls from publishers wanting to reproduce her Black Panther images. Many were included in the Black Panther Rank and File exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2006. And 20 shots are on display at the Alameda County Law Library. “They were supposed to be up for one afternoon” in 2012, says Hartmann, and they’re still on view.
By the late 1960s, Hartmann was already living in Bolinas with her partner, noted China scholar and former dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Orville Schell. They were both back-to-the-land enthusiasts who found a like-minded “tribe” of artists, writers, and thinkers in the fiercely alternative enclave. They were together for seven years and have a filmmaker son, Ole.
The tiny community saw an influx of environmentalists, farmers, and hippies following a massive oil spill on January 18, 1971. Two Standard Oil tankers had collided under the Golden Gate Bridge, causing more than 800,000 gallons of thick bunker fuel to wash ashore on Marin County beaches. Seven thousand birds were smothered, and Hartmann documented the Bolinas community’s efforts to save as many birds as possible. One of her most famous images, taken the morning of the disaster, shows Schell’s arm raised to the sky holding a dead, oil-drenched grebe. It was reproduced widely, on anti–Trans-Alaska Pipeline posters, and was even submitted to the Congressional Record by then–Marin County supervisor Gary Giacomini.
Hartmann’s West Marin photos from this period are an earthy counterpoint to all the urban demonstrations and protests. Another standout, Leah Cutting Thistles, shows a Bolinas resident caught midswing as she’s clearing a dense field with a scythe, her hair a blur as a horse grazes in the background. Off-the-grid Bolinas in the late ’60s was easy to fall in love with, but “it took me a long time to get used to being in this isolation,” Hartmann says.
She returned to Berkeley regularly, usually hitchhiking across Marin County to the East Bay with her camera gear, trusting in the kindness of strangers for rides. Sometimes they were a little too kind. “People would ask you, ‘You want to go to the hills?’ ” That was free-love-speak for “Do you want to make love?” Hartmann recalls the invitations with a laugh. “I remember saying one time, ‘No. I’m not a hippie, I’m a radical. Get me to the protest!’ ”
Back on Berkeley’s campus, she saw a copy of the Daily Cal “which said the Indians have taken a boat to Alcatraz. I couldn’t believe it!”
Hartmann made her way to San Francisco and landed a spot on a ferry shuttling water to the island to document the 1969–71 occupation of Alcatraz, when Native Americans commandeered the vacant federal prison in San Francisco Bay for 19 months. “The government had cut off all water and electricity,” she recalls.
The hours she spent on Alcatraz that day, and then again on June 11, 1971, when U.S. marshals rounded up the occupiers, resulted in some of Hartmann’s most indelible images: Native American children playing on abandoned Bureau of Prisons equipment. A waterfront sign painted with the words “Indian Property.”
And then there’s the single image she’s most often asked for permission to reproduce: a close-up of Canadian Cree activist Oohosis and his friend Peggy Lee Ellenwood, a Sioux from Montana, raising their fists in the Red Power salute moments after being removed from the island.
“For me, everything was connected, a solidarity between groups,” says Hartmann. The Black Panthers, Berkeley’s antiwar demonstrators, and marching farmworkers “were the same people who were speaking up later at Alcatraz.” And she wanted to help them all be seen.
RADICAL EYE
“Ilka’s work is extremely important for the historic record of activism in the Bay Area when it was the hotbed of resistance,” historian and curator Amy Long tells me. She discovered Hartmann’s work while organizing a 2016 exhibition at the New Museum Los Gatos on the Urban Relocation Program, initiated by the federal government in 1952 to encourage Native Americans to move from reservations to cities by offering help with housing and employment.
“I tracked her down and was absolutely blown away by her body of work,” Long says. “I remember thinking, She put herself on the front lines of these movements, and it’s insane she’s not more widely known and her work, with its incredible volume and scope, isn’t archived.”
Long organized a retrospective look at Hartmann’s photography the following year, Faces of Resistance: Through the Lens of Ilka Hartmann.
One of the days I visit her in Bolinas, Hartmann is wearing a T-shirt screen printed with one of her own photos of scholar and activist Angela Davis. It’s the kind of image you could see hundreds of times without knowing it’s hers.
She explains that she wants to stay informed, but current events leave her shaken. She admires the citizen-photographers documenting the ICE raids and protests in Minneapolis but says it’s difficult to stay optimistic about human nature and the arc of moral progress, given her aversion to authoritarianism and war, in the era of Trump 2.0. “I’m beginning to think there’s really something wrong with us,” she says. “How can we not keep peace and get along?”
Without a cell phone or television, she occasionally sits in her car to tune the radio to the alternative station KPFA. Then she goes back into the house, where she’s surrounded by her photographs. “I have about 30 rolls of film that I’m going to develop pretty soon,” she says.
“Ilka is such a great visual storyteller, and her work is an inspiration,” Emory Douglas tells me. The former Black Panther culture minister created provocative illustrations and collages for the party’s newspaper that popularized the movement’s iconic militant-chic look and helped disseminate its revolutionary goals. (A retrospective of his work, Emory Douglas: In Our Lifetime, is on view at San Francisco’s African American Art & Culture Complex through October 2026.)
Douglas admired Hartmann’s photos during the Panthers’ heyday and even used several of them as source material for his political posters, yet the two activists, both now in their 80s, didn’t meet until a 40th-anniversary event in Oakland in 2006. They’ve kept in close touch ever since.
He lets out a loud laugh when I tell him his friend Hartmann calls herself a radical. “Yes, she certainly was. In fact, she still is.”
Hartmann calls me one day with something she wants to clarify from our earlier conversations. She says she wants to be sure I know that her work was “always done to support the movement” she was covering.
She admits she’s never been ambitious in terms of amplifying her own reputation. “The work has always been a real joy, but I didn’t have ambition at all. I would have had to go to New York to cocktail parties and so on. I didn’t want to do any of that.
“I couldn’t be a Black Panther or a marching farmworker, but I felt like this was how I could contribute.”•
