“People would say, ‘What are you doing here? You look like a cop.’ And I would say, ‘I’m Dr. King’s photographer.’ And that opened doors.” — Bob Fitch, in a 2012 radio interview.

Looking through Bob Fitch’s powerful and incredibly intimate imagery, the question inevitably arises—how did a white photographer in his early 20s gain access to Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle during some of the most turbulent days of the civil rights movement? And the answer is simply that Fitch was just the right person for that precise moment in history, in ways both intentional and otherwise.

Martin Luther King Jr., Atlanta, GA; Southern Christian Leadership Conference office, 1966. (Used with permission from the Bob Fitch Photography Archive © Department of Special Collections, Stanford University.)

As a student of Berkeley High School during the 1950s, Fitch often attended local folk music gatherings (with the likes of now-iconic musician Pete Seeger) where he was exposed to a wide cross section of socially conscious viewpoints. This contrasted to the rigid and reserved atmosphere at Fitch’s home under a father who was both a Protestant minister and a professor of religious ethics. These two influences—of the church and the counterculture—conveyed to him an awareness and empathy for the adversity people were facing around the world.

While interning at Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco, Fitch’s path to photography emerged after encountering James Baldwin’s seminal work The Fire Next Time. “That book was the very pivot that drew me into photography,” Fitch recounted. “I remember reading it in one shot … at the end putting it down in a daze and having a vision of myself involved in some aesthetic pursuit that depicted what was in that book.”