Originally published on Substack: The Study of Light, on August 12, 2025
This post features some photos taken by Alan Hipwell. Hipwell was a freelance photographer who worked for the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles Herald Examiner in the 60s and 70s. He was also the father of Margo Hipwell, an artist and DJ friend who lives near me in Viroqua, Wisconsin. Margo once asked me to unlock some photo files off of a floppy disk. This was difficult, even ten years ago, which was still long after the technology was updated and then shelved. I managed to get most of them open, and with her permission, share them here.
I also asked Margo where else these photos are located. She assured me they are “part of the historical record,” meaning she has delivered them to the Kennedy family.
An interesting aside: I recently read the memoirs of Harry Belafonte, called My Song. Belafonte had an amazing life, and the people he knew and worked closely with went all the way from Paul Robeson and Eleanor Roosevelt, through to Nelson Mandela. His career as an entertainer and breaker of barriers is fascinating, but I really enjoyed the chapters about the Civil Rights movement. On those pages he described working closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and how King would urge Belafonte to press harder on Bobby Kennedy. “That man has good inside of him,” he would say. There were many politicians who could not be broken through to, on issues of civil rights for all people, but Kennedy was an exception. It took years, and it was never a clean and simple process, but eventually Bobby Kennedy became the vanguard of civil rights in the Democratic party.
Enjoy these photos of Senator Robert Kennedy, which you have probably never seen before! IMO they are amazing photojournalism.
