Family Values

This year is the 45th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision. The International Center of Photography is exhibiting Grey Villet's photos, taken in 1965 for a Life story on Richard and Mildred Loving and their family.

The Lovings would endure this long fight—

Forty-five years ago, sixteen states still prohibited interracial marriage. Then, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case of Richard Perry Loving, a white man, and his wife, Mildred Loving, a woman of African American and Native American descent, who had been arrested for miscegenation nine years earlier in Virginia. The Lovings were not active in the Civil Rights movement but their tenacious legal battle to justify their marriage changed history when the Supreme Court unanimously declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation law—and all race-based marriage bans—unconstitutional.

It was a fight they never sought but bravely faced. And while she had never wanted to be in the public eye, on the 40th anniversary of the decision (and one year before her death), Mildred Loving released this statement, supporting marriage equality as a logical and necessary consequence of the Loving decision.

The photos at ICP emerged as documentary director Nancy Buirski was making The Loving Story, to be shown February 14 on HBO.

A slide show accompanies this piece by Barbara Villet, the photographer's widow.

Emotional content always mattered most to Grey in his work and pursuit of images "as real as real could get." It's what gives his take on the Loving family its intimacy and strength. Grey was a purist in his approach to every essay he shot. Quiet as a cat, he seemed almost to disappear as he worked. Unlike many other celebrated photographers, he avoided posing his subjects, refused to manipulate the action and simply waited patiently for telling moments to emerge, in the belief that reality would supply more truth than any imposition of his own ego.

I didn't know this photographer's work, but after seeing these images I can only agree with Ms. Villet—

The emotions that bound the Loving family together, all those years ago, live on in Grey Villet's images — as does the sensitive spirit of the great-hearted photographer who created them.