By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, 2011
Some newsroom careers are measured in scoops. Others are measured in images. Art Rogers’s was the second kind.
Then
In late December 2011, FishbowlLA noted the death of Art Rogers, a native Angeleno who had spent more than 40 years as a photographer for the Los Angeles Times. He was 93. His Times obituary, which ran on Christmas Day, recorded a remarkable career.
Rogers was part of the Los Angeles Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1965 Watts riots — one of the defining stories in the paper’s history. At his most prolific, FishbowlLA noted, he once had 22 of his photographs run in a single Sunday edition. The Times marked his passing with a gallery of his best work.
Now
Rogers belonged to a generation of staff newspaper photographers whose work was, for decades, the primary visual record of Los Angeles. The Times photo staff he was part of documented the city through riots, earthquakes, elections and everyday life.
That kind of deep, permanent photo desk is much rarer now. As newspapers contracted through the 2000s and 2010s, staff photography was among the hardest-hit departments industry-wide, with many papers trimming or eliminating their photo staffs entirely. Rogers’s four-decade run is a reminder of an era when a great metropolitan paper kept photographers on staff long enough to build a body of work — and a city’s memory — one assignment at a time.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.