Superman floats above Times Square during the 1988 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

An American flag hangs upside down on the Statue of Liberty during a three-day Vietnam War protest, in 1972.

A couple on their fire escape, off 66th Street and Broadway, an area of Manhattan with a big transgender community, in 1965.

New Yorkers watch ships sail down the Hudson River in celebration of the Statue of Liberty’s centennial, on July 4, 1968.

Eliane Laffont, Jean-Pierre Laffont’s wife, wears a Harry Gordon poster dress bought at Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan for $2.98 in 1968.

*Top,* children play in the Bronx, in 1966; *above,* Black Panthers line the streets for the funeral of six Black men killed in the Attica-prison riot in 1971.

D.I.Y. baseball in the Bronx, during the summer of 1966.

Black Panthers protest on the statue of former Yale president Theodore Dwight Woolsey in 1970.

Members of the Savage Skulls, a gang that declared war on drug dealers operating in their area of the Bronx, in 1972.

A propeller-powered Eastern Airlines shuttle makes its way west over Manhattan in 1969.

*Top,* the veterans cemetery on a Navajo reservation in Fort Defiance, Arizona, in 1985; *above,* supervisors and inmates outside the Arkansas state penitentiary in Cummins in 1968.

Homeless men squat in the shadow of the newly completed World Trade Center in 1975.

True Grit

Over a six-decade career, Jean–Pierre Laffont, the photojournalist who will receive the French Legion of Honor this month, chronicled everything from street scenes to social movements

In 1964, when Jean-Pierre Laffont was in his late 20s, he decided to move to New York to forge a career as a photojournalist. In Paris, he’d already worked with the fashion photographers Sam Lévin and Alexander Choura. He’d also shot the rising star Ava Gardner, in Rome. But, all in all, fashion bored him. He was attracted to grit, not glamour.

It was the right time to make the move. The U.S. was in political turmoil. In 1965, the first American soldiers were deployed to Vietnam. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The Black Panther Party was gaining power, and New York was on the verge of bankruptcy. “I was trying to find a good story,” Laffont, now 88, tells me, “to make a start and have my name shining like it had in Europe.”