75th Anniversary Issue
As she lay dying, the widow of a Milwaukee newspaper editor made a gift that has now invigorated journalism for 75 years. Agnes Wahl Nieman, a well-educated woman with a fondness for bicycling, willed money to Harvard to “promote and elevate the standards of journalism.” That $1.4 million bequest (worth about $23 million in today’s dollars) funded the Nieman Fellowship program that has brought 1,442 journalists from around the world to Harvard for a year of study. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 75th anniversary, Nieman Reports tells the stories of 75 Nieman Fellows, among them pioneers in biography, documentary filmmaking, and investigative journalism.
Jamie Poole
For the magazine's cover, British artist Jamie Poole based his portrait of Agnes Wahl Nieman on one of only two known images of her—a small engraving from a collage published in The Milwaukee Journal in 1916—and on the physical description she provided in her 1891 passport application: light brown hair, bluish-gray eyes, and fair complexion. Using portraits of Agnes’s mother and father as references, he worked with cut pages from Nieman Reports and from the Foundation’s archival material to create this likeness.
Alexandra Garcia, NF ’13
For the portrait that accompanies the profile of Agnes Wahl Nieman in this issue, Alexandra Garcia, NF ’13, an Emmy Award-winning multimedia journalist with The Washington Post, based her acrylic portrait with collage on the photograph of Agnes standing with her husband, Lucius Nieman, in the pressroom of The Milwaukee Journal. The photograph was likely taken in the mid-1920s when Agnes would have been in her late 50s or 60s. Garcia took inspiration from her Fellowship and from the Foundation’s archives to present a younger depiction of Agnes.
For the magazine's cover, British artist Jamie Poole based his portrait of Agnes Wahl Nieman on one of only two known images of her—a small engraving from a collage published in The Milwaukee Journal in 1916—and on the physical description she provided in her 1891 passport application: light brown hair, bluish-gray eyes, and fair complexion. Using portraits of Agnes’s mother and father as references, he worked with cut pages from Nieman Reports and from the Foundation’s archival material to create this likeness.
Alexandra Garcia, NF ’13
For the portrait that accompanies the profile of Agnes Wahl Nieman in this issue, Alexandra Garcia, NF ’13, an Emmy Award-winning multimedia journalist with The Washington Post, based her acrylic portrait with collage on the photograph of Agnes standing with her husband, Lucius Nieman, in the pressroom of The Milwaukee Journal. The photograph was likely taken in the mid-1920s when Agnes would have been in her late 50s or 60s. Garcia took inspiration from her Fellowship and from the Foundation’s archives to present a younger depiction of Agnes.
