From Sean O’Hagan’s article for The Guardian:
Henry Horenstein was a student at the University of Chicago in the 1960s when he discovered the work of the leftwing English historian EP Thompson. Soon afterwards, on the advice of his tutor, he journeyed to England and enrolled for a term at the University of Warwick, where Thompson was a lecturer.
“I went specifically to study with him, having read his book The Making of the English Working Class,” Horenstein tells me over the phone from his home in Boston. A few years later, when his interest shifted from history to photography, Thompson would still be as big an influence on Horenstein’s work as the esteemed photographers he studied under at the Rhode Island School of Design – the likes of Aaron Siskind, Harry Callahan and Minor White. “I soon figured out that the life of a historian was pretty dull, whereas the life of a photographer wasn’t,” Horenstein says, laughing. “But what Thompson taught me, I tried to bring to my photography. I sought out working people whose voices would not usually get out there.”