Researching John Mcbride

McBride was born in Wayne County, Ohio, in 1854. He started working in the coal mines at the age of nine. In 1870, McBride joined the Ohio Miners' Union, and in 1883 he became its president, a post that he retained until 1889. After serving briefly in the Ohio legislature as a Democrat from 1884 to 1888, McBride helped found the Ohio People’s Party in 1891. In 1892, McBride was elected president of the United Mine Workers.

McBride's prominence continued to rise with the growth of the Populist Movement in the American Midwest, and in 1894, McBride unseated labor icon Samuel Gompers as president of the American Federation of Labor. Not long after assuming the office, however, McBride became embroiled in conflicts with other union leaders and his popularity declined. Gompers regained the presidency the following year.

McBride was standing on a street corner in Globe, Arizona, when a runaway horse knocked him through a plate glass window, causing severe lacerations in his leg, a severed artery, great loss of blood, and death.

John McBride attended Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA), after which he studied under the direction of photographer George Krause at the University of Houston. McBride moved to the East Village neighborhood of New York City in 1986 at the age of nineteen and began his photographic career by assisting numerous commercial photographers on shoots in the United States and Europe. He also took courses at the School of Visual Arts and, later, attended Hunter College where he majored in Geography and Energy and Environmental Policy Studies.

John McBride's work includes fine art photography, fashion, portraits and photojournalism. The subjects of McBride's photographs include friends and lovers, the famous and the unknown, protesters, passersby as well as landscapes, cemeteries and religious and secular iconography. In 1985 McBride took many photographs of the people who frequented the clubs and street scene along Westheimer Road in Houston's Neartown area. Some of McBride's better-known work includes photographs of the 1988 riots surrounding New York City's Tompkins Square Park that were published in The Village Voice and the 1989 arrests of Lower East Side squatters and the demolition of their homes, many of which were published in the East Villager, as were photos of civil rights attorney William Kunstler and artist Keith Haring. Other work includes photographs taken in 1989 in Tututepec and Puerto Escondido, Mexico. More recent work includes pictures taken in Texas, Europe and in Tokyo, Japan (2008).

In 2007 a selection of McBride's photographs were chosen for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

John McBride currently lives and works in New York City.