Olive Pierce was a talented documentary photographer from Massachusetts. Throughout her long career, Pierce took several hundred black-and-white photographs. Her earliest images (the 1960s) depict landscapes and individuals in Maine, and a theme Pierce returned to throughout her life. Among the topics that she covered in her career are political protests in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and life in the Jefferson Park neighborhood during the 1970s; high school students in Cambridge (1980s); and the lives of Iraqi children in war zones between 1999 and 2003, and protests against that war in the United States.
As a photography teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, Olive Pierce took photographs of students at the Cambridge Room of the Cambridge Public Library. She photographed students for three years and published the results in No Easy Roses: A Look at the Lives of City Teenagers (1986).
