american art
american art history
american culture
american culture studies
american photography
ben shahn
Category=AJC
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
documentary photography
dorothea lange
early 20th century american history
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
farm security administration
gordon parks
government picture file
government policy
great depression
office of war information
photographers
photography
photography collections
realism
roy emerson stryker
russell lee
salvation army
second world war
union station
united states of america
walker evans
ways of seeing
Product details
- ISBN 9780520062214
- Weight: 1225g
- Dimensions: 216 x 279mm
- Publication Date: 18 Jan 1989
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Between 1935 and 1943, a group of photographers under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker set out to photograph the United States for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. Photographs taken by this celebrated group, whose ranks included Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee and Walker Evans, have since become icons of the 1930s and 1940s. In recent years, however, their work has been reproduced with little discussion of the particular circumstances surrounding its creation. "Documenting America" takes a fresh look at these remarkable photographs. The book opens with two incisive essays by Lawrence Levine and Alan Trachtenberg that examine issues central to photography and American culture. While Levine explains how the pictures portray the complexity of life in the period, balancing scenes of Depression hard times with images of the pleasures of life, Trachtenberg analyzes the way in which viewers read photographs and the role of the government picture file that stands between the creation of the photographs and their use.
Both essayists raise important questions about Stryker's grand ambition of a photographic record of America, about the 'ways of seeing' that have grown up around the most famous of these photographs, and about the whole enterprise of documentary photography and the conventions of realism. The images themselves are presented in series selected from groups of pictures created by single photographers. A documentary photographer often makes dozens of exposures to portray different elements of the subject, experiment with camera angles, and cover the stages of an event or steps of a process. By studying these pictures in series, we come closer to the photographer working in the field. We see a tenant farming community in Gee's Bend, Georgia, the activities of the Salvation Army in San Francisco, and the hubbub and commotion that filled Chicago's Union Railway Station in 1943. Texts accompanying each of the book's fifteen series describe the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of the pictures and discuss the relation between government policy and the subjects of the photographs.
The nearly three hundred images included vividly portray America in the last bitter years of the Great Depression and the first years of the Second World War.
Carl Fleischhauer is a Folklife Specialist and Beverly Brannan is a Curator of Photography, both at the Library of Congress. Lawrence W. Levine is Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Alan Trachtenberg is Professor of American Studies and English at Yale University.
