|
Books > History > American history
|
Buy Now
Documenting America, 1935-1943 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,792
Discovery Miles 17 920
|
|
|
Documenting America, 1935-1943 (Paperback)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
|
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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
