Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-making, 1935-1943

Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-making, 1935-1943 PDF Author: Stuart S. Kidd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
While previous studies of the photographic images of the U.S. southern poor produced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) have been discussed in the context of individual photographers or the general culture of the Great Depression and the New Deal, Kidd (American history, U. of Reading, UK) situates his examination of the photographs in the institutional context of the FSA and the role played in photographic production by FSA administrator Roy Stryker. The photographs emerged, according to Kidd, from the dialogue between Stryker and his field photographers about the proper way to document disadvantaged and oppressed groups within the framework of a progressive, federal government. The resulting productions reveal "an uneasy dimension to the relationship between individual and the liberal state and its cadres" that is partly an outcome of class cleavages between photographer and subject. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-making, 1935-1943

Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-making, 1935-1943 PDF Author: Stuart S. Kidd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book Here

Book Description
While previous studies of the photographic images of the U.S. southern poor produced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) have been discussed in the context of individual photographers or the general culture of the Great Depression and the New Deal, Kidd (American history, U. of Reading, UK) situates his examination of the photographs in the institutional context of the FSA and the role played in photographic production by FSA administrator Roy Stryker. The photographs emerged, according to Kidd, from the dialogue between Stryker and his field photographers about the proper way to document disadvantaged and oppressed groups within the framework of a progressive, federal government. The resulting productions reveal "an uneasy dimension to the relationship between individual and the liberal state and its cadres" that is partly an outcome of class cleavages between photographer and subject. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars, 1918-1939

Reading Southern Poverty Between the Wars, 1918-1939 PDF Author: Richard Godden
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820327085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Franklin D. Roosevelt once described the South as "the nation's number one economic problem." These twelve original, interdisciplinary essays on southern indigence between the World Wars share a conviction that poverty is not just a dilemma of the marketplace but also a cultural and political construction. Although previous studies have examined the web of coercive social relations in which sharecroppers, wage laborers, and other poor southerners were held in place, this volume opens up a new perspective. These essays show that professed forces of change and modernization in the South--writers, photographers, activists, social scientists, and policymakers--often subtly upheld the structures by which southern labor was being exploited. Planters, politicians, and others who enforced the southern economic and social status quo not only relied on bigotry but also manipulated deeply held American beliefs about sturdy yeoman nobility and the sanctity of farm and family. Conversely, any threats to the system were tarred with the imagery of big cities, northerners, and organized labor. The essays expose vestiges of these beliefs in sources as varied as photographs from the Farm Security Administration, statistics for incarceration and child labor, and the writings of Grace Lumpkin, Ellen Glasgow, and Erskine Caldwell. This volume shows that those who work to eradicate poverty--and even victims of poverty themselves--can hesitate to cross the line of race, gender, memory, or tradition in pursuit of their goal.

The Body at Risk

The Body at Risk PDF Author: Carol Squiers
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520247337
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The Body at Risk: Photography of Disorder, Illness, and Healing is the first book to explore the ways that photojournalists and social documentarians have conceptualized the human subject as a site of both good and ill health. The volume looks at photographs depicting child laborers; Depression-era health programs; general medical care in the southern United States at mid-century; people with HIV, AIDS, and polio, along with their caretakers and the health workers who advocate for them; environmental pollution; physical and psychological injuries received during warfare; domestic violence; and emergency care in the modern urban hospital. It brings together ten significant bodies of photographs made over the past one hundred years to show how human health topics have been represented for the general public and how the emphasis on health has shifted; how photography has been used to present and promote certain points of view about health and the social circumstances that affect it, both positively and negatively; and how photography has helped shape public knowledge of and opinion about health care and some of the events and circumstances that engender it.

Capturing the South

Capturing the South PDF Author: Scott L. Matthews
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469646463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
In his expansive history of documentary work in the South during the twentieth century, Scott L. Matthews examines the motivations and methodologies of several pivotal documentarians, including sociologist Howard Odum, photographers Jack Delano and Danny Lyon, and music ethnographer John Cohen. Their work salvaged and celebrated folk cultures threatened by modernization or strived to reveal and reform problems linked to the region's racial caste system and exploitative agricultural economy. Images of alluring primitivism and troubling pathology often blurred together, neutralizing the aims of documentary work carried out in the name of reform during the Progressive era, New Deal, and civil rights movement. Black and white southerners in turn often resisted documentarians' attempts to turn their private lives into public symbols. The accumulation of these influential and, occasionally, controversial documentary images created an enduring, complex, and sometimes self-defeating mythology about the South that persists into the twenty-first century.

It's All Done Gone

It's All Done Gone PDF Author: Patsy Watkins
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1682260631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In 1935 a fledging government agency embarked on a project to photograph Americans hit hardest by the Great Depression. Over the next eight years, the photographers of the Farm Security Administration captured nearly a quarter-million images of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the South, migrant workers in California, and laborers in northern industries and urban slums. Of the roughly one thousand FSA photographs taken in Arkansas, approximately two hundred have been selected for inclusion in this volume. Portraying workers picking cotton for five cents an hour, families evicted from homes for their connection with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the effects of flood and drought that cruelly exacerbated the impact of economic disaster, these remarkable black-and-white images from Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, and other acclaimed photographers illustrate the extreme hardships that so many Arkansans endured throughout this era. These powerful photographs continue to resonate, providing a glimpse of life in Arkansas that will captivate readers as they connect to a shared past.

Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South

Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South PDF Author: Jason Phillips
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807150355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
On November 5, 1968, Ralph Ellison stood up at the Southern Historical Association meeting in New Orleans and called the members gathered there “respectable liars,” thus exposing the link between “official” history and the dominant consciousness of the time. Historian Jason Phillips refers to such scholarship as “master narratives”—stories masquerading as truth that promote the interests of white patriarchy past and present. In this innovative collection, Phillips and ten other historians and literary scholars explore an enduring dynamic between history, literature, and power in the American South. Blending analysis with storytelling, and professional insights with personal experiences, they “deconstruct Dixie,” insisting that writing the South’s history means harnessing, not criticizing, the inherent power of narrative. The contributors examine white southern narratives from multiple, fresh perspectives and consider ways in which storytelling helped shape identity and mold scholarship over time. Bertram Wyatt-Brown argues that William Percy’s life and work blurred fact and fiction as he negotiated the anti-intellectual conventions of a rural, hierarchical South as a cosmopolitan and homosexual. Orville Vernon Burton and Ian Binnington investigate nationalism, local allegiances, and the imagined community of the Confederacy. Farrell O’Gorman, Jewel L. Spangler, David A. Davis, Robert Jackson, Anne Marshall, K. Stephen Prince, and Jim Downs explore diverse topics such as southern Gothic fiction and the centrality of religion, white trash autobiographies, the “professional southerner” in literature and criticism, and the “one-drop rule” of racial taxonomy in America. Like Ellison, these writers look beyond ideology and race, including how often-overlooked, basic elements of a work—such as its form, plot, aesthetics, or genre—can re- or deconstruct white southern power. Showcasing new ways of interpreting texts, they encourage historians and literary scholars to move beyond theory to engage the historical context of southern stories and storytelling while reading evidence more deeply and stories more broadly.

Photography as Activism

Photography as Activism PDF Author: Michelle Bogre
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0240812751
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
The only book to cover the most popular tool for social change - photography.

The Family of Man Revisited

The Family of Man Revisited PDF Author: Gerd Hurm
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000213358
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The Family of Man is the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography. The book of the exhibition, still in print, is also the most commercially successful photobook ever published. First shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, the exhibition travelled throughout the United States and to forty-six countries, and was seen by over nine million people. Edward Steichen conceived, curated and designed the exhibition. He explained its subject as `the everydayness of life' and `the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world'. The exhibition was a statement against war and the conflicts and divisions that threatened a common future for humanity after 1945. The popular international response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Many critics, however, have dismissed the exhibition as a form of sentimental humanism unable to address the challenges of history, politics and cultural difference.This book revises the critical debate about The Family of Man, challenging in particular the legacy of Roland Barthes's influential account of the exhibition. The expert contributors explore new contexts for understanding Steichen's work and they undertake radically new analyses of the formal dynamics of the exhibition. Also presented are documents about the exhibition never before available in English. Commentaries by critical theorist Max Horkheimer and novelist Wolfgang Koeppen, letters from photographer August Sander, and a poetic sequence on the images by Polish poet Witold Wirpsza enable and encourage new critical reflections. A detailed survey of audience responses in Munich from 1955 allows a rare glimpse of what visitors thought about the exhibition. Today, when armed conflict, environmental catastrophe and economic inequality continue to threaten our future, it seems timely to revisit The Family of Man.

New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans

New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans PDF Author: C. Blinder
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230111866
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Coinciding with the increasing intersections between visual and literary studies, this timely reappraisal of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sheds light on the book's unclassifiable status as part imaginative fiction, documentary effort, ethnographic study, and modernist prose.

California on the Breadlines

California on the Breadlines PDF Author: Jan Goggans
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520945891
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
California on the Breadlines is the compelling account of how Dorothea Lange, the Great Depression’s most famous photographer, and Paul Taylor, her labor economist husband, forged a relationship that was private—they both divorced spouses to be together—collaborative, and richly productive. Lange and Taylor poured their considerable energies into the decade-long project of documenting the plight of California’s dispossessed, which in 1939 culminated in the publication of their landmark book, American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Jan Goggans blends biography, literature, and history to retrace the paths that brought Lange and Taylor together. She shows how American Exodus set forth a new way of understanding those in crisis during the economic disaster in California and ultimately informed the way we think about the Great Depression itself.