Documenting the Real: The Photo Essay I

• James Agee & Walker Evans - 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'
• Margaret Bourke-White - 'A Portrait of Myself'
• Looking at Life Magazine
• Susan Sontag - 'Regarding the Pain of Others'
• Ernst Friedrich - 'War Against War'
• Next Week - Series of Photo Essays
• Magnum in Motion
• Films or slide-shows
• Think of sequence, use of sound (non-diegetic)
• Diegetic - of that world (non-diegetic - not of this world)
• What does adding non-diegetic sound do for us?
• James Agee - 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men'
• A documentary, this is a Political Book
• Stills Camera & The Printed Word
• The photographs and text are co-equal, mutually independent and fully collaborative
• These are not illustrations
• Agee & Evans - Road Trip - Writer & Photographer
• Evans was regarded as an essayist in his own right
• Depression, dust-bowl, Southern USA
• What is a Photo-Essay?
• it's a set of images that seek to tell a story, often but not always supported by text
• Usually sequential (insinuated/inserted photos into text)
• All photo essays are a collection of photographs but not all collections of photographs are photo essays
• Need to make an argument to turn collection of photographs into photo essay
• Ernst Friedrich collates a series of photographs
• Wasn't a photographer himself
• He wasn't a commisioning editor
• Pulls images together to make an essay
• Work is categorical in its form
• Book ' War Against War' is polemic
• Booked was banned, but went through ten editions by 1939
• As a polemic it fails - Outbreak of WWII
• Susan Sontag reading from 'War Against War'
• Photography as shock therapy
• Photographs have text (in four languages)
• Families told that victims were dead (Asylums and Sanctuaries)
• Friedrich brought the unseen into the seen
• Governments led counter arguments 'A Just War'
• 'The Dissenting Voice' as opposed to 'The Official Voice'
• Agee & Adams were embedded with the families
• They stay with three families - Triangulation
• James Curtis writes about Evans' work
• Not merely observing - giving subject space to reveal themselves
• Government sponsorship
• To document part of a nation at a particular time
• Life & Time magazines had massive circulation
• Evans' photography was very contemporary
• A mediated image - through the photographer (also camera & Editor)
• The 'Photographer' is a 'Recorder'
• Alan Trachtenberg - 'Essay on Photography'
• Version of reality/Interpretation
• Process of intervention can continue to darkroom
• Dorothea Lange
• Sequence of images
• Who is the audience?
• Margaret Bourke-White
• Made her money in advertising
• Life changing moment
• Life Magazine published FSA images
• Magazines shape and influence
• Editors modified images by the written word
• Concern for accompanying text