How many words is a

picture worth?

Robert Capa: A Frenchwoman, with her baby fathered by a German soldier, punished by having her head shaved after the liberation of the town, ChartresAugust 18, 1944

Documentary Documentary PhotographyPhotography

What is Documentary Photography?

• What is Photojournalism?

• What is the importance, if any of documenting with photographs or telling stories with photographs?

Walker Evans Revolutionizes Documentary Photography

Walker Evans

Dorothea Lange

Philipinos cutting lettuce, Salinas, California, 1935. Photographer: Dorothea Lange.

"If I could tell the story in words,

I wouldn't need to lug a camera."

-Lewis Hine

Robert Capa

http://www.warchronicle.com/journalists/capa_pics.htm

http://museum.icp.org/emuseum/emuseum.asp?emu_action=collection&collection=142&collectionname=Robert%20Capa%2C%20selections&currentrecord=1&moduleid=1&module=

• http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/Photos/

• Farmer and sons, dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936.

• Photographer: Arthur Rothstein.

The drought that helped cripple agriculture in the Great Depression was the worst in the climatological history of the country. By 1934 it had dessicated the Great Plains, from North Dakota to Texas, from the Mississippi River Valley to the Rockies. Vast dust storms swept the region.

• The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration.

In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience: 

• I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

Photo Essay on the Great Depression

• http://www.english.uiuc.edu/MAPS/depression/photoessay.htm

Margaret Bourke-White Prisoners at Buchenwald 1945

Margaret Bourke-WhiteGerman civilians made to face their nation's crimes, Buchenwald1945

Roy DeCaravaMississippi freedom marcher, Washington, DC1963

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/Photos/try.htm#

• Test your critical skills with these exercises designed to explore how photographs work as historical evidence.

• Ask yourself these important questions:• Who took the photograph?• Why and for whom was the photograph taken?• How was the photograph taken?• What can the companion images tell us?• How was the photograph presented?

Margaret Bourke-White

• http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1175402