Document, survey, construct

helen.clarke@leeds-art.ac.uk

August Sander, Face of our Time, published in 1929

People of the 20th Century:The Farmer, The Skilled Tradesman, The Woman, Classes and Professions, The Artists, The City, and The Last People

(homeless persons, veterans, etc.). By 1945, Sander's archive included over 40,000 images.

Farm Security Administration

● Initiative by president Roosevelt to resettle those sharecroppers who were affected by the Depression

● Photographers and writers were commissioned to record the conditions that those affected were enduring

● There was a migration from the mid west eg: Oklahoma towards California in the search for work on the land.

FSA photographers

● Dorothea Lange● educated in photography

in New York, in a class taught by Clarence H White.

● Walker Evans● graduated from Phillips

Academy, in Andover, Massetu

● Spent time in Paris & New York

Gordon Parks

● Youngest of 15 children living in Kansas

● Worked as a waiter in a ‘white’s only’ club

● Saw photos of migrant workers in a magazine and bought a camera

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936

● Florence Owens Thompson

● Her thumb was removed from the image although her index finger remains in the bottom right

Walker Evans, Hale County Alabama, 1936

Bud Fields and his family, 1936

Lists of topics were provided for him. Eg:

Farmers Kitchen, 1936

American Gothic

● Gordon Parks photographed Ella Watson who was working in the FSA building in 1942

● Grant Wood, 1930

Mass Observation

● This organisation was founded in 1937 aiming to create an 'anthropology of ourselves'. They recruited a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This original work continued until the early 1950s

Humphrey Spender

● third son of Harold Spender, a Liberal journalist and writer

● studied art history at Freiburg University for a year, then qualified for a career in architecture

● Picture Post- Lensman

‘Worktown’- Bolton

● Washing Line, 1936● Ashington, colliery

town

● Body of work collected between 1937 and 1940

Robert Frank, The Americans, first pub. 1958

●Swiss immigrant to the US in 1947

●Intro by Jack Kerouac●Funded by the Guggenheim foundation●Friend of Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg

Richard Billingham, Ray’s a laugh, 1989-96

Nick Waplington, Living Room

Further Research

● "May the Twelfth: Mass-Observation Day-Surveys 1937 by over two hundred observers" was published in book form

● Wells, Liz Ch 2 Surveyors and Surveyed in Photography: A Critical Introduction

● Humphrey Spenders ‘Worktown People’

● Let us now Praise famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans, first pub.1941