(Walker Evans’ FSA photographs of Floyd Burroughs, his wife, Allie Mae Burroughs, and the washstand in the Burroughs’ home, Hale County, Alabama, 1936.)
Week two of the Seminar in Documentary Studies brought a great discussion session of the previous week’s reading assignments. We discussed several passages, what spoke to us, and of course, the interesting character of James Agee. We talked about the homework exercise “Who Are You?” and reviewed a case study of a student and his idea for a documentary project. The resulting discussion was centered around being aware of our own biases when going into a documentary project. Joy emphasized the importance of introspection and asking questions of yourself in an effort to better understand your subject and perhaps even why you want to document them.
Next, we discussed the definition of a documentary. We reviewed several different genres of documentary work: expository, direct cinema, social change, and reflexive.
This week’s homework is to read:
Bruce Jackson, Chapter Seven, Fieldwork
Hugo Slim and Paul Thompson, Chapter One, Listening for a Change
Guides to equipment and getting started in the field (CDS handout)
Sample interview agreement (CDS)
Jay Allison, “Radio Storytelling”, Nieman Reports, Fall 2001
In addition to the reading assignments, we’re supposed to experience a documentary of our choice (audio, film, exhibit, etc.) and evaluate its genre, discern the type of fieldwork conducted, evaluate how meaning is constructed in it, and post our comments on the class discussion board.
A few things of interest:
1. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I’d heard about this book and even seen it at bookstores before. Like many things we’re quick to dismiss, I was never really interested in it. It’s now on my “books I’d like to own” list. Walker Evans was only 32 when he accompanied James Agee (26) to rural Hale County, Alabama on an assignment for Fortune Magazine. They spent more than a month with three different families documenting their daily lives. Evans mainly used an 8×10″ view camera, but also a Leica 35mm and possibly a 4×5″ view camera. Agee submitted a lengthy manuscript to the Fortune editors, longer than anything they could feasibly publish. More than a year later, and still unpublished, Agee convinced Fortune to release it and then tried to have Harper and Brothers publish it as a book. He refused to make changes and the deal went nowhere. Finally, in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published by Houghton Mifflin. The first printing opened with 31 photographs by Evans, with no captions, then the extensive writing of Agee. It was a very unusual design and layout for a book of this type. What’s more interesting to me is that, in 1960, after Agee’s death, a second edition was released. The second edition contained twice as many photographs as the first (62) and an essay by Walker Evans. Some of the images he included weren’t even from Alabama and some had been taken when he worked for the Resettlement Administration. Bruce Jackson’s take on why Evans did this is an interesting one – “Perhaps he realized that this book was where his mark was being made and he had to become more of a presence in it than he had in the first edition.”
2. Errol Morris and James Curtis wrote a great article series called “The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock“, which addresses long-held theories about manipulation of photos and settings, posing elements of photographs, and the larger concept of purpose and identity of the FSA. It’s an extremely wordy and heavily footnoted series, but it’s well worth the read. Rothstein, Lange, and Evans are discussed at length.
3. You can access all the entire FSA archive (and many other great images) at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. What does this mean? Well it means you can spend hours and hours online pouring over photographic history AND you can download high resolution TIFF files and make your very own prints to hang on your walls. How cool is that?
