The American photo-text, 1930-1960 / Caroline Blinder.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blinder, Caroline, 1967- author.

Series:

BAAS paperbacks.

BAAS paperbacks

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Documentary photography--United States--History--20th century.

Documentary photography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 249 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2019]

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

Focuses on the intersections between text and photography in the twentieth-century American photo-textThis critical study of the American photo-text focuses on the interaction between text and images in twentieth-century American photography as well as the discourse surrounding image-text collaboration on a wider level. In looking at books designed as collaborative efforts between writers and photographers and by photographer/writers adding their own narrative text, it establishes the photo-text as a genre related to and yet distinct from other documentary efforts.Ranging from documentary studies in the 1930s to post-war examinations of the American landscape, urban and rural, from Dorothea Lange’s photographs of dispossessed migrants in American Exodus (1939), Weegee’s small time hoodlums on the streets of New York in Naked City (1945), to Robert Frank’s Cold War landscapes, this survey constitutes an invaluable entry into how we read the politics of twentieth-century American photography.Key FeaturesExplores through a series of case studies some of the seminal photo-texts of the 1930s, 40s and 50s from documentary realism of the Depression years to post-war studies of the American landscapeExamines photo-texts by Doris Ulmann, Walker Evans, James Agee, Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke White, Wright Morris, Paul Strand, Roy DeCarava and Robert FrankEnables students and scholars of both American photography and literature to rethink the intersections between writing and photography in political as well as aesthetic termsSituates the various case studies with reference to the political, social and economic developments of the periodRe-establishes the book form as particularly crucial for an understanding of American Documentary photography

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The American Photo-Text

PART I: THE 1930s

1. Portraiture as Place in Julia Peterkin and Doris Ulmann’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933)

2. Articulating the Depression in Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus (1939) and Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)

3. Establishing a Photographic Vernacular in Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938)

PART II: THE 1940s

4. Modernism as Documentary Practice in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

5. A Post-War Pastoral in Wright Morris’s The Inhabitants (1946) and The Home Place (1948)

6. Hardboiled Captions and Flashgun Aesthetics in Weegee’s Naked City (1945)

PART III: THE 1950s

7. Ideology, History and Democracy in Paul Strand and Nancy Newhall’s Time in New England (1950)

8. Visions of Harlem in Langston Hughes and Ray DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955)

9. Beat Poetics in The Americans (1959)

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781474404136

1474404138

9781474404112

1474404111

OCLC:

1312726820