Socially Engaged Photography

mickyates Collaboration, ContextualResearch, Critical Research Journal, Culture, Documentary, Ethics, FinalMajorProject, FMPWeek12, Ideas, Photography, Practice, Social Development 5 Comments

In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to aid American farmworkers during the Great Depression. Its photographers aimed to document what was going on, in an effort to raise awareness and support. Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were two of those photographers. Interestingly, there is one school of thought, repeated by Susan Meiselas and Wendy Ewald, …

Allan Sekula – Fish Story, and Critical Realism

mickyates Art, ContextualResearch, Critical Research Journal, Critical Theory, Documentary, History, ICWeek12, Ideas, Informing Contexts, Landscape, Narrative, Photography 3 Comments

Allan Sekula was one of the most influential documentarians working in the late 20th Century. An incisive critic, he also was part of the re-imagining of documentary, moving photography (and art, generally) away from that rather ferocious and inward-looking absorption with identity that was postmodernism. His masterwork, Fish Story, reminds me of Susan Meiselas’ Kurdistan. Both used historical and contemporary …