SOCIAL SCIENCE, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND THE CAMERA
WORKER PHOTOGRAPHY
- Newspaper and magazine photographs were rivaled by the up-to-the-minute news of radio broadcasts, and the proliferation of motion pictures, with which sound has been successfully integrated.
- Filmmaking and film theory helped instigate the beginnings of documentary photography.
- In the 1920's, documentary film combined derring-do with exotic stories, as in Grass (1923), an account of the hazardous yearly migration of the Bakhtiari people of Iran.
- American filmmaker Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) spent sixteen months with the indigenous people near Hudson Bay in Canada chronicling their daily lives in the box-office success Nanook of the North (1922).
WORKER PHOTOGRAPHY
- In Europe and Russia during the 1920's, left wing groups calling themselves worker-photographers organized to combat what they identified as " bourgeois picture-lies"
- Their concern to combat deceptive press images attests to the power of the illustrated newspapers and magazines as display cases for political ideas.
- Worker-photographer groups were also started in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Britian.
- The worker-photograohers brought their class eye to bear on Renger-Patzsch's book The World is Beautiful, claiming that the world was ugly and evil, and in need of change.
- The work of James Van der Zee (1886-1983), a popular portraitist and street photographer, was steeped in nineteenth and early twentieth- century devices, including extensive props and elaborately painted backgrounds,
- During the interlay years, entertainment magazines, such as Photoplay (1911-80) and Modern Screen (1930-85), increased in number and in circulation.
- Josepho's early Photomaton employed attendants to help sitters into the photo-booth and to suggest poses.
- Privacy curtains blocked the public's view as the sitter or sitters posed.
- What happened in the photo-booth process produced a direct positive print- that is, one without negative.
- From 1933 on, as the Nazis fomented an atmosphere of race hated and scapegoating, Jewish people were characterized as lazy and slovenly in print ad in press photographs.
- Roman Vishniac traveled to Portland, RUssia, Hungary, and Romania on behalf of the American Jewish Joint Distribution COmmittee, making pictures that could assist their money-raising efforts to aid poverty-stricken Jewish communities.
- Journalists, photographers, writers, film and radio producers, publishers, printers, painters, and poets were conscripted into the Propaganda Division of the army.
- Photomontages exposed the real effects of Nazi social policies on the ordinary citizen, appeared in AIZ.
- When the war broke out in Europe in 1939, correspondents and photographers were sent there, sponsored by publications and photo agencies.
- Some photographs were conveyed by radio transmission, but most, with captions written by the photographer, were physically transported by the military.
- Photographers often had to form pools, meaning that photographs by any one of them could be used by all of them.
- The huge improvement in cameras filmed since World War I allowed soldiers from all sides to make snapshots and send them back home, although these, two, were supposed ti pass through the censor's hands.