The American photo-text, 1930-1960 /Caroline Blinder.
- Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, (c)2019.
- 1 online resource (xi, 249 pages) : illustrations (black and white).
- BAAS Paperbacks .
Includes bibliographies and index.
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) -- 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) -- 7. Ideology, history and democracy in 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)
"This 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."--