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documentary photography --- Photography

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Comparative religion --- Documentary photography --- Religion --- Spirituality --- Documentary photography. --- Religion. --- Spirituality. --- Locus, Jan,

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Working class --- Documentary photography --- Killip, Christopher --- Great Britain --- Social conditions

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'The Bitter Years' was a seminal exhibition curated by Edward Steichen in 1962 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The show featured 208 images by photographers who worked under the aegis of the US Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935-41 as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

The Great Depression of the 1930s defined a generation in modern American history and was still a vivid memory in 1962. The FSA, set up to combat rural poverty, included an ambitious photography project that launched many photographic careers, most notably those of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. The exhibition featured their work as well as that of ten other FSA photographers, including Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, and Arthur Rothstein. Their images are among the most remarkable in documentary photography - testimonies of a people in crisis, hit by the full force of the economic turmoil and the effects of drought and dust storms.

'The Bitter Years' was the last exhibition curated by Steichen, who was not only a distinguished photographer in his own right, but also a celebrated director of the photography department at MoMa, in which role he had won international acclaim in 1955 for 'The Family of Man' exhibition.

This book is published in association with the Centre National de l'Audiovisuel and the Ministry of Culture in Luxembourg. It accompanies a permanent display at the Château d'Eau in Dudelange of the original exhibition, given by Steichen, who was born in Luxembourg. No proper catalogue was produced of the exhibition in 1962 so this book provides a unique opportunity to see all the photographs in a structure and sequence that reflect those devised by Steichen for the original show.

Jean Back, Director of the Centre National de l'Audiovisuel, contributes an introduction to the book and the four essays by international writers and teachers on photography discuss the FSA, its place in the history of 20th-century photography and the continuing role of its archive, Steichen and the origins, impact and legacy of the exhibition, and its new location in Luxembourg.

The Bitter Years celebrates some of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century and provides a whole new insight into Steichen's impact on the history of documentary photography.

Photography --- poverty --- documentary photography --- farmers [people in agriculture] --- United States of America

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"Coauthored by the literary scholar Sara Blair and the art historian Eric Rosenberg, this volume of the Defining Moments in American Photography series offers new ways to understand the work of the famous Farm Security Administration photographers by exploring an expanded and much more variable idea of the documentary than what New Dealers proposed. The coauthors follow in the line of scholars who have, on the one hand, looked critically at the FSA photography project and identified its goals, biases, contradictions, and ambivalences and, on the other hand, discerned strikingly independent directions among its photographers. But what distinguishes their work from that of others is their wrestling with a specific term often applied to the Depression era: trauma. If it was the case that documentary, as a genre, and FSA photographs, as an umbrella project, came to prominence during a time of trauma and in the hands of socially minded photographers was meant to address and publicize trauma, the coauthors of this volume seek to understand how trauma and photography mixed and how, in the volatility of that mixture, the competing ideas for documentary took shape. Among the key figures they study are some of the most beloved in American photography, including Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Aaron Siskind"--Provided by publisher.

Documentary photography --- History --- United States. --- United States --- Economic conditions --- Social conditions