In the end, while both documentary photography techniques and black tropes have been under consideration, they have rarely been reconciled. Dorothea Lange, Title in FSA Archive: Hoe culture. In the same way as W.E.B. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who suffered discrimination and violence in the South and the North. In Twelve Million Black Voices, Richard Wright, in a beautifully poetic prose, recounts the conditions African Americans endured when they migrated North during the early Twentieth Century. Cayton is one of the authors of Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Nothern City, a landmark study on Chicago’s South Side, that was to be published in 1945, with an introduction by Richard Wright–who was by then familiar with the sociological approach of the School of Chicago that fostered the celebrated black urban study. 11Yet the publication of Twelve Million Black Voices owes more to the FSA than a supply of ready-to-use photographs that African American writer and intellectual Richard Wright might have drawn from to achieve his own endeavor at exposing the African American truth to the eye of the American public. TRACHTENBERG, Alan, Reading American Photography: Images as History. Get this from a library! In the 1920s another million followed (Grossman, 1989, 3-4). The historians’ urge for a bigger picture to better appreciate “the evolving self-consciousness of African Americans and the shifting constraints that confronted them” (Lawson & Payne, 1998, 110) is akin to Wright’s own sense of the importance of his documentary book within a larger historical frame. Posted on June 17, 2010 by Terry Suton. Still, “the use of a nonblack photograph for a vital black reference” (Natanson, 1992, 251) further thwarts the relation to truth and suggests the staging of visual elements to fit the commanding narrative. Commentators have been critical of the writer’s bias. Farm Security Administration.] Olivier Lugon has convincingly argued that the protagonists of documentary photography, such as Stryker, actually used the reference to Hine in a retrospective construction of their own method. Yet it could be of interest to remind Newhall’s definitions in his 1938 piece in Parnassus: beyond the debate of art versus sociology or politics, Newhall highlights the focus of documentary photography on poverty and the primary interest for the representation of “the homes and lives of the underprivileged” (Newhall, 1938, 5). Original because it displayed a reality that had rarely been shown as such and because one third was specifically collected for the book. 19 According to Maren Stange, “reviews were largely positive” and the photo book became “an instant Bible” for African American photographer Gordon Parks while it was taught in creative writing courses by Langston Hughes (Stange, 2003, xxiv). If you want to get a comprehensive picture of our country, you should go through these files sometime. The Historical Section was thus instrumental in setting up different kinds of exhibits. Black American Literature Forum And we charged this meager horde of stolen sounds with all the emotions and longings we had ; we proceeded to build our language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls, by rolling our eyes, by assigning to common, simple words new meanings, meanings which enabled us to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Lands without their being aware ! ---, and LEE, Russell & ROSSKAM Edwin (Photographs), Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941-1943, New York, New Press, 2003. FABRE, Michel, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (Trans. The book contains eight pictures of African American congregations at prayer, or reading or singing, a rare sight in segregated America and one that captures African American life well. (Wright, 1940, 874). The photographs include works by such giants … The images in 12 Million Black Voices are much more candid than images of earlier eras. (Wright, 1941, 40). ROSSKAM, Edwin, “Not Intended for Framing: the FSA Archive”, Afterimage Volume VIII, n° 8, March 1981, 9-11. After reminding the African slaves’ contribution to the building and prosperity of the new nation, Wright concludes: We black men and women in America today, as we look back upon scenes of rapine, sacrifice, and death, seem to be children of a devilish aberration, descendants of an interval of nightmare in history, fledglings of a period of amnesia on the part of men who once dreamed a great dream and forgot. More useful to our perspective in this paper is the question of which truth is being conveyed by, not just the photographer’s, but the editor’s and narrator’s of Twelve Million Black Voices. A historiographic perspective sense the mediation of Richard Wright, Jackson, University of Illinois Press 1986... 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