Shooting Nature

Ronald B. Tobias, Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature: Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011).

from the publisher:

With his square, bulldoggish stature, signature rimless glasses, and inimitable smile — part grimace, part snarl — Theodore Roosevelt was an unforgettable figure, imprinted on the American memory through photographs, the chiseled face of Mount Rushmore, and, especially, film. At once a hunter, explorer, naturalist, woodsman, and rancher, Roosevelt was the quintessential frontiersman, a man who believed that only nature could truly test and prove the worth of man. A documentary he made about his 1909 African safari embodied aggressive ideas of masculinity, power, racial superiority, and the connection between nature and manifest destiny. These ideas have since been reinforced by others — Jesse “Buffalo” Jones, Paul Rainey, Martin and Osa Johnson, and Walt Disney. Using Roosevelt as a starting point, filmmaker and scholar Ronald Tobias traces the evolution of American attitudes toward nature, attitudes that remain, to this day, remarkably conflicted, complex, and instilled with dreams of empire.

Robert Frank's "The Americans"

Jonathan Day, Robert Frank's "The Americans": The Art of Documentary Photography (Intellect Books; distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2011).

from the publisher:

In the mid-1950s, Swiss-born New Yorker Robert Frank embarked on a ten-thousand-mile road trip across America, capturing thousands of photographs of all levels of a rapidly changing society. The resultant photo book, The Americans, represents a seminal moment in both photography and in America's understanding of itself. To mark the book’s fiftieth anniversary, Jonathan Day revisits this pivotal work and contributes a thoughtful and revealing critical commentary. Though the importance of The Americans has been widely acknowledged, it still retains much of its mystery. This comprehensive analysis places it thoroughly in the context of contemporary photography, literature, music, and advertising from its own period through the present.

#1 Party School

Recently Ira Glass's NPR show "This American Life" broadcast an episode on the "#1 Party School," Penn State University. The show was originally broadcast on 18 December 2009.

It is an interesting radio documentary, and well worth listening to, though you will wince if you are a Penn State faculty member or student.

The local NPR station, WPSU, has also posted some discussion of the show, including a recent column in the student paper, The Daily Collegian.

Social Documentary Photography

I've been exploring the Flickr group for Social Documentary Photography. Easy to get lost, but worth a look.

Arrotino!

Lovely short documentary Arrotino: Living off a Knife's Edge -- Michele Muzio the knife grinder -- by Alan Helix on YouTube.

See also the photo and earlier story at my Rome and rhetoric of tourism blog. Thanks to Alan Helix for bringing his little film to my attention in a comment on the blog.

New Hard Times at New York Times

The New York Times has begun a new video series, inviting readers to submit short video interviews of friends and relatives who lived through the Great Depression.

The New Hard Times can be found here.

Look Magazine, March 1937

"Children of the Forgotten Man. Humanity Hits Bottom in the Deep South."

Photo spread from Look magazine, March 1937.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540 USA, Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Reproduction Number LC-USF345-003816-ZA DLC (b&w film neg.)