Word: photographs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While President Ford fielded questions at his White House press conference, at least one photographer focused on him with special care. With three cameras slung over her jacket, Susan Ford, 17, wedged herself into the press ranks and began clicking away under the tutorial eye of presidential Photographer David Kennerly. Susan may be learning her craft more quickly than anyone realizes. As reporters clustered around the President at the close of his remarks, one onlooker jokingly suggested that Ford economize by firing Kennerly and hiring Susan. "That wouldn't save much," she shot back between pictures...
...another photograph we see a woman, dressed in an old-fashioned skirt and blouse, staring off to the right at something beyond our vision. She is standing next to an old stone bird bath, and the ground around her is strewn with dead leaves. This image is superimposed on a broken pane of glass whose pieces form a jagged jigsaw puzzle. The glass is at once a mirror and a window; whether we see an illusion or reality is left as enigma, as is the identity of the woman and the meaning of the scene...
...Evans's photographs are often described as "desolate," "stark" "social documentaries." Many perceive his photographs as political statements or attempts at social change. But "That's inadvertent...I am not a social protest artist...If you photograph what's before your eyes and you're in an impoverished environment, you're not--and shouldn't be. I think--trying to change the world or comment on this saying. 'Open up your hearts and bleed for these people.' I never dream of saying anything like that. That's too presumptuous and naive to think you can change society by a photograph...
...just this attitude that caused friction between Evans and Roy Stryker, who directed the photographers of the Farm Security Administration, causing Evans to be the first to go when there was a budget reduction in 1937. Evans was independent, not to be "directed" from above. Later in his 20 years at Fortune, he not only decided what subjects he would photograph but wrote the accompanying captions and stories. Says Szarkowski. "Stryker thought that the unit's function was to help reform the ills of the country, and Evans thought it was an artist's function to describe life. Stryker thought...
When asked if he had ever gone back to photograph childhood haunts, he responded. "I've gone back far enough to find out it can't be done...there's always a let down and an ungratifying experience...You go up to something you knew in your childhood and you're full of feeling about it and that feeling doesn't come through. The object doesn't reflect that feeling. You put something in it that's no longer there. Something of yourself...I avoid that strictly now. Although I'm very interested in the immediate past impersonally." Records...