OUGD601: Documentary Photographers for magazines in the Great Depression

Walter Benjamin the work of art in mechanical reproduction

Documentary photographers like Walker Evans, Arthur Rothsteine, Dorothea Lange, were initially to show ‘city folk’ what life was really like in the countryside. They photographed the Great Depression in the 1920s and 30’s and are some of the only sources of TRUE evidence. Untampered with as shot on film, un-edited and un-art directed. Very different than how Vogue portrayed America during this time period, however the purpose and distribution is vastly different. Magazines provided a sense of escapism. The average American would not be living a life with excess or luxurious settings (with designer garments), so a magazine showing them what they could already see would not sell. Money would only be spend on something to take them away from this reality or provide them with additional knowledge (like a fiction/ non-fiction book would). Never the less, Magazines were not targeted at people living the kind of lives documented by the FSA photographers- they were targeted at city folk as this is where the ‘culture lived’, and these photographs (despite documenting the truth) represented a piece of entertainment/dystopian-ism, as for the city folk, the way these people were living must have been unimaginable but still fascinating. (This also starts raising issues in class divide within the publishing industry.) In conclusion, DOCUMENTARY IMAGES are for NEWSPAPERS and stories about NON-FICTION. Fashion editorials take an opposite approach, perhaps loosely based on truths yet not conducted in such a head on way- artistic concept, allure and imagination are all combined to create something not found in the public media spectrum (especially Vogue 1930s onwards).