Thinking Through Production

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Go to the Library of Congress’s online collection, “American Memory: America from the great Depression to World War II. ” Click either the black and white photo or the color photo options, and do a search for photographs that show people close up and for photos that show only landscapes or people in landscapes.
Design and produce two different documentary photography books or websites that use exactly the same photographs but that, through their arrangements, argue for different relations between people and the landscape. In one book or website, emphasize how the landscape can bring people together; in the other, show how landscape can make people feel alone and isolated.
Write a short reflection essay on the arrangement and caption strategies you used to create the different effects.

Compose an essay using photos from different decades on the same topics: you could focus on (for example) portrait photographs, photographs of families or houses, or photographs of technologies or industries. (Click the “Photographs you can use” link to the left to see sites with photographs you might use for this purpose.)
Print each photograph onto a separate sheet of paper (or put each on a separate webpage) and try different arrangements of the photographs. Can you arrange the photographs to erase a sense of passing time, emphasizing instead the similarities among the photos? Can you arrange the photographs to emphasize difference in time? Can you arrange the photographs to tell a narrative?

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