Tuesday, March 11

KEY WORDS/PEOPLE
*Jacob August Riis (1849 - 1914), a Danish-American muckraker journalist, photographer, and social reformer, was born in Ribe, Denmark. He is known for his dedication to using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the less fortunate in New York City. As one of the first photographers to use flash, he is considered a pioneer in photography. He used photography as a tool to document the lives of the impoverished in New York City.
*How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) was a pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. It served as a basis for future muckraking journalism by exposing the slums to New York City’s upper and middle-class.

*Lewis Wickes Hine (1874 –1940)was an American photographer. For Hine, the camera was both a research tool and an instrument of social reform. In 1908, he became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor in American industry to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice. Between 1906 and 1908, he was a freelance photographer for The Survey, a leading social reform magazine. He took all these pictures to show the country the cruelties of child labor. During and after World War I, he documented American Red Cross relief work in Europe. During the Great Depression, he again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, and for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

*Walker Evans (1903 –1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He wrote that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent."

*Dorothea Lange (1895 –1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. In 1952, Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture.
* “Migrant Mother”- The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.

*FSA-Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, and very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming. The RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935-1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the plight of the poor farmer.