(Not) Picturing the Poor It was no accident that Frederich Engels (1820-1895), a twenty-four year old German social scientist, visited England to study the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon its population. In 1844 no other nation was as industrialized as Great...
(Not)Picturing the Slums The London of the twentieth century imagination is based upon Merchant-Ivory film productions or Masterpiece Theater, or both. Here in these nostalgic realms, upper class life is recreated and evoked through elegant horse drawn carriages...
Jacob Riis and the Other Half During a period of open borders, the Age of Mass Migration, which extended from 1850 to 1913, brought thirty million individuals, men, women, children, and families to the New World. They came in ships that were built increasingly larger...
Photography as Re-Enactment Part Two When photographer Edward Curtis began his monumental twenty volume project on the Native American Tribes of North America, the term “documentary photographer,” had yet to be invented. Such was the certainty that a...
Photography as Re-Enactment Part One It is difficult to know what to do with Edward Curtis (1868-1952)–was he a photographer, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a film director, a historian? Did he combine all of these disciplines or did Curtis participate in...
