Documerica (portmanteau of "document" and "America"; stylized in all caps) was a program sponsored by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to "photographically document subjects of environmental concern" in the United States from about 1972 to 1977. [1] [2] [3] The collection, now at the National Archives, contains over 22,000 photographs, [4] more than 15,000 of which are available online. [5] [6] [7]
With support from the first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, project director Gifford D. Hampshire contracted well-known photographers to work for the EPA on the project. [8] [9] Estimates of the number involved range between 70 [10] and 120, [8] including Erik Calonius, Dennis Cowals, Gene Daniels, Ken Hayman, Anne LaBastille, Danny Lyon, Boyd Norton, Yoichi Okamoto, Charles O'Rear, Marc St. Gil, Flip Schulke, Tomas Sennett, Bill Strode, Suzanne Szasz, Arthur Tress and John H. White. [1] They were organized geographically, with each photographer working in a particular area in which they were already active. For example, Michael Philip Manheim worked in Boston; [2] [5] Jack Corn focused on West Virginia and Tennessee; [2] [5] Bill Gillette documented miners in Colorado; [5] and Marc St. Gil focused primarily on Leakey, Houston and San Antonio, Texas. [11]
Subjects photographed include urban cityscapes, small towns, rural areas, beaches and mountains. They show people going about their everyday lives as well as working in farms; waterfronts; mining and logging, industry and heavy industry. Images document junk yards, highways, Amtrak trains, air and water pollution; and environmental protection and pollution control measures. [12] [13] The earliest assignments were closely aligned to the EPA's proposed areas of concern: air and water pollution, management of solid waste, radiation and pesticides, and noise abatement. [14] : 153 However, photographers had considerable creative freedom about what they shot. [4] As has been discussed by Gisela Parak, photographers working with Documerica were involved in the creation of a new pictorial language to articulate environmental issues. [14] : 155 Among the areas depicted are national parks and forests, including environmentally sensitive areas that were under development or considered for government protection, such as the planned route of the Alaska Pipeline, Hawaii and Washington, D.C. Photographers used differing approaches: Boyd Norton's photographs often emphasize the natural beauty of an area, [14] : 156 while Alexander Hope's photographs of the Middletown, Rhode Island dump and salt marsh reveal complex inter-relationships of man and nature. [14] : 165–167
Photographers working for the Documerica project received $150 a day along with film and expenses. [4] More than 80,000 photographs were submitted to Gifford D. Hampshire. [15] A selection were kept to become part of the collection, while copies and the unselected images were returned to the photographers. Because the images were part of a federal government project, photographers were required to waive their copyright, placing the images in the public domain. [16]
Like the photographers of the Federal photographic project of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, [17] some of the Documerica photographers interpreted their mission rather broadly, and sometimes artistically. Many of the photographs preserve a distinct visual record of time and place. [18]
Perhaps a quarter of the images were publicly shown during the 1970s. [15] A group of 155 photographs was shown in an exhibition Documerica 1 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. for six weeks in the summer of 1972. A number of small traveling exhibits were sent to cities such as New Orleans, Cincinnati, Dallas, and Philadelphia, and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) created the exhibit Our Only World for display at the EPA's Visitors Center and as a traveling exhibit. [5]
Digital scans of over 15,000 of the original 35 mm color slides and black-and-white negatives and prints are available through the National Archives and Records Administration's Archival Research Catalog. [19] [20]
The quality of the images varies. Older copies made from the original color transparency films tend to be inferior to the quality of the originals. [16] In 2013, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., displayed a curated exhibition, "Searching for the Seventies: The Documerica Photography Project". Curator Bruce Bustard selected a set of images from the Documerica collection and arranged to reprint them from the original slides. The quality of the resulting color images was much higher than that of older color reprints, which had degraded. [4] One hundred reprinted images from the Documerica project were reprinted in the exhibition book Searching for the Seventies: The Documerica Photography Project (2013), edited by Bruce I. Bustard. [13] [21]
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 “Documerica”, ETHEL, trailer from 2013 Next Wave Festival |
In 2013 the string quartet Ethel created a multimedia show called Ethel's Documerica which incorporated images from the DOCUMERICA archives. [10] The show premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and went on a national tour managed by Baylin Artists Management. [22]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent agency of the United States government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. The order establishing the EPA was ratified by committee hearings in the House and Senate.
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
Danny Lyon is an American photographer and filmmaker.
Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle events or environments both significant and relevant to history and historical events as well as everyday life. It is typically undertaken as professional photojournalism, or real life reportage, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit.
Jill Furmanovsky is a British photographer who has specialised in documenting rock musicians.
Art Wolfe is an American photographer and conservationist, best known for color images of landscapes, wildlife, and native cultures. His photographs document scenes from every continent and hundreds of locations, and have been noted by environmental advocacy groups for their "stunning" visual impact.
Charles O'Rear is an American photographer. His image Bliss is the default desktop wallpaper of Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. O'Rear started his career with the daily newspapers Emporia Gazette, The Kansas City Star, and Los Angeles Times; worked for National Geographic magazine; and was part of the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA project. He began photographing winemaking in 1978.
Charles Page is a Brisbane-based documentary photographer, and lecturer at the Queensland College of Art. He studied at Griffith University where he got a PhD.
Conservation photography is the active use of the photographic process and its products, within the parameters of photojournalism, to advocate for conservation outcomes.
Social documentary photography or concerned photography is the recording of what the world looks like, with a social and/or environmental focus. It is a form of documentary photography, with the aim to draw the public's attention to ongoing social issues. It may also refer to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.
Daniel Meadows is an English photographer turned maker of digital stories, and a teacher of photography turned teacher of participatory media.
James Edward Westcott was an American photographer who was noted for his work with the United States government in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War.
Boyd Norton is an American photographer, known for his work in wilderness photography and his environmental activism. He is the photographer/author of 17 books covering topics such as from African elephants, mountain gorillas, Siberia's Lake Baikal and issues of Alaskan and Rocky Mountain conservation. He contributed photographs to the Environmental Protection Agency's Documerica project in the early 1970s.
The conservation and restoration of photographic plates is caring for and maintaining photographic plates to preserve their materials and content. It covers the necessary measures that can be taken by conservators, curators, collection managers, and other professionals to conserve the material unique to photographic plate processes. This practice includes understanding the composition and agents of deterioration of photographic plates, as well as the preventive conservation and interventive conservation measures that can be taken to increase their longevity.
Ike Vern (1916-1987) was an American freelance magazine photographer and documentary film maker.
Photography in Sudan refers to both historical as well as to contemporary photographs taken in the cultural history of today's Republic of the Sudan. This includes the former territory of present-day South Sudan, as well as what was once Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and some of the oldest photographs from the 1860s, taken during the Turkish-Egyptian rule (Turkiyya). As in other countries, the growing importance of photography for mass media like newspapers, as well as for amateur photographers has led to a wider photographic documentation and use of photographs in Sudan during the 20th century and beyond. In the 21st century, photography in Sudan has undergone important changes, mainly due to digital photography and distribution through social media and the Internet.
LeRoy Woodson Jr. was an American photojournalist. He was a staff writer and editor for National Geographic magazine in the 1970s and 1980s. He worked for many newspapers and magazines, including The Washington Post, LIFE, Fortune, and Forbes. Woodson was employed by the Environmental Protection Agency for their Documerica photography project. He has works in the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, wrote the book Roadside Food, and founded the website MilitaryWeek.com.
Photographs have been taken in the area now known as Canada since 1839, by both amateurs and professionals. In the 19th century, commercial photography focussed on portraiture. But professional photographers were also involved in political and anthropological projects: they were brought along on expeditions to Western Canada and were engaged to document Indigenous peoples in Canada by government agencies.
Marc St. Gil was a Dutch-American photographer, best known for his work with the Environmental Protection Agency.
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