- DOCUMERICA
-
Heavy smog in Los Angeles, 1973. DOCUMERICA photo by Gene Daniels.
DOCUMERICA was a program sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency to "photographically document subjects of environmental concern" in the United States of America from about 1972 to 1977.
Girls smoking pot, Texas, 1973. DOCUMERICA photo by Marc St. Gil.
Jesse Jackson, Chicago, 1973. DOCUMERICA photo by John H. White.The images were made by approximately 70 well-known photographers contracted by the EPA for this project. Photographers included Danny Lyon, Gene Daniels, Marc St. Gil, Bill Strode, Charles O'Rear, Jack Corn, Tomas Sennett, Yoichi Okamote, Ken Hayman, and John H. White.
Like the earlier Federal photographic project of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, some of the DOCUMERICA photographers interpreted their mission rather broadly, and sometimes artistically. Many preserve a distinct visual record of time and place.
Some of the subjects photographed are urban cityscapes, everyday life in small towns, scenes of natural beauty including beachs and mountains, urban areas including junk yards, streets, buildings, and traffic control; Amtrak; air and water pollution; waterfronts; mining scenes; and people. Areas included are National Parks and Forests, Lake Tahoe, the Great Lakes, the Alaskan Pipeline, Hawaii, Washington, D.C. and cities throughout the United States. The project even wound up including some photographs of Canada, and even Yugoslavia and Austria[1]
Digital scans of over 15,000 of the original 35mm color slides and black and white negatives and prints are available through the National Archives and Records Administration's Archival Research Catalog.[2]
References
- ^ http://narademo.umiacs.umd.edu/cgi-bin/isadg/viewseries.pl?seriesid=4040
- ^ In "Scope & Contents" page for series DOCUMERICA: The Environmental Protection Agency's Program to Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern, compiled 1972 - 1977, ARC Identifier 542493 / Local Identifier 412-DA; Series from Record Group 412: Records of the Environmental Protection Agency, 1944 - 2000. Record of holdings available from the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) of the National Archives and Records Administration under the ARC Identifier 542493. Accessed February 18, 2009.
External links
Categories:- Photography in the United States
- Environment and society
- Environment of the United States
- United States Environmental Protection Agency
- 1970s in the United States
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