Exhibitions and Events

In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented The Bitter Years, curated by Edward Steichen. This exhibition included over 200 images taken between the years of 1935-1944 by a small group of photographers working for the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration Programme (the FSA). Many of the best known Depression-era photographers were fostered by the FSA including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Under the direction of Roy Stryker, these photographers were sent out to document the plight of rural workers, to introduce ‘America to Americans.’

The Human Document takes The Bitter Years as its starting point in exploring artists’ enduring fascination with the FSA Historical Section– both as photographs designed to awaken human emotions and as a collective body of images. It presents a selection of photographs from The Bitter Years, corresponding to Steichen’s original thematic groupings, alongside photography by contemporary artists including* Richard Billingham*, Paul Graham, Sunil Gupta, Chris Killip, Susan Lipper and Eileen Perrier as well as the film installation On Photography, People and Modern Times by Akram Zaatari.

 

Warwick Arts Centre website

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Film

    A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.