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, Amtraktrains,
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
Details
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]
Public access
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]
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]
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]
Gallery
Bikers in Colorado, 1972, Boyd Norton
Fertilizing the Imperial Valley, CA, 1972, Charles O'Rear
Suburbanization, Orange County, CA, 1975, Charles O'Rear
Nature in New York City, 1974, Suzanne Szasz
Children at a Brooklyn beach, 1974, Danny Lyon
63rd Street, Chicago, 1973, John H. White
Duck killed by polluted pond, Utah, 1974, Bruce McAllister
Air pollution, Cleveland, OH, 1973, Frank John Aleksandrowicz
^In "Scope & Contents" page for series DOCUMERICA: The Environmental Protection Agency's Program to Photographically Document Subjects of Environmental Concern, compiled 1972 - 1977, National Archives 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 National Archives Catalog of the National Archives and Records AdministrationArchived August 2, 2014, at the Wayback Machine under the National Archives Identifier 542493. Accessed February 18, 2009.