James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) opened a whole, huge space for considering and pursuing documentary writing that owes more to what we will term the documentary impulse than it does to the genre of the documentary. Whereas the genre of documentary has grown in the last 60 years or so out of newspaper, magazine, radio, and tv journalism, the documentary impulse seems present in a huge array of literary and other art that is not bound, as journalism is, to the supposedly objective representation of the “facts.” In some ways, the documentary impulse may be considered a method for documenting the huge array of experiences that are, for various reasons, problematic to journalism, and to journalism’s conception of a knowable, objective reality.
That Agee – a journalist – grappled with these ideas is clear from the first pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and for this reason his and Walker Evans’ text seems a valuable foundation for our consideration of What May Be Documented and how Art and Artistic structures become necessary – (and may be the only/best means) for this sort of documentation. Our goals then, in this class, circumvent attempts to define what it and is not documentary art. Instead, we will look at a variety of texts for what they may teach us about representing oftentimes hidden phenomena in the world around us.
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