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Civil Rights Activist Julian Bond to Narrate ETV’s National Presentation of “Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the Documentary Photographers”

Program to Air Statewide on Monday, Aug. 18 at 10 p.m.

For Immediate Release
July 22, 2008

Columbia, SC... It was the first time Americans saw each other’s faces and witnessed what life was like across the nation: north to south, east to west, rich and poor, black and white. Ordinary people. Extraordinary times. And it was all thanks to the work of a group of groundbreaking photographers who were given unprecedented freedom in the 1930s and early 1940s to travel coast-to-coast, boldly capturing the face of Depression-era America. Their stories are candidly told in Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the Documentary Photographers. Narrated by civil rights activist Julian Bond, the film premieres Monday, Aug. 18 at 10 p.m. on ETV.

A production of Butlerfilms LLC in association with South Carolina Educational Television, the hour-long program recounts the remarkable strides of a legendary band of New Deal-sponsored photographers that included Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano. Galvanized by the unorthodox leadership of fiery prairie populist Roy Stryker, this unlikely troop of photographers and artists unwittingly became responsible for creating what is now considered a national treasure – over 270,000 images archived at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. In fact, Dorothea Lange’s haunting snapshot of the “Migrant Mother” remains one of the most famous images of all time.

Documenting the Face of America tells the inspirational “behind the lens” stories that celebrate the courage and foresight of a small contingent of renowned artists. From the heartbreak of the Dust Bowl era to the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans at the outset of WWII to widespread racial and economic inequality, the work of these photogs changed not only the course of photography, but the way Americans related to the plight of their countrymen.

“Roy Stryker proved to me that you cannot photograph a bigot and say ‘this is a bigot’ because they have a way of looking just like everybody else,” said photographer and activist Gordon Parks. “What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry by showing the people who suffered most under it.”

Throughout this unapologetic glance back in time, interviews with photographers, as well as candid commentary by respected historians and scholars, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Kennedy and F. Jack Hurley, delve into the mechanics of this controversial government-sponsored project. Compelling oral histories, archival footage and detailed excerpts from the diaries and shooting scripts kept by Stryker and the photographers underscore the spirited nature of Stryker’s vision of establishing a complete pictorial record of rural America. In so doing, he made Americans everywhere more familiar with themselves and their country.

South Carolina ETV is the state's public educational broadcasting network with 11 television and eight radio transmitters, and a multi-media educational system in more than 2,500 schools, colleges, businesses and government agencies. Using television, radio and the web, SCETV's mission is to enrich lives by educating children, informing and connecting citizens, celebrating our culture and environment and instilling the joy of learning.

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For more information, contact Rob Schaller at (803) 737-6556 or rschaller@scetv.org.

Portrait shows Florence Thompson with several of her children in a photograph known as "Migrant Mother," by Dorothea Lange, February 1936. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Migratory Mexican field workers, photographed by Dorothea Lange. Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.