Doing Documentary Work

Based on a series of lectures delivered at The New York Public Library, Doing Documentary Work utilizes the documentaries of writers, photographers, and others to show how their prose and pictures are influenced by the observer's frame of reference. Among the examples Coles draws upon are literary documentaries -- James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier; photographs by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange; and personal portraits of poet William Carlos Williams; Robert Moses, one of the leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s; Erik H. Erikson, biographer of Gandhi and Martin Luther; and others.