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A Curious Collaboration

Richard Knox Robinson

Friday, November 06 - 10:00AM to 10:55AM
Clemson One Building

Rothstein’s First Assignment and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

"It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, …


A Curious Collaboration looks at how a passage in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men came to explain the troubling discoveries made exploring FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein’s first project for the Resettlement Administration. With documentation discovered while producing Rothstein’s First Assignment (Cinema Guild 2011), the presentation explores the context of this project, finding it at odds with Rothstein’s description of working as a lone photographer in the mountains of Virginia. Utilizing written, visual and audio records, the presentation looks to the extensive documentation of Rothstein’s subjects, including the ethnographic studyHollow Folk; revealing that Rothstein did not work alone, nor were his subjects Resettled. Instead many would end up institutionalized and forcibly sterilized at “The Colony.”

http://www.robinsonphoto.com/

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Richard Knox Robinson
Richard Knox Robinson

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