Documentary as Art

Having grown up in Colorado I know all about the desolate beauty of a High Plains desert. The photographer Peter Brown really captures the breathtaking beauty of wide open vistas. As the book says "You have to know how to look at this country. You have to slow down. It isn't pretty, but it's beautiful."

While reading the blurb on the front flap I learned that this book was in part funded by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Inspired by the work of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor in An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, the Center funds collaborations between photographers and documentary writers working in the early stages of a project like American Eoxdus.

 Here's a list of the prizewinners that DPL owns:

• West of Last Chance by Peter Brown
• Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream by Robert Dawson
• A Positive Life: Portraits of Women Living with HIV by River Huston

I hope you are as fascinated by these works as I am.