How are great journalists made? Often, it’s pieces of great journalism that help form them, influencing their lives or careers in an indelible way. To celebrate the Nieman Foundation for Journalism’s 80th anniversary in 2018, we asked Nieman Fellows to share works of journalism that in some way left a significant mark on them, their work or their beat, their country, or their culture. The result is what Nieman curator Ann Marie Lipinski calls “an accidental curriculum that has shaped generations of journalists.”
Early in my career I was deeply affected by the photographs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). It is a visual record of American life between 1935 and 1944.
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More Nieman Fellows on exemplary journalism that influenced them[/sidebar]
This was a U.S. government photography project headed for most of its existence by Roy E. Stryker. It is still the most famous documentary photography project ever undertaken. Some of the better-known photographers were Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee.
The photographs touched me because they were about ordinary lives. And it was not lost on me that women were deeply involved in this work. Dozens of books have been published about the individual photographers and on the entire body of work.
In 1976 I searched for and found first-time parents in Louisville, Kentucky willing to let me photograph the first year of life with their new baby. I went on to spend 42 years (and continuing) documenting the McGarvey family. Always in the back of my mind I was remembering the work of the FSA photographers making a record of daily life. That famous project was the root of the personal project that has spanned most of my life.
There are important stories to tell about the major subjects of the day, but I am most interested in the ordinary stories that seem insignificant in the moment but are the cultural artifacts of our time.
The original parents of the family I am documenting have four grandchildren and another one on the way.
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