Human Documents: Eight Photographers

In Human Documents, Robert Gardner introduces the work of photographers with whom he has worked over a period of nearly fifty years under the auspices of the Film Study Center at Harvard. Their images achieve the status of what Gardner calls “human documents”: visual evidence that testifies to our shared humanity. In images and words, the book adds to the already significant literature on photography and filmmaking as ways to gather both fact and insight into the human condition. In nearly 100 images spanning geographies and cultures including India, New Guinea, Ethiopia, and the United States, Human Documents demonstrates the important role photography can play in furthering our understanding of human nature and connecting people through an almost universal visual language.

Author and cultural critic Eliot Weinberger contributes the essay “Photography and Anthropology (A Contact Sheet),” in which he provides a new and intriguing context for viewing and thinking about the images presented here.

With photographs by Michael Rockefeller, Robert Gardner, Kevin Bubriski, Adelaide de Menil, Christopher James, Jane Tuckerman, Susan Meiselas, and Alex Webb.

In Human Documents, Robert Gardner introduces the work of photographers with whom he has worked over a period of nearly fifty years under the auspices of the Film Study Center at Harvard. Their images achieve the status of what Gardner calls “human documents”: visual evidence that testifies to our shared humanity. In images and words, the book adds to the already significant literature on photography and filmmaking as ways to gather both fact and insight into the human condition. In nearly 100 images spanning geographies and cultures including India, New Guinea, Ethiopia, and the United States, Human Documents demonstrates the important role photography can play in furthering our understanding of human nature and connecting people through an almost universal visual language.

Author and cultural critic Eliot Weinberger contributes the essay “Photography and Anthropology (A Contact Sheet),” in which he provides a new and intriguing context for viewing and thinking about the images presented here.

With photographs by Michael Rockefeller, Robert Gardner, Kevin Bubriski, Adelaide de Menil, Christopher James, Jane Tuckerman, Susan Meiselas, and Alex Webb.

Dominique James - San Francisco Book Review

In nearly 100 images spanning geographies and cultures including India, Ethiopia, and the United States, Human Documents demonstrates the important role photography can play in still furthering our understanding of human nature and connecting people through an almost universal visual language.

Filmmaker Robert Gardner is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; founding director of Harvard Film Study Center (1957-1997); former director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; faculty member, Department of Anthropology and Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, 1960-2000. He is the author of The Impulse to Preserve (2006) and Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film (2007).

Charles Warren teaches film studies at Boston University and the Harvard Extension School, and is the editor of Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film.

Kevin Bubriski is a documentary photographer and curator of an exhibit of Michael Rockefeller’s photographs at the Harvard Peabody Museum. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Fulbright, and NEA fellowships, and his photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.