Summary: The power of the photographic image remains undiminished in the latter part of the 20th century, even though it faces new challenges from television, technology, motion pictures, and elsewhere. Photography Transformed examines surveillance photography and the Cuban Missile crisis, searing images from the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights violence—while highlighting the transformation to the new...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1999
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Summary: The 1930s brought to all Americans the explosion of mass media devoted to distributing photographic images. Magazines like Life and Look—dedicated to telling stories, primarily through photographs—were rapidly growing in popularity. An Associated Press “wire photo” could be sent anywhere instantaneously, and suddenly, millions of people were seeing the same pictures at the same time. Through...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1999
View online at AVOD
Summary: Although photography was invented in the first half of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century marked extraordinary changes. The Developing Image travels back to the very first time in history when inexpensive hand-held cameras gave ordinary people the opportunity to create their own visual images. Through archival footage and interviews with historians and notable photographers,...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1999
View online at AVOD
Summary: Beginning in 1935, a group of New Deal-sponsored photographers roamed the American landscape, capturing the human face of the Great Depression. This film tells the story of the mammoth project, supervised by Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration and later made part of the Office of War Information. Viewers will encounter the poignant, iconic images and personal challenges of...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
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Summary: Can art antagonize? Seduce? Inspire transformation? And if so, how might desires and taboos shape our ability to imagine? Fantasy, featuring contemporary artists Jeff Koons, Mary Heilmann, Florian Maier-Achen, and Cao Fei, explores a defiant and unconventional world of sculpture, painting, video and photography-a techno-inspired collection that is at times hallucinatory, irreverent, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Through wars, depressions, and social upheavals, the West has accommodated to change while remaining a mythical land of freedom and possibility. The ghosts of the buffalos are still stirring. Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood have given way to Native American artists; Indians-once the subjects of painting-have become its practitioners. So the myth regenerates itself and the American...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: How do photographic images evoke meaning and emotion? To understand that, viewers first need to understand how the eyes and brain process input from the visual world. After an overview of the biomechanics of vision, this program explains how proximity, similarity, and continuity affect perception; what light is and how lighting types and angles alter an image; and how color theory operates....
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
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Summary: Photographs have the potential to present powerful truths-or to create convincing fictions. This program uses case studies involving Iwo Jima, Elian Gonzalez, and O. J. Simpson to show how images can be manipulated to influence the way viewers perceive events. The ethics of photography and the positive and negative impacts of digital technology, which is steadily eroding the border between...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program addresses the emotionally manipulative power of photography by illustrating how commercial advertising has created an obsession with youth and physical perfection and can exploit viewers' fascinations with celebrity, sexuality, and violence. The video also demonstrates how photogenic people who adroitly use the visual media have come to dominate the political scene. Commentary is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Often called the father of modern photography, Frenchman Eugene Atget embraced a heartfelt realism that influenced generations of younger photographers-including an American, Berenice Abbott, who championed him in his later career and carried on his legacy. This program examines the work of both artists, juxtaposing Atget's Paris oeuvre with Abbott's views of New York, describing how their...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009
View online at AVOD
Summary: Once strictly considered a visual recording device, the camera has expanded beyond its documentational niche and made places for itself in the worlds of fine art, advertising, and news media as well. This program describes existing and emerging genres in the photographic arts, including documentary photography, portraiture, still life, commercial photography, and photojournalism. Commentary is...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: Movies, magazines, TV, billboards, the Web-the world is filled with captivating photographic images competing for viewers' attention. Not surprisingly, citizens of the Global Village are experiencing a growing need for visual literacy: the ability to read between the lines and extract meaning from that daily bombardment. This program takes a close look at the vital importance of visual language...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005
View online at AVOD
Summary: Roy E. Stryker headed the Historical Division of the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1943. This program tells the story of how Stryker, a low-level federal bureaucrat with integrity and vision, managed a massive New Deal project to document the Great Depression. These photos-nearly 200,000 by both established and aspiring photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007
View online at AVOD
Summary: In 1993, Mohammed Aideed's militia triumphantly paraded U.S. corpses through the streets of Mogadishu. In stunning irony, Mohammed's son, Hussein, though not a representative of Somalia's official government, now offers the U.S. strategic bases. This program presents a candid interview with Somalia's de facto leader, a warlord with unusual credentials: American citizen, former Marine, and...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006
View online at AVOD
Summary: This program draws on insightful commentary from literary scholars and authors to examine the characters, plots, and themes of seven American novels that deal with wealth, poverty, and the nature of success and failure in the U.S. In an exploration that moves from the turn of the 20th century into progressively more contemporary surroundings, passages from each book are dramatized through...
Format: software, multimedia
Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008