Human Documents

Eight Photographers

Conceived by Robert Gardner and Edited by Charles Warren

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

    These extraordinary photographs, from the eyes of eight very different photographers, remind us of the humanising role of photography. The images work at the blurred boundaries between anthropology and photographic practices as both attempt to translate different experiences of the world from one space to another. The photographers represented here are acutely aware of this challenge, and their images go back to the classic roots of the medium at its most powerful.
       --Elizabeth Edwards, Senior Research Fellow, University of the Arts, London

    Human Documents is a book of stunning photographs which collectively show that visual art is more than merely illustrative.
       --Tracy Kidder, author of Mountains beyond Mountains

    Some scholars are remembered as having been pioneers in their fields. In the case of Robert Gardner, an entire academic discipline, visual anthropology, came into being simply to formalize what he was already doing. For more than fifty years he has been an inspiration as an author, photographer, filmmaker, and teacher. Human Documents is a beautiful and profound book, as significant as any to appear since Susan Sontag's On Photography.
       --Wade Davis, author of The Serpent and the Rainbow

  • Cover: Human Documents

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.