Jesse Dritz

This dissertation considers how a group of student photography practices called “cultural journalism” reimagined documentary photography from the ground up in the 1970s. Materializing as deeply localized DIY documentary picture magazines, cultural journalism projects were the fruit of high school students’ photographic collaborations with their communities. Following in the footsteps of Foxfire, an Appalachian student magazine based in North Georgia that became an unexpected cultural phenomenon in the 1970s, cultural journalism took off as high schools across the US began to form their own programs that numbered over 150 by the decade’s end. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the 1970s as a flashpoint in the history of documentary photography. This dissertation examines how high school students intervened in this moment of photographic reckoning as local communities and cultural groups increasingly demanded agency over their photographic representation. Student documentary projects spanned the US and its imperial peripheries, encompassing locales from urban to rural, coastal to mountainous, contiguous to noncontiguous; what they shared was a photographic inquiry into community identity, as students collaborated with friends and neighbors to recover the representational rights to their own images.  

Student documentary photographers appropriated the authoritative language of social documentary and claimed space to experiment with local manifestations of documentary practice. Foxfire students used the camera as a tool that could replicate embodied teaching, scripting a national performance of Appalachian-ness that intersected with back-to-the-land narratives of rural self-sufficiency. Maine’s Salt magazine used documentary imagery to unify a multiracial and multiethnic Maine working class within its pages, while students making Cityscape magazine in Washington, DC, used photography to re-map urban space. However, cultural journalism projects could also collapse student agency and reify top-down dynamics of empire. This dissertation seeks to expand the narrative of postwar photography to include student practices that repurposed documentary conventions in collaborative community publications. Yet it also queries how these projects, intertwined with both countercultural and reactionary rhetoric in the 1970s, were co-opted under the guise of multiculturalism to support the naturalization of American empire.