Our America
Updated: Nov 13, 2024
Ken Burns
Our America: a photographic history by Ken Burns is a collection of black and white photographs throughout America’s history starting in 1839 and going through to 2019. The book is almost a coffee table book. Each page contains the image with the location of the image and the year on a black background. Nothing more. Ken describes in his introduction the inspiration for this format, “The best books to me were the Aperture monographs, where there was only one image per page, with minimal captions, the full expressive power of each image undiluted by explanation, description, words. It permitted the photograph to speak for itself” (Burns, 5). In the back of the book there are illustration notes to go with each image if the viewer wishes to find more information on the photograph. This is a great resource for an adult who wants to see the impact that photography in the United States has throughout history. The images range from jovial to brutal depictions of the U.S. throughout history that would not be appropriate for children. Ken Burns is a notable documentary filmmaker who had a talent for bringing photographs to life in his films. In his introduction he describes his vision for the book, “It would need to insistently acknowledge in its pages the history of the U.s., but also the story of ‘us,’ the two-letter, lowercase plural pronoun that in its intimacy often balances out the majesty, the complexity, the contradictions, and the controversy of its larger counterpart” (Burns, 6). He wanted to include warts and all in this resource. Burns includes many, if not all, states throughout the work as well as moments of beauty and moments of absolute horror. It is easy to navigate and organized in Chronological order. The impact of having only the image, location and year on a black background is extremely powerful. They wanted the audience to wrestle with the images themselves; “[the] audience is thus asked to grapple with the evidences of the images themselves, and the sequence in which they appear, long before the minimal contextual information is offered” (Burns, 11). In the back there are the illustration notes also in chronological order, so if you want to know more about the photograph you can find it. The entries in the illustration notes include a smaller image, the location, year, title of the photograph, photographer, description and background of the image and the photo credit. The book was published in 2022 so I wouldn’t imagine there is a need to update the resource yet. This was another book that I found in my public library catalog.
