American Photography: A Century of Images
8.0Season 1Episode 1
The Developing Image, 1900-1934
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Episode Overview
Inexpensive hand-held cameras gave ordinary people the opportunity to create their own visual images. Suddenly pictures were a part of our daily lives: on passports, postcards, in the developing picture press, and in science. World War I photographs even convinced many reluctant Americans that they had a stake in this distant war, and advertisers embraced photography because of its ability to create a fantasy that seemed to be a plausible reality. By the end of the 1920s, photographs—little flat pictures that came to represent the truth—had made their way into virtually every corner of contemporary life.