A handful of photographers look back on the Documerica Project, a long-forgotten epic photo survey of the American envir | dG1fdm1WTVV0aUIwZ3c
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Short filmTranscript
00:00The good photographs are only in that they show you something that needs to be shown.
00:20I haven't looked at them in quite a long while.
00:25People just adjusted to living in these spoiled environments because there was nowhere else
00:33to go.
00:38I wanted to preserve everything in sight.
00:43I was pissed off over what I was seeing happen.
00:50That was the smell of progress, but it was also the smell of destruction.
01:02Shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin
01:09to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?
01:16Something needed to be moved.
01:22We must act.
01:23It is literally now or never.
01:28Project Documerica was documenting the state of the American environment, the good and
01:34the bad.
01:35There were a hundred photographers and many thousands of photographs taken.
01:43Essentially that was Gwaltain Dewitt.
01:49We were portraying the excesses of the American way of life.
01:54It was all there.
01:57I think they were important.
02:00There were a lot of social aspects to this because people live in their environment.
02:09There was still faith in the single image.
02:14I don't know, it all seemed to fall on deaf ears.
02:23People were apathetic to it and people have been apathetic to the environment still today.
02:30It's our only world.
02:45We better take care of it.
02:51I don't know how heavy that lens will get next year.