Photo Essay | Documentary Photography

Upcoming
Photo Essays

Bolivia Election 2005

Medellín Reborn

Central America after the Wars

Kazakhstan in the Nuclear Age

Mexico Election 2006

Election Campaign Rally for Evo Morales & the MAS Party, Cochabamba, Bolivia, December 2005. Photograph © James Lerager

Documentary Photography & Research Project

In part modeled on the famous 1930s WPA photographic surveys, encompassing seminal work by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and many other photographers, the DPRP is intended to establish a digitized photographic documentary archive and online internet publishing capacity that can complement and supplement the usual written reports, dissertations, articles, and volumes, that are generated by professional researchers, yet are often inaccesible to the public, and to decision makers.

With creative use of the Internet, it is our hope that the the Photo Essays featured on the DPRP may, over time, dramatically enhance the value and impact of many research projects and make relevant images and text immediately available to scholars, students, policy makers, NGOs, and the interested public.

The first DPRP collaborative project, “Demanding The Land,” involved field work with political scientist Paul Dosh [then a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, and now teaching at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota], conducted in Perú and Ecuador in 2002. It is Paul’s and my hope that this work will inspire many more collaborations between professional social science researchers and documentary photographers, adding new dimensions to their research projects and to the possibilities for communicating their results.

We look forward to an ongoing conversation with you, and to adding collaborative photography and research projects to the DPRP website.

James Lerager

info@WebPhotoEssay.com