NEXT AVENUE SPECIAL SECTION
Ken Burns on ‘Our America’ By Richard Harris
Next Avenue: How did you whittle down to 251 the photographs [from 1839 to 2019] that are now between the hardcovers of your book, representing what you call Our America? Ken Burns : I collect quilts. No amount of research can really reveal the story behind each quilt. Each has a unique provenance that will remain unknown. How old was Hannah, the girl who may have signed it? Was she married? What is the story behind this quilt? I spent all of my professional life investigating and finding out what the facts are, what the truth is about certain events, and then trying to fashion them into stories that reflect that. This book was like the quilts, an ability to go back to the DNA of all my work, which is the still photograph. I wanted to produce a volume that treated each photograph as an event — one photograph per page with the most minimal captions, then in relationship to the other photograph across the page, whether there's compositional similarities or thematic similarities or where there's just kind of architectural similarities, they begin to speak to each other.
For the better part of a half century, Ken Burns has been on a mission to tell America's story, warts and all, taking us on a deep dive through the Civil War, Country Music and the U.S. and the Holocaust, among his more than three dozen documentaries and series. But to understand why he's been scratching this itch since the seventies, all you need to do is read the introduction to his 2022 coffee table book, “Our America: A Photographic History." Burns’s love affair with the still photograph — what he calls the DNA of his life's work — began in his dad's Delaware darkroom when he was three. He recalls being held in his father's "strong left arm, watching a wonderful alchemy take place, as an image began to slowly emerge from a blank piece of photographic paper immersed in a tray of strong-smelling chemicals, under a dim eerie red light. To a three-year-old it seemed like magic."
Read more of this interview with Ken Burns on NextAvenue.org
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