Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.
Aaron Siskind, Maricia Battle, Ann Banks, Federal Writers' Project, National Museum of American Art (U.S.) (1990). “Harlem photographs, 1932-1940”, Smithsonian Inst Pr