You probably know of the iconic photograph titled Migrant Mother, but do you know the government photo project that led to its creation? Between 1935 and 1943, the US Government launched the largest photo project in the history of the country through its Resettlement Administration (RA) — later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The project enlisted the likes of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to help educate citizens in the East about what was going on in the West, and the giant PR campaign ended up producing over 170,000 photos and one of the most important photo collections in the US. The lecture above by Yale student Lauren Tilton offers a brief history lesson on this project.
It seems like every few weeks another long-lost photo archive is discovered and digitized, and the newest of these archives is a set of one thousand historical images taken as part of a Farm Security Administration project in the early 20th century. The photos — some of which were taken by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Russell Lee — were originally put together to combat poverty, but have instead become an important glimpse into what was then simply everyday American life.
All one thousand will be unveiled on The New York Public Library’s digital gallery soon, but until then you can find a small sampling of the work at the NY Times Lens Blog. Not every photo is exciting, or even artistic, but all of them show an important part of American cultural, and photographic, history.
For every iconic photograph that’s out there, there was likely a number of other photographs taken at the same time that many people probably have never seen. One such photo is Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange — an image that became one of the defining photos of the Great Depression. The woman in the photo, Florence Owens Thompson, had been travelling with her family when their car’s timing chain snapped. After setting up a temporary camp to wait while her husband and two sons went to town for repairs, Dorothea Lange drove up and spent 10 minutes capturing 6 photos. Read more…
