Flick[e]red Past

J.W. Gates Funeral, N.Y.C., August 23, 1911
Library of Congress Collection on Flickr

A while back, I posted on an amazing late Depression Era--early World War II-collection of photographs newly digitized by the Library of Congress (LOC). The "Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943" exhibit published over 1600 public domain photographs which were produced from slides and negatives. The online-only exhibit was first presented on the LOC's website and allowed the images taken by the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information as a photographic chronicle of America.

From the LOC webiste:

This U.S. government photography project was headed by Roy E. Stryker, formerly an economics instructor at Columbia University, and engaged such photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, John Vachon, and Carl Mydans. The project initially documented the Resettlement Administration's cash loans to individual farmers, and the agency's construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and of migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording rural and urban conditions throughout the United States and mobilization efforts for World War II.

This group of photographs has joined a larger collection of materials from the Library of Congress and published on Google's Flickr website. Not only that, you can help the LOC "tag" the photographs, too. Just don't use too many profanities, eh?

The 1600 Depression Era photographs have been joined by 1500 additional "News in the 1910's" set. Gothamist wrote a piece about the New York City-tagged items from this set.