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.

Bound for Glory: The Depression Era in Color

Vicinity of Natchitoches, Louisiana, August 1940
Reproduction from color slide

When I think of the Depression Era, I first think of my parents, who are Depression babies. I know from them that it was an incredibly difficult time in our nation's history, and I'm not quite sure how our citizens now would deal with such a crappy economic downfall. Let's hope it never gets to that point again.

I was watching CNN today (home sick from work today, and also have to get ready for my performance in tonight's "Dick Cheney Holiday Spectacular"), and saw a piece about a fascinating new online-only exhibit at the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress (LOC) of the United States is an amazing place. They are the nation's repository of its own history (along with the National Archives and Records Administration or NARA), and have such a vast collection of books that I hear tales of books piled high on the floors because they can't keep up with the decades-old backlog of books that are deposited at the LOC.

They have a fascinating 'new' collection of materials, a set of over 1600 color slides, "Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943."

Here's what their front page says:

Bound for Glory: America in Color is the first major exhibition of the little known color images taken by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI). Comprised of seventy digital prints made from color transparencies taken between 1939 and 1943, this exhibition reveals a surprisingly vibrant world that has typically been viewed only through black-and-white images. These vivid scenes and portraits capture the effects of the Depression on America's rural and small town populations, the nation's subsequent economic recovery and industrial growth, and the country's great mobilization for World War II.

The photographs in Bound for Glory, many by famed photographers such as John Vachon, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and Marion Post Wolcott, document not only the subjects in the pictures, but also the dawn of a new era -- the Kodachrome era. These colorful images mark a historic divide in visual presentation between the monochrome world of the pre-modern age and the brilliant hues of the present. They change the way we look -- and think about -- our past.

Take a look. I love black and white photographs, but these color photos of an era that we only know of through the brown dust of the prairie and from stories told by our parents or grandparents, really open the eyes to a time gone by... and a time one hopes will never return...

Brockton, Massachusetts, December 1940
Reproduction from color slide

And by the way, my mother was born and raised in Putnam County, Georgia... her family sharecropped... this is what it might have looked like:

White Plains, Greene County, Georgia, June 1941