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alwayssummer -> RE: Americana (9/11/2010 1:11:40 PM)
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Carl Mydans and Gordon Parks, two legendary FSA photographers I had the blessings to know & represent,
would want me to provide more background on the FSA and the photos here. The Farm Security Administration was set up as the photographic arm of FDR's Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Depression. Their assignment and dedication of all the FSA photographers throughout was to document the poverty and destitution of rural Americans in the Depression and Dust Bowl for edification of those in the cities.
The most known and compelling American photograph, Dorothea Lange's " Migrant Mother and Child", is but one of this now socially and economically priceless collection of works funded by the government ...the WPA being the greatest government "stimulus to the arts program" ever! This was a Golden Age of American Art - from early Jackson Pollack's to the negatives of these social humanist photographers of the FSA, the financial and cultural returns to the American taxpayers are inestimable...and continue to grow in value.
You might enjoy reading the early classic YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES written by James Agee with FSA photos by Walker Evans. There are, of course, scores of books written since on the art of the WPA and photographs of the FSA. All are enjoyable.
Mydans and Parks would just want me to remind: The assignment and intention of all FSA(and these photos) was always to reveal stark realities of the rural Depression, with compassion and respect for their subjects, their struggles to survive, feed, house and educate their children, and maintain fidelity to American rituals...all against crushing poverty and destitution.
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