Photography from FSA

The photographs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA)- Office of War Information [OWI], are among the most famous documentary photographs ever produced ... These are transferred to the Library of Congress in 1944, form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1943.

It was created by a group of U.S. government photographers, and the images show Americans in every part of the nation. This U.S. government photography project was headed by Roy E. Stryker, formerly an economics instructor at Columbia University. It 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.

The core of the collection consists of about 164,000 black-and-white photographs. This release provides access to over 160,000 of these images; future additions will expand the black-and-white offering. The FSA-OWI [Office of War Information] photographers also produced about 1600 color photographs during the latter days of the project.

Reference: FSA - OWI, prints and photographs division, click here ...