Product Description
Housed at the Library of Congress, the archives of the Farm Security Administration constitute an essential visual record of American life from the late 1920s through the onset of the Second World War. Guided by the adroit hands and watchful eyes of the master photo editor Roy Stryker, the FSA archive includes the work of dozens of photographers, from acknowledged giants like Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange to Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee, whose names and work may be less familiar.
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Stryker's approach to his photographers' assignments was a bracing mix of structure and improvisation. He sent his artists across the country to shoot for a few weeks, mostly in small towns and rural areas. They worked from what Stryker called shooting scripts laundry lists of possible subjects and situations but were always free to explore their own perspectives on a locale, its inhabitants, and their activities. When negatives and prints arrived, Stryker would guide his artists with suggestions, advice, and sharp-eyed criticism, all designed to elicit their best work. At this he was strikingly successful.
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This book collects work from nine of these trips Evans in Louisana and Alabama, Shahn in West Virginia, Lange in California, and others uniting them with Stryker's shooting scripts, letters, and other relevant archival documents. What emerges, beyond the images themselves, is a complex and vital overview of the FSA at work, not just the work, but how the work evolved and matured under Stryker's guidance. Appropriately, the book concludes with photographs of New Orleans, the only city photographed in depth by the FSA artists.
Contents : /
0. Foreword by Peter Bacon Hales /
1. Photography and the FSA by Stu Cohen /
2. An Overview of the FSA File - 1935-1942 /
3. Ben Shahn - West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, October 1935 /
4. Walker Evans - Pennsylvania, Alabama, Louisiana, November 1935-January 1942 /
5. Dorothea Lange - Migratory Workers in California, 1936-1939 /
6. Dorothea Lange - Threshing Oats, Clayton Indiana, July 1936 /
7. Sheldon Dick - Sit-In Strike, Flint, Michigan, January 1939 /
8. Ben Shahn - Ohio, Summer 1938 /
9. Marion Post Wolcott - West Virginia, September 1938 /
10. Marion Post Wolcott - Miami Beach, Florida, January-April 1939 /
11. Russell Lee - Pie Town, New Mexico, June 1938 /
12. New Orleans - Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, 1935-1941 /
Appendices: Documents & Shooting Scripts / Bibliography.