John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Déjà Vu All Over Again: James Estrin & "The Tsunami of Vernacular Photographs"

We can't see the ideas for the illustrations. Our world is simply flooded with them. --Editorial, Harper's magazine, 1911 ...we are bombarded by pictures every waking hour, in on form or another... transitory images seen, unconsciously, in passing, from the corner of our eyes, flashing at us.... I don't know... Read more →

Baseball! Opening Day with the FSA

One of the enduring myths about the Farm Security Administration [FSA] is that its photographers only made gloomy pictures of poor people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite that fact that the FSA was a Depression-era federal agency that brought aid to the poor, its photographers -- under... Read more →

Review: "Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression"

In the 1930s and '40s, photographers employed by the federal government's now-legendary Farm Security Administration [FSA] created the most significant and, perhaps, most beautiful of all American photo archives. The FSA's Historical Unit, which was established to document and promote the Roosevelt administration's New Deal policies, far transcended its narrow... Read more →

How Photography Lies, Even When It's Telling the Truth: FSA Photography & the Great Depression

Think about the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and images like the one below will spring into your head -- a photograph of a homeless mother and her children who appear to have nothing to cling to but their clothes, their car, and each other. It seems to sum... Read more →

America in Blackface: Photos from the Farm Security Administration

This is weird little photograph. (You'll want to click directly on it to see a larger version.) It shows a slightly bewildered group of white southern school kids gathering around their teacher to have blackface makeup put on their face and arms, and one little girl, looking in a mirror,... Read more →

The FSA Photographers and the Great American Road Trip

In the 1930s and early 1940s, a small group of immensely talented photographers, working for the federal government's Farm Security Administration [FSA], invented the visual language of the great American road trip. Dorothea Lange: Between Tulare and Fresno on U.S. 99. Farmer from Independence, Kansas, on the road at cotton... Read more →

Dorothea Lange: The Art and (Social) Science of Documentary Photography

In January 1935, Dorothea Lange reinvented documentary photography. Best known for the iconic images that she made as a photographer for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration[FSA], Lange made her conceptual breakthrough a little bit earlier, while working for California’s Emergency Relief Administration [SERA]. Paul Taylor, an economist and SERA... Read more →