John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Easter Sunday in Black Chicago, 1941: Russell Lee, Edwin Rosskam, & the Farm Security Administration

This is one of my favorite photos. I love the kids, the clothes, the car, and the moment. It's April 1941, Easter Sunday, and the five poised black boys are as much in control of the situation as is the photographer, a white man named Russell Lee. Russell Lee: Negro... 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 →

Ben Shahn and the Medicine Show, Huntingdon, Tennessee, 1935

This is not a slave auction. After all, the photo was made in 1935, 70 years after emancipation. But our twenty-first century eyes might have trouble figuring out exactly what's going on. The photographer, Ben Shahn, would have recognized the scene immediately. It's a traveling medicine show, a once popular... 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 →