Picturing the Place and Time

sharecropper's son hanging tobacco, 1939, Shoofly, N.C. Dorothea Lange

FSA rehabilitation borrower plowing, 1941, Boundary, Idaho            Russell Lee

Lovers of old photographs and lovers of U.S. history, rejoice! The 170,000 photographs commissioned and saved by The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) in the 1930s and '40s have been released to the public. Even better, Yale University and the National Endowment for the Arts organized them by place and year into an interactive map. The original purpose of the photographs, many of them by well-known photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein, was, according to the website, "to build support for and justify government programs." In order to do so, "the Historical Section set out to document America, often at her most vulnerable, and the successful administration of relief service" (additional photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection): http://photogrammar.yale.edu/map/