Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943
The Farm Security Administration's ambitious program, inaugurated in 1935, to document American life in photographs produced a file of nearly a hundred and fifty thousand negatives. Hundreds have since become iconic, almost to the point of cliché: portraits of rural poverty, migrant workers, and mining towns by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn. Here, in a collection all the more impressive for its understated presentation, Lesy examines the conception and evolution of the file under the F.S.A. administrator, Roy Stryker, and spotlights some four hundred pictures, many previously unpublished, from the program's eight-year existence. These depictions of ordinary life—social gatherings, urban streetscapes, and small-town rituals—succeed, by their range and depth, in restoring a sense of the extraordinary to an enterprise now frequently taken for granted.Copyright © 2005The New Yorker