Depression era masterpieces.

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The New York Times’s splendid ‘Lens’ blog just published a few images from a newly discovered treasure trove from Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration documentation of the Great Depression. All the familiar names are there – Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Ben Shanh, Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange. It seems that Stryker was concerned that his collection of images survive, and had parceled off a substantial subset to New York’s Public Library, just in case. It is this collection of some 41,000 prints, in addition to the 175,000 in Washington DC which the NYT is referring to. Its recent rediscovery provides a treasure trove of rarely seen images.

These are moving pictures but one, above, especially caught my eye as it’s by Marion Post Wolcott, that least known of the FSA’s photographers, yet one of the best. She left the FSA in 1942 after just three years, opting for children, hearth and home, and the photography world was the worse off for her departure. The definitive book on her life and works has been in my library for many years and remains available at Amazon US. You can see it by clicking the picture below. What distinguishes Wolcott’s work from that of her polar opposite, Walker Evans, is its sensitivity and grace. Where Evans is in-your-face, she is all restraint and caring.

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In that book there’s another version of the above picture which includes the man at the right, and it’s every bit as good:

And finally, perhaps her greatest picture. One can only wonder at the bigotry of the American south which had this sort of thing going on 74 years after Lincoln’s assassination:

It would be another 25 years before LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law which finally made this dreadful behavior illegal.

Marion Post Wolcott had a great heart to accompany her great eye.