Wednesday, May 18, 2011

What's 10 Years Give or Take in The Grand Scheme of Things?

These are amazing photographs, but for history buffs out there, what's with the headline?

1 comment:

Jeff said...

The Daily Mail reporter does say the photos come from the end of the Depression era. That's partly true, but since they were taken between 1939 and 1944 they're mostly from the war years that followed. It's also pretty much true that many areas were still poverty-stricken during this five-year period, but these photos don't "define" the Depression era except maybe in a negative sense. Their tone is mostly optimistic. They don't show much squalor and what of it they do show is by way of contrast to the dramatic upswing of the war economy. It's mystifying that the Mail put a copyright mark on them. They're all public domain. Equally mystifying is the claim that they're in any sense rare. They're readily available, and heavily accessed, both on the LC web site and in LC's Flickr pages. (I've done a set of blog posts on them myself, mostly concentrating on the excellent work of the FSA/OWI's women photographers: Marjory Collins, Louise Rosskam, and Marion Post Wolcott. Do a Google search for "louise rosskam" for example and you'll probably see a blog post of mine on the first page of hits -- http://secondat.blogspot.com/2010/12/louise-rosskam.html.)