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A plane crashed at the base of the Air Transport Command, but was repaired and got to the Russo-German front. Nome, Alaska. Unknown, 1943. -
A woman shows off her chili peppers. Concho, Arizona. Russell Lee, 1940. -
An aerial view shows housing for agricultural workers at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) farm workers community. Woodville, California. Russell Lee, 1942. -
A baby with club feet wears homemade splints at a Farm Security Administration camp for migratory workers. Farmersville, California. Dorothea Lange, 1939. -
An instructor shows student how to use a spectrograph to study materials using measurements of the arc of light they emit. Golden, Colorado. Andreas Feininger, 1942. -
A Japanese boy reads at a FSA farm workers’ camp. Twin Falls, Idaho. Russell Lee, 1942. -
Japanese FSA farm workers stand in a field. Twin Falls, Idaho. Russell Lee, 1942. -
Cowhands sing after day’s work. Rosebud, Montana. Arthur Rothstein, 1939. -
A man uses enormous asbestos mittens to handle hot magnesium ingots at Basic Magnesium’s plant in the southern Nevada desert. Clark Nevada. Fritz Henle, 1943. -
A man works at a mineral spring near the White Sands project. Otero, New Mexico. Arthur Rothstein, 1936. -
A chef with his dinner gong at the Rimrock Camp in the central Oregon land development project. Jefferson, Oregon. Arthur Rothstein, 1936. -
A brakeman waves from an ore train at the open-pit mining operations of Utah Copper Company. Bingham Canyon, Utah. Andreas Feininger, 1942. -
A man pours a heat of iron at the Columbia Steel Company. Ironton, Utah. Andreas Feininger, 1942. -
Women work on sections to add to the fuselage of a new B-17F (Flying Fortress) bomber. Seattle, Washington. Andreas Feininger, 1942. -
A worker for Long Bell Company sights a tree in the undercut to determine the exact direction it will fall. Cowlitz, Washington. Russell Lee, 1941. -
Stockmen stand on street corner. Sheridan, Wyoming. Marion Post Wolcott, 1941.
Between 1935 and 1944, a group of photographers fanned out to document life across America. The initiative was a public relations move to bolster support for programs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s contentious Farm Security Administration, which sought to help those hardest hit by the Great Depression. When it was over, some 175,000 photographs were transferred to the Library of Congress and eventually placed online, but they remained hard for the wider public to access.
Now, a team from Yale University has made it much easier to explore the photos snapped by legends like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein, using an interactive web-based map and archive called Photogrammar. The map allows you to view images county-by-county, some of which appear here. “Nobody has seen them all,” says Laura Wexler, an American Studies professor at Yale and co-director the project. The photographers who headed West featured plenty of farmers and ranchers. But they also documented female factory workers in Washington, a man stacking magnesium bullion in Nevada, and a New Mexico woman cradling a wall of chili peppers. In every image, says Wexler, there’s a story to be told.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Depression era photos from your hometown.
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