Chrome film. The library of congress curator tells a story about this collection and the photographers. But we are in the center vault of the prints and photographs division of the library of congress. The library has a collection of color photographs from the 1930s and 40s. It started as an experiment with color film. Kodak was just putting its color film on the market and sent it out to photographers and institutions to give it a try to see if they could create a market for it. The pictures were free so they were appealing to the newspapers magazines and publishing agencies, book brochures on that kind of thing. I was fill your with the black and white photographs. About 171,000. Black and white photograph. I have been working with those for a few years. There was not much emphasis placed because they were hard to handle. They were unique items. Theres only one of each at the time in the 1970s. It was difficult to make a copy. Very expensive to make a photograph. You do make another print from the color transparency. People didnt want to pay the extra money so these just sat on the shelf for a long time and sally stein began doing a project about color film. She came to the library and wanted to see these color transparencies. I was one of the people who helped to serve her. At the time the library didnt have a way of making duplicates that was affordable for researchers. So she brought a photographer with her to help make copies on the stands in our division. I became intrigued and began looking at them more and more. Thought, these are interloper pictures. They dont really belong. It took a while for me to realize that they did belong that there are pictures made on the same outing, but the photographers would carry a 35mm camera, they would carry a road flex. And cameras loaded with color film. In some instances there are black and white pictures that are near duplicates for the color pictures that you find online in that 1930s and 40s set. One of my favorite topics is stores. Stores serve as Community Gathering places. They are equalizers. Every buddy has to go to the store at some point. During the period we are talking about, they were usually momandpop type stores. Where the same clerks were there year in and year out. People bought with a needed and usually had a chat about the neighborhood come the products they were buying and some people just hang out in the stores before or after work. A Little Community orientation. I like that aspect. I liked the fact that many of them are quite colorful that they are painted quite colorful to attract customers to stand out on a block of otherwise brick or concrete buildings. These would attract attention. Many things got electronic. One of the functions of the Newspaper Office was to inform people on the street of the latest headlines before the newspaper was printed. It would make handlettered signs with the headlines in a few brief phrases about the latest advance. This picture shows exactly that. Outside theing Newspaper Office reading the headlines finding out whats going on. A place where people can congregate and comment on the news. Similar to stores. Citizens would just begin talking to each other. Express your opinion and move on. John made pictures of stores. And lincoln in ohio nebraska. Where heebraska was got his own feet under him. Before that he had been trying to copy the styles of different photographers. Evans oneliked walker of the more artistic of these documentarians that when he got out to nebraska, he found himself thinking. How would walker evans take this picture. However i take this picture. Thats when he made this transition from trying to remember all the instructions others had given him. Made the pictures like he wanted to make them and continue to do that for the rest of his life. He stayed in photography to his dying day. He went to texas to photograph ways that the American Workers were making the transition to war materials as a basis for the economy. This shows the many many workers at a factory. Previously factories had been shut down. There were no jobs to be had. We can see many people the group of people working there which probably would not have happened before there was such a need for everybody to be put to work. As the United States got closer thecloser to the war, funding for the farm programs diminished. Programsng for defense increased. Documentation for the need for war and to show how the money was being spent to get us into the war and helping our european allies. The people in charge of the program shifted from agriculture to advertising people by and large, so the picture was different. Delano was one of the more prolific of the war photographers. He came at the end of the ffa period. He had been trained as a painter. He was a good photographer and he was a people person. He could go to any situation and telling him begin about their most secret oughts and their deepest desires and he would photograph them quite comfortably and they would all go away happier for the quick for the occasion. Stores and would photograph them in ways that were like works of art. European internship in before world war ii went to the museums and Art Galleries and and waslltrained eye able to photograph in a style and was extremely polished, because of his proletarian background, he was taking pictures of ordinary people. Intellectualsre and came to lift the when you when he was about 12 years old. They lived in a very simple lifestyle. He became very sympathetic to the life of coalminers and did quite a few projects making pictures of people who work with their hands and who related well to common citizens in the United States. Known that the Farm Security administration had. Ffices in puerto rico puerto rico had been a u. S. 1898 when itsince went from spanish ownership to the United States. Theress people had gone and developed industries, rum, tobacco, various other kinds of projects, but the people themselves were not well cared for. There is a hurricane in the 1920s that destroyed much of the cropland, and in the 1930s people were actually starving to death. The United States went to teach them better farming techniques to build housing that wouldnt blow away with each hurricane, because they were living in huts made out of sugarcane. It was a very rough life. In fact it was an enormously high infant mortality rate. The children were Drinking Coffee instead of milk which does not have good nutritional value for young children. There was this kind of extreme poverty that he wanted to address. Jack was the only one who got down there and made these photographs in part because while he was there, pearl harbor occurred and the United States entered world war ii. He couldnt stay as long as he had hoped because he had to get back to sign up to go back to the military. Croix some work in st. Must summon puerto rico. While he was there he fell in love with the culture and decided that after the war, he was going back, and thats exactly what happened. He went back and lived out the rest of his life in puerto rico. Where he worked initially for ande government projects, then he became the head of Public Television in puerto rico. I went to visit him a few years before his death. People would come from across the street to shake his hand, to for saving their relatives and families. In st. Croix, he would make pictures that are works of art. He kept a picture of one of his favorite painters over his bed in his house. Work. Ed showing people at he thought that the dignity of work was one of the most important things in life. The picture shows a woman stir stooping over her garden to tend it. The colors are luminous. You cannot see her face but the way that hes made this picture you get the idea that this woman works very hard, that she tends things carefully and has an eye for beauty. Many of us have a romance with the railroads. This is one of the more beautiful pictures of the train engine being carefully watched and cared for. You can see the water streaming down from above. Somebody washing it with a brush. Shows thecombination ability to make art out of everything that he saw. Railroadost of the securityhs in the arm administration. He was sent to document American Transportation as part of the preparation for world war two. He started in chicago and he took the train out west through californiap, through backup toco, arizona, chicago again. He got along very well with the people working on the railroad, ride in the engine, document their lives and he went home for dinner with some of them and photographed them at home with their families, showed the life of the railroad man. Lanternsh people using in the railyard. Thats how they communicated in the days before walkietalkies or electronics. It was sort of like a morse code. The captions online usually indicate what is being communicated with those light patterns. Most of the time by himself doing those pictures, but occasionally his wife would join him. He said that they would go to a hotel at night and makeup songs about the trip they had just made on the train. He would play the harmonica. She would sing and entertain themselves while traveling on the road. Part of what he did was to photograph women at work. He was very sympathetic to women workers. His mother supported the family by running a black market Dentistry Office in their home. His father was never able to adapt to u. S. Life very well. Could hardly sell furniture at the store where he was working, so his mother was the one who made the money that they lived on. He was very sick pathetic to other women working in made beautiful portraits of women. He would go into the railroads and photograph women at work. One of his betterknown pictures is of women having lunch at one of these railyards. Very different from the women photographed by the office of more information. Women and jacks pictures are not wearing lipstick. They have their hair done up in bandanas or rags to keep the dust and dirt out of their hair. Simply. E dressed very they have sensible shoes. Sandwichesving their on wax paper. It is just the way you would expect people in roughandtumble jobs to be looking. Not dramatically lit. They are just straight on pictures. Over mensere taking jobs because so many men had been sent to the front or they were working in military situations on the homefront. These jobs opened up for women who had been excluded previously. There is a lot of sentiment that women were not physically fit to do factory work, that they were mentally not able to grasp what was involved, that they should be home taking care of the men and when push came to shove, they had to go out, somebody had to do this work, and most of them acquitted themselves very well but when the war was over they were forced back into the home rule or secretarial jobs, or things that had been lower paying jobs for women. This woman is painting the emblem on an airplane that is going to be used during the war. Coiffed. Is well and lipstick. Cara she is wearing gloves to protect her hands from the paint. By the end of the day she would look grubby. This is opposed photograph. This is a posed photograph. It was made by Alfred Palmer. Alfred palmer trained as an advertising photographer. He used a lot of light. He wanted his product to look good and he wanted people to buy whatever it was he was photographing. His type of photography became very popular when the United States began gearing up to enter world war ii. We wanted to look strong and forceful. Gradually, roy strykers style of documentation of looking natural was phased out and Alfred Palmer became the leading voice for the offer of more information. His picture would make people believe what they saw. They are just works of art in their own right. You have to wonder sometimes about how much manipulation went into them. This is not a realistic way for people to go about dirty work. This is a photograph by Alfred Palmer. Myers,an is working on but the comments on flickr telus she is not really working on wires that it is a posed photograph. You would expect that because she is so beautifully groomed. Dress, shea stylish does have on work gloves which not all the women working in the situations war but that is a concession to the fact she is supposed to be working for a. Ifferent aesthetic used rosie the riveter was a phenomena surrounding world war ii where women went to take over , andpreviously done by men there was a lot of animosity toward the women coming into the workplace. The government launched a Publicity Campaign to show that the women could do these jobs and were capable of doing them with a smile. That is what the rosie the riveter term suggests. Alfred palmer did a lot of work in hollywood before he came to work for the office of more information. This shows up as dramatic lighting in a lot of his pictures. The man looks as though he is going off to something very serious. There is a dark section behind him that looks like it is propelling him into the light. He looks like he probably performs these functions on a regular basis. I dont know what hes doing or where he is going but he looks like the kind of person that you would want to accomplish the mission for you. Some of Alfred Palmers xers are so staged looking, that it stretches the imagination that this man would be out working under this dramatic looking sky, working with a drill and bit, but he probably is a worker. Is soiled with oil and dirt. Hes very muscular looking. He looks at home in his hard hat yet he is wearing a ring. Actors he is a hollywood standing in. He certainly looks the part of someone who would scare off the enemy showing that the United States was not just the weekend the poor who had been earlierphed by the stage of the securities administration, that we were not a people who could be easily brought to ground by the italians, that we would put up a. Ood fight Marjorie Collins was a new yorker. When she joined the office of more information, she said she didnt want to be caught up in doing more propaganda. She wanted to document life as it was in america. But she went into this camouflage area. They were creating camouflage maps for defense purposes, studying ways of interpreting aerial photographs. She ended up doing a very good job with what she said she did not want to do. It is helpful for us to have these kinds of pictures. It is a little surprising to see that man with his pipe standing over the work. And it is surprising to see a Woman Working with him in such close proximity, but there we have it in color. , agencies the photograph. Magazines. The newsreels were popular at the time. Verytryker had kept a asht grasp on the operation long as he was in charge of it. Photographers reported to him when other agencies wanted photographers his made the pictures and he charged the other agencies the perdiem. This is how he stayed in business as long as he did. He understood that those other places could pay for the travel, and his photographers would have to charge his agency only for the days they made his picture. As he was diminishing in agency, heto the realized that his strategy was about to backfire because the National Archives had come into existence during the time that he was working. Was thatation government photographer pictures had to go to the National Archives, and i had to go to the records of the agency that paid for them. That meant he would no longer have his time capsule of all the pictures under his pages. It would be disbursed to whoever paid for the travel money. He was still well enough connected that he was able to pull strings to get the fsa collections to come to the library of congress where it could be kept together as a single unit. It took the president to step in to say that they could be kept together, but he did have the connections to get to the president. Hired to6 a person was reorganize the collection. Initially it had been divided by the state and it was a cumbersome system to locate photographs and get them back where they came from. For the transition, they hired paul vanderbilt. The microfilmed the collection. They sorted out the prince by photographer and by assignment. Them in thepersed finals we are reading right now. It took a couple of years for them to make that transition. They typed the captions for the photographs that have been handwritten. Simplifiede used language so that there was consistency of word use, paste to the captions on and they have been in use in their reading room since 1946. You are watching American History tv. Covering history cspan style with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures and College Classrooms and visits to museums and historic places. All weekend every weekend on cspan3. Today marks 75 years since the u. S. Dropped a second atomic tom on japan, devastating the city of nagasaki three days after the first attack on hiroshima. The japanese emperor announced japans Unconditional Surrender on august 15, 1945, with a formal surrender ceremony taking place on september 2 aboard the uss missouri in took he obey, and it world war ii. American history tv and cspans washington journal were live this morning to examine president Harry Trumans decision to use the new weapon and the legacy of these atomic attacks. You will hear from richard frank, author of downfall the end of the Imperial Japanese empire. It will be followed by peter k uznick, director of american universities Nuclear Studies institute. On august 6 an Army Air Force b29 dropped atomic bomb number two on hiroshima, japans seventh largest city. A communications at military and Industrial Center of considerable importance. [explosion] a stunned universe swiftly learned that man had a new weapon of shocking destructiveness. A weapon bordering on the absolute. In the blast, thousands died instantly. 70,00