Color photographs from the 1930s and 1940s. They started as an experiment with color film. Kodak was just putting its color film on the market. Sent it out to photographers at 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 newspapers, magazines, publishing agencies, book publishers. That kind of thing. I was familiar already with the black and white photographs. There are about 171,000 Farm Security administration and office of war information blackandwhite photographs. And i had been working with those for a few years. There was not much emphasis placed on the color transparencies, because they were hard to handle. They were unique items. Theres only one of each. At the time, in the 1970s, it was really difficult to make a copy. It was very expensive to make a photograph. You had to make another print from the color transparency. People did not want to pay that extra money. So, these just sat on a shelf for a long time. And then sally stein, whos a photo historian, began doing a project about color film. She came to the library, wanted to see these color transparencies. I was one of the people who helped serve her. At the time, the library did not have a way of making duplicates that was affordable for researchers. So, she brought a photographer with her to help make copies on a stand set up in our division. And i became intrigued. Began looking at them more and more. But initially i thought, these are interloper pictures. They dont really belong. It took a while for me to realize they did be long. That there are pictures made of a same outing, that photographers would carry a 35mm camera, they would carry a graphflex, they would carry a roloflex, and they would carry cameras loaded with color film, not just black and white. They would use these interchangeably. In some instances there are black and white pictures that are near duplicates of the color pictures you find online now in that 1930s and 1940s set. One of my favorite topics is stores. Stores serve as Community Gathering places. They are equalizers. Everybody has to go to the store at some point. During the period we are talking about, the 1930s and 1940s, they were usually mom and pop type stores, where the same owner, the same clerks were there year in, year out. People came, bought what they needed to buy, and usually had a chat about the neighborhood, the products they were buying. And some people would just hang out in stores, before or after work, just up stop by for a Little Community orientation. So, i like that aspect of them. I also like the fact that many of them are quite colorful. That the stores are painted bright colors maybe to attract customers, to stand out on a block of otherwise brick or concrete buildings. These were bright places that would attract attention. Before so 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 got printed. They would make hand lettered signs with the headlines in a few brief phrases about the latest events. This picture shows exactly that people standing outside the store, the Newspaper Office, reading headlines. Finding out what is going on. It was a place where people could congregate and comment on the news. It served a function similar to stores in a way that citizens would begin talking to each other. No obligation to maintain a relationship, but you could express your opinion and move on. John vachon, he made pictures of stores, particularly in ohio and lincoln, nebraska. Lincoln, nebraska was where he sort of got his own feet under him. Before that, he had been trying to copy the styles of different photographers. He really liked walker evans, who was one of the more artistic of these documentarians. But when he got out to nebraska, he found himself thinking. How would walker evans take this picture . And then, how would i take this picture . And that is when he made this transition from trying to remember all the instructions other people had given him to just listening to his own mind, made the pictures like he wanted to make them, and continued to do that for the rest of his life. He stayed in photography to his dying day. John vachon 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. Yet, here we see many people working. And you see it is a mixed race 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 and closer to war involvement in world war ii, then the funding for farm programs diminished. And the funding for defense programs increased. We needed documentation for the need for war and to show how the money was being spent to get us into the war in helping our european allies. The people in charge of the program shifted from agriculturalists to advertising people by and large. So, the pictures look different. Jack delano was one of the more prolific of the office of war information photographers. He came just at the end of the fsa period, beginning at the office of war. Funding for the agency. He had been trained as a painter. He was a very good photographer. He was a people person. He could go into almost any situation and people would begin telling him about their most secret thoughts. Their deepest desires. And he would photograph them quite comfortably, and they would all go away happier for the occasion. So, he also liked stores, as i do. Saw them as community centers, photographed them in ways that are like works of art. He had an internship in europe, before world war ii, went to many museums too many art galleries, and had a quite welltrained eye and was able to photograph in a style that was extremely polished and yet, because of his proletarian background, he was making pictures of common, ordinary people. His parents were intellectuals in lithuania before they came to america when he was about 12. He didnt remember much about his early childhood, but he they settled in the philadelphia area. His father had been a professor, but he could not speak english. So, he had to work in the Furniture Store for a relative. His mother had been a dentist, but was not able to practice here. So, they lived a very simple lifestyle. They lived in an area with lots of coal miners. Jack became very sympathetic to life of coal miners, and made did quite a few projects, making pictures of people who worked with their hands. And related well to common citizens in the United States. It was very littleknown that the Farm Security administration had offices in puerto rico and st. Croix. Puerto rico had been a u. S. Protectorate since 1898, when it went from spanish ownership to the United States. Business people had gone there and developed industries, rum, tobacco, various other kinds of projects, but the people themselves were not wellcared for. There was a hurricane in the 1920s that destroyed much of the crop land. And in the 1930s, people were actually starving to death. The United States went to teach them better farming techniques, to build housing that would not blow away with each hurricane, because they were living in huts made out of poles and sugarcane. It was a very rough life. In fact, it was an enormously high infant mortality rate. There was no milk for the children. They were Drinking Coffee instead of milk, which does not have good nutritional value for Young Children trying to build bodies. And it 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. And he couldnt stay as long as he had hoped because he had to get back to sign up to go into the military. So, he did some work in sink way. He did some work in puerto rico. But while he was there, he fell in love with the culture, decided after the war he was going back, and that is exactly what happened. He went back, lived out the rest of his life in puerto rico where he worked initially for these government kinds of projects. And then he became the head of Public Television in puerto rico, working for the puerto rican government. I went down to visit him a few years before his death. When we went out to dinner, it was like going out with a movie star. People would come from across the street to shake his hand, thank him for making pictures of their relatives, their families. And he lived a very full life in puerto rico, working always for the Common People in puerto rico. Insane coy, he made pictures that i think are just works of art. Bridal was one of jack toledos favor painters. He kept this picture over the his bed in his house that he just love showing people at work. He thought that the dignity of work was one of the most important things in life. The picture here shows a woman stooping over her bruegel garden to tend it. The colors i think are just luminous. You cannot see the womans face, but the way jack has 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. I think this is one of the more beautiful pictures of a train engine. It is being carefully washed. And cared for. You can see water streaming down from above. Somebody is washing it with a brush. But the color combination of light on the train shows jack delanos ability to make art out of everything he saw. Jack delano made probably most of the railroad photographs in the Farm Security administration collection. He was sent to document he to document American Transportation as part of preparation for world war ii. He said it off in chicago and the train out west. He did a big loop through california, new mexico, arizona and back up to chicago again. He got along very well with the people working on the railroad. They let him ride in the engine, document their lives. He went home for dinner with some of them, photographed them at home with their families. So the life of a railroad man. He photographed people using lanterns out in the rail yards. That is how they communicated in the days before walk you talk ease or electronics. They use these lights, kind of like a mores code. The movement of the light at a certain meaning, and the captioned online usually indicate what has been communicated with those light patterns. Jack traveled most of the time by himself doing those pictures, but occasionally, his wife would join him. He said they would go to a hotel at night and makeup songs about the trip they had dismayed on the train. And he would play the harmonica, she would sing. And they entertained themselves while they were traveling on the road that way. 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 Industry 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 they lived on. He was very sympathetic to other women working. He made beautiful portraits of women. So it was a natural that he would go into the rail yards and photograph the women at work. One of his better known pictures is that women having lunch at one of these rail yards. They look very different from the women who were photographed by the office of more information. The women in jacks pictures are not wearing lipstick, they have their hair done up in bandanas or rags to keep dust, dirt out of their hair. They are addressed very simply, they have on sensible shoes. Theyre wearing overalls. Theyre having their sandwiches from wax paper. They folded around the sandwiches. It was just the way you would expect people in rough and tumble jobs to be looking. Not dramatically let. They are just straight on pictures. The women were taking over mens job because so many men have been sent to the front four they were working in military situations on the home front. So these jobs opened up for women who had been excluded from them previously. There was a lot of sentiment that women were not physically fit to do factory work, that they were just 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 to the home road, or secretarial jobs, or things that had traditionally been lower paying jobs for women. This woman is painting the emblem on an airplane that its going to be used in the war. She looks like a fashion model. Her hair is well waft, she has on mascara and lipstick and nail polish. She is not wearing gloves to protect your hands from the paint, so by the end of the day, she probably is going to look very grubby. But this is a post photograph. Its beautifully lit, beautifully composed. It was made by Alfred Palmer. Alfred palmer trained as an advertising photographer. He used lots of lights. He wanted his product to look good, you want people to buy whatever it was he was photographing. Hes type of photography became very popular in the United States, began gearing up to enter world war i. We want to look strong and forceful when we met the axis powers. So, gradually, raleigh stryker style of documentation of looking natural was phased out and Alfred Palmer became the leading voice for the office of war information. His pictures would make people believe what they saw. They just works of art in their own right. But you have to wonder how much manipulation went into them. This is not a very realistic people for people to go about dirty work. This is a photograph by Alfred Palmer. The woman is working on wires, but comments on flickr tell us that shes not really working on wires, that its a post photograph. You kind of suspect that because she is so beautifully groomed, she has on a very stylish dress. She does have on work gloves, however, which not all the women working in these situations war, but maybe as a concession to the fact that shes supposed to be working. It was a very different ascetic used for some of the rosy to the river type pictures than they were for others. Rosy the river was a phenomenon surrounding world war ii when women got to take over job previously done by men, and theres a lot of animosity towards women coming into the workplace. The government launched a Publicity Campaign to show that women could do these jobs. They were capable of doing them and doing them with a smile. So thats what the rosy the riveter term suggests. Alfred palmer did a lot of work in hollywood before he came to work for the office of war information. This shows up in the dramatic lighting in a lot of his pictures. This one, very dramatic looking. The man looks as though he is going off to do something very very serious. And there is this dark section behind him that looks like it is propeling him into the light. He does look like he probably performs these functions on a regular basis. I dont know what he is doing, where he is going, but he certainly looks like the kind of person you would want to accomplish a mission for you. Some of Alfred Palmers pictures are so staged looking that it stretches the imagination that this man would be out working under this dramaticlooking sky, looking with it real and get that he probably is a worker, his clothes are stained with oil and dirt, or whatever. Hes very muscular looking, he works at home, yet hes wearing a ring. I dont know. Construction workers were rings . Maybe hes a hollywood actor standing in, but he certainly looks the part of someone who would scare off an enemy. Would showing that the United States was not just a week and the poor photographed by the earlier phase of the Farm Security administration. That we were not a people that could be easily brought to ground by the italians, germans and japanese. We would put up a great fight. Marjory collins was a new yorker. When she joined the office of war information, she said she did not want to be caught up in doing war 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, they were studying ways of interpreting aerial photographs. So she did a very good job of what she said she did not want to do. But it was very helpful for us to have these kinds of pictures. Its a little surprising to see the man there with his pipe standing over the work, and its a little surprising to see a Woman Working with them in such close proximity. But there we have it, in color. Gradually, agencies other than roy strykers began providing photographs for newspapers, magazines, film footage, the news reveals that were popular at the time. Roy striker had kept a very tight grasp on the operation as long as he was in charge of it. The photographers reported to him when other agencies wanted pictures made. His photographers made the pictures, and he charts the other agencies the podium. This is one where he stayed in business as long as he did. He was a wily bureaucrat. He understood that those other places could pay for the travel and its photographers within have to charge his agency only for the days he made his pictures. As he was diminishing in importance to his agency, he realized that his strategy was going to backfire on him, because the National Archives had come into existence during the time that he was working. The regulation was that government pictures, government photographers pictures had to go to the National Archives. And they had to go to the records of the agency that paid for them. So that meant he would no longer have his cat time capsule of all the pictures made under his age is. They would be dispersed to whoever paid for the travel money for his photographers to get there. But he was still well enough connected that he was able to pull strings to get the fsa collection to come to the library of congress, where could be kept together as a single unit. It took the president to step in, to say that it could be kept together, but he did have the connections to get to the president to get this waiver. About 1945, 1946, a person was hired to reorganize the collection. Initially, it has been divided by state and apparently it was a cumbersome system to locate photographs and get them back where they came from. For the transition, they hired paul vanderbilt, who was trained as a librarian. He micro filmed the collection by job. They sorted out the prince by photographer and by assignment, micro filmed them and dispersed them in the file thats in our reading room now. It took a couple of years between 1943 1945 to make the transition. They typed the captain for the photographs that were on those grave mounds, they had been handwritten. These people used simplified language so that there was consistency of word usage. Pasted the captions on. And they have been use in our reading room since 1946 or so. Weeknights, we feature American History tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan three. The vietnam wars offensive started on january 30th, 1968. With veered cone forces attacking more than 100 cities, towns and outposts across a broad swath of south vietnam. We visited the museum in washington, d. C. To tour an exhibit on the battle of way, where some of the most intense fighting of the campaign took place. We speak with former photographer about his voters and experiences. Watch tuesday, beginning at eight eastern. And enjoy American History tv this weekend every weekend on cspan 3. Up next Pulitzer Prize with photographer david human candidly discusses more than 50 or long photography career with the story of john meacham. He spoke in an event hosted by the center for creative
vimarsana.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.