"The greatness of Vachon's portrait of America is that it's not a happy-all-the-time Bedford Falls nor a ghastly Pottersville, neither propagandistically pro-nor anti-American, but achieves some truer, more complicated, liminal version of the nation at midcentury." -Kurt Andersen on John Vachon

The approximately 172,000 film negatives and transparencies in the Library of Congress's collection from the Farm Security Administration (FSA), later the Office of War Information (OWI), provide a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and World War II.

This government photography project, headed by Roy E. Stryker, employed many relatively unknown names who later became some of the twentieth-century's best-known photographers, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Carl Mydans.

Each volume in the Fields of Vision series features an introduction to the work of a single FSA/OWI photographer by a leading contemporary author or writer, and presents fifty striking images that show how the particular vision of these photographers helped shape the collective identity of America. Their evocative pictures transport the viewer to American homes, farms, and streets of the 1930s and 1940s, while offering a glimpse of a new narrative and intimate style that was later to blossom on the pages of post-war magazines. magazines. For many Americans of the pre-television age, the diversity and complexity of their country was defined by the lenses of these men and women.

Jack Delano was born in Russia in 1914 and moved with his family to Philadelphia at age nine. Hired by the FSA in 1940 as an itinerant photographer, he was assigned in 1941 to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. After service during World War II, he returned to Puerto Rico on a Guggenheim fellowship to produce a book documenting conditions there. He continued to live and work on the island until his death in 1997.

Publisher: D. Giles Limited in association with the Library of Congress

Description: Paperback, 7" x 7", 64 pages, 50 color and b/w illustrations

ISBN: 978-1-904832-47-8

Price: $12.95

Availability: Usually ships in 3-4 business days.

Product #: 21107091