Hendrickson, Paul
Abrams
ISBN: 0-8109-4348-4
EAN: 9780810943483
US $35.00
May 2004
Availability: In Stock
The photographs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which recorded American life in the late 1930s and early 1940s, remain among the most moving and famous documentary images from the first half of the 20th century. Yet few people know that, along with thousands and thousands of black-and-white photographs, the FSA photographers also took color pictures. Here, for the first time, is a selection of the best of the FSA color photographs—introduced by National Book Award finalist Paul Hendrickson and assembled to create a vivid portrait of America as it emerged from the Great Depression to fight World War II. Covering countryside and city, farm and factory, work and play, the images in this book open a window onto our national experience from 1939 to 1943, revealing a world that we have always seen in our mind's eye exclusively in black and white. Never before has there been a book that paints this picture in full color.
about the author
PAUL HENDRICKSON, a longtime feature writer for the Washington Post, now teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott, The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War, and the recent Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy. He lives in Philadelphia.
reviews
Taken from 1939 to 1943 under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, these 175 "lost" photos feature shots by Russell Lee, Andreas Feininger and Marion Post Wolcott, using the then-revolutionary technology of Kodachrome film. Color photographs taken before 1939 have largely deteriorated, so these surviving photos are later than the most familiar b&w Depression-era shots. This 11¾"*8½" volume thus "colorizes" one's normally black-and-white impressions of a very vibrant time, as Hendrickson (Sons of Mississippi) notes in his introduction. The logic behind the arrangement of the photos, which at first seems largely random, as it follows neither photographer, location nor chronology, becomes clear by the end of the book: the U.S.'s industrial rise. Images of urban lethargy and farmhands picking cotton under hot blue skies (the unbearable conditions of cotton-picking somehow seem more apparent in color) gradually give way to images of mobility, mechanization and a changing economy. Arnold T. Palmer's gleaming portraits of Rosie the riveterñlike aircraft workers follow Jack Delano's earthier photos of male railroad workers, their sweaty and intent faces caked with soot. Tellingly, the book ends with photos of bombers flying over California. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
- Publishers Weekly
"An extraordinary collection of rare and color photos (Kodachrome, to be exact) of America, 1939-43."
- Entertainment Weekly
"...these images from FSA stalwarts Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and others constitute manna from the archives....Masterly and powerful as their monochrome siblings, they are as complexly delightful."
- Booklist, Starred review
"The appeal of a book like Bound for Glory: America in Color 1938-43...is that it can literally change our view of history."
- BookPage
