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Vintage photos of:
Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.
[REV 25-NOV-2014]
October 1935. "Interior of a home of prospective resettlement client. Brown County, Indiana." The old woman seen with her husband in an earlier post today. View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by Theodor Jung for the FSA.
March 1940. Visalia, California. Band playing a Saturday night dance at the Farm Security Administration's Tulare migrant camp. View full size. Medium format safety negative by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration.
June 1943. The Civil Air Patrol Base at Bar Harbor, Maine. Flying field of Coastal Patrol #20. View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by John Collier.
January 1942. Community house Saturday night dance in the Farm Security Administration settlement of Woodville, California. View full size. Medium format safety transparency by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration.
October 1935. Brown County, Indiana. Prospective Resettlement Administration clients whose property has been optioned by the government. View full size. 35mm nitrate negative by Theodor Jung for the Farm Security Administration.
February 1937. "Negroes at Gee's Bend, Alabama. Descendants of slaves of the Pettway plantation. They are still living very primitively on the plantation." Here we see one of the celebrated Gee's Bend quilts. Medium format nitrate negative by Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration. View full size.
December 1936. This formidable-looking lady either had something to do with the Resettlement Administration's creation of Greenhills, Ohio, one of the first planned communities in the United States, or she was tragically misfiled at the Library of Congress. Either way, her caption has no name. View full size. Medium format negative by Brice Martin. [Update: The mystery lady is Dorothy M. Beck, a regional director of the Resettlement Administration.]
March 1937. Stalled in the Southern California desert. "No money, ten children. From Chickasaw, Oklahoma." View full size. Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration.
Imperial Valley, California, March 1937. "One of a Mexican field gang of migratory laborers thinning and weeding cantaloupe plants. The young plants are capped with waxed paper spread over a wire wicket to protect against cold and accelerate growth. The laborers' wages are 30 cents an hour." View full size. Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the FSA.
November 1941. "Slag runoff from one of the open-hearth furnaces at Republic Steel in Youngstown, Ohio. Slag is drawn off the furnace just before the molten steel is poured into ladles for ingotting." View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by Alfred Palmer for the Office of War Information.
March 1937. "Unemployed family from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, camped on a river bottom near Holtville, California." View full size. Medium-format nitrate negative by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration.
Summer 1942. "Good citizenship and plain common sense. This man is performing a duty every car owner owes to himself and to our fighting men. In having his car adjusted to prevent excessive tire wear -- and in observing the simple rules that make tires last longer -- he is making a valuable contribution to our war effort. The man who wastes rubber is a poor citizen and blind even to his own personal interests." View full size. From photos by Martha McMillan Roberts, Howard Hollem, Albert Freeman and Howard Liberman for the Office of War Information.
New York, summer 1938. "Street vendor of shaved ices." View full size. Medium format nitrate negative by Jack Allison for the Farm Security Administration.
November 1911. Chicopee, Mass. Stanislaus Matthew, 30 Cabot Street (lefthand boy). Warren Butman, Nonotuck Street. Has worked in spinning room at Dwight Manufacturing since Monday. View full size. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.
October 1935. Our third shot of Red House, West Virginia, youngsters on the way to school by truck. 35mm negative by Ben Shahn for the FSA. View full size.