Photogrammar
I went down a rabbit hole yesterday looking at images on Photogrammer, an amazing web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the united states farm security administration and office of war information (fsa-owi). Sounds fancy, but really is a map of the US and you can can select cities / counties and see photographs taken from there during the time period - Photographers such as Dorthea Lange and Russell Lee, and other photographers hired by the FSA to document workers, living conditions, etc... during the depression. I concentrated on the West, Texas to California, the epicenter of the Dust Bowl which coincided with the Great depression, and is something that I will be forever fascinated with and can never get enough images of. It's also an example of a Man Made American catastrophe, an economic and ecological disaster that shook the entire country, and forced people into extreme conditions, drastic moves, and to come together as humans, to experience and live through something together. Like what is going on today, it was something we were not prepared for as a country, it was a perfect storm of over farming, federal land policies, a change in weather (um hello global warming), and farm economics, i.e. farm more, make more $! It's crazy and so sad to think that people truly believed, the more you plow, the more rain will come, but that is what they thought, and what they did. It lasted 10 years y'all... 10 YEARS! Here is a link to a nice little Dust Bowl summary HERE
If you're really interested, I highly suggest Ken Burns Documentary The Dust Bowl, on PBS. Kids probably won't enjoy it, but it would be fine to have on when they're in the room! You never know, they might be interested! HERE
Here are a few of my favorites that I stumbled upon. It's unbelievable the beauty and humanity captured in these photos. Apparently they were asked to capture the eyes, and capture the eyes they did.
