Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43
by Paul Hendrickson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Paul HendricksonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-05-01
ISBN: 0810943484
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Summary of Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43
Between the years 1935 and 1942, a vast number of images of America were taken by photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA had been established as a relief organization in order to help rural Americans out of poverty and into economic self-sufficiency and prosperity. The charge of the photographers was to document the people and places the FSA had set out to help. In 1942, the FSA's photography unit was transferred to the Office of War Information (OWI), whose primary purpose was to document America's mobilization during the early years of World War II, concentrating on such topics as aircraft factories and women in the workforce. Today, this collection of photographs consists of about 108,000 images, among them some of the most famous black-and-white documentary images from the first half of the twentieth century. Yet few people know that, along with the vast number of black-and-white photographs taken, color images were also made, by photographers such as Marion Post Walcott, Russell Lee, John Vachon, Arthur Rothstein, and Andreas Feininger. This book presents, for the first time, the best of these 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 and prepared to fight World War II.Thanks to famous documentary photographs of Americans during the Great Depression, we tend to visualize everything that happened in the 1930s in black-and-white. In fact, Kodachrome first became available in the U.S. in 1935, and several photographers for the Farm Security Administration experimented with the new color film as they traveled across the country. Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43 presents an oddly startling world of small towns and country roads ablaze in the vivid hues of real life. A sunburned family in Pie Town, New Mexico, eat a dinner of homemade biscuits, grits, and gravy. Sisters wearing print dresses all made from the same rose and blue fabric seem dazed at the wonders of a state fair in Vermont. Work horses graze on bright green grass under a moody Kansas sky. Chosen from an archive of about 1,600 vintage color slides, the 175 photos in the book are the work of several documentary photographers, including Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano. Partway through this panorama of Americana, the tone and subject matter shift. Suddenly, the U.S. is at war, and the casual, unposed quality of the earlier images shifts into self-conscious glorification of the American war effort by the Office of War Information, with shots of steel mills and train yards, and of women newly hired by factories to assemble bomber parts. It's clear from Paul Hendrickson's engaging introduction that the pre-war images are the ones he finds most captivating. This slender volume--which aptly borrows the title of Dustbowl troubadour Woody Guthrie's autobiography--offers a window on a distant era in which grinding poverty and racial segregation coexist with the simple pleasures of rural and small-town life. ?Cathy Curtis
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