Looking Back at Vermont: Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1936-1942

Between the winter of 1936 and the autumn of 1942, nine government photographers (Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Marion Post, Edwin and Louise Rosskam, Jack Delano, Fritz Henle and Al Freeman) traveled to Vermont on behalf of the U.S. government's Historical Section. What began as an effort to record for Washington bureaucrats the means whereby one of the nation's poorer regions coped with the Depression, New Deal economics, and the approach of World War, became, under the passionate and inexhaustible direction of Roy Stryker, the most sweeping U.S. government cultural history project ever undertaken in Vermont. In Looking Back at Vermont, Nancy Price Graff has painstakingly selected, from the approximately 1,600 project Vermont negatives housed at the Library of Congress, thirty-two representative images of Vermonters at work and play. This collection documents Vermont's breathtaking beauty and the state's heartbreaking poverty. Graff's engaging and well-written accompanying text includes pieces on the work of the Historical Section, Roosevelt's America, the individual photographers involved in the project, photography as a new visual language in this, the age which saw the launch of Life and Look magazines, and the progress of the already flourishing art of Vermont photography.