Imagine looking at a state in 40-year intervals. Documenting Kentucky: Three Photographic Surveys, does just that in a new show at the Frazier History Museum in Louisville Kentucky.
Between 1935 and 1943, Roosevelt’s New Deal Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) sent photographers all over the United States, creating what came to be the visual record of the Great Depression.
Photographing in Kentucky were: Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, Esther Bubley, John Vachon, and most notably Marion Post Wolcott.
In the era before television and the internet, news came to Americans through newspapers, magazines, and movie newsreels. RA and FSA released their images to these sources. As FSA Information Division Director Roy Stryker said, “We were introducing America to Americans.”…