During the Great Depression and World War II, the United States Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information hired photographers to document American life. The documentarians, working between 1935 and 1944, captured 170,000 pictures. This included many in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
It is described as one of the most famous documentary photography collections of the twentieth century, “creating visual evidence of government initiatives alongside scenes of everyday life during the Great Depression and World War II across the United States.”
Once the program ended, The Library of Congress became the custodian of this work. They were placed in public file cabinets where researchers could browse the prints, searching for visual clues of earlier times. In March 2011, Yale University received a grant to create an interactive web-based open soured visualization platform for these images. The free online platform, Photogrammar, allows a rapid search of the large photographic data set. Easy to use, it includes an interactive map, which facilitates locating images of interest.
If you are interested in the images of the photographers who documented America during the Great Depression and World War II check out this free resource https://photogrammar.org/maps
Jack Collier, Feb. 1942. U.S. Farm Administration
