Long Time Coming – A Photographic Portrait of America 1935–1943 - Hardcover

Lesy, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393049434 ISBN 13: 9780393049435

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002

Synopsis

Long Time Coming is derived from the 145,000 photographs made between 1935 and 1943 by a team of now-famous photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), whose ranks included Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. We are all familiar with the iconic images of poverty that are usually associated with the project. The agency's mission, however, went well beyond photographing dispossessed rural people, and this book is proof. It includes 410 remarkable images made in large cities (including New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, and Pittsburgh) as well as dozens of small towns and villages throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. These are images that have rarely been seen-some twenty percent have never been published before-images that present a portrait of a vanished America, a visual record of everyday existence that enhances and enlarges our assumptions about the era. Setting the pictures in context, Michael Lesy's iconoclastic, groundbreaking text intercuts excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some given as "assigned reading" to the project photographers) with an extended look at Roy Stryker, the FSA's controversial director. It presents the FSA photographs in a very different light from the bleak vision to which we are accustomed.

About this title

Synopsis:

"Long Time Coming" is derived from the 145,000 photographs taken between 1935 and 1943 in America by a team of photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Despite the iconic images of poverty that are usually associated with the project, the agency's mission went well beyond photographing dispossessed rural people. This book reproduces 410 rare and remarkable images made in cities and towns throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. These photographs, together with the text, present an unusual visual record of everyday America.

About the Author:

Michael Lesy is one of America's leading photographic scholars. His books include Wisconsin Death Trip, Murder City, Angel's World, and Long Time Coming. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he teaches literary journalism at Hampshire College.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0393049434
• ISBN 13: 9780393049435
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480