blog.big-woop.com

This is what things look like now. The background photograph is by Russell Lee. I found it while perusing the Library of Congress' American Memory Project. While looking for pictures from around my neck of the woods I ran across a collection of amazing photographs take in War-era Minneapolis-St. Paul, many of them focusing on a group of migrant farm workers resting in the Gateway Distric of Minneapolis. As it turns out, most of these photos were taken as part of the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information's wartime collection.

Headed by former economics professor Roy E. Stryker, the collection was intended as a document of cash loans made to individual farmers by the Resettlement Administration and the construction of planned suburban communities. Its second stage focused on sharecroppers and migratory agricultural workers. Photographers involved included Lee, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks and Carl Mydans.

I plan on creating a site for Lee's photography of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, as well as for others' work from the same era.

Peace.
-Todd