Michael Lesy

A wonderful collection of documentary photographs from the Farm Security Administration, the same agency that sponsored the work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. These photographs are so much more vivid than any attempts at fine art could be, while often achieving that status themselves. The past is made real here: not just farms, migrants, and poverty, but the ordinary life of people in cities or at leisure, including old people, adults in their prime, teenagers, and children. There's a feeling of spontaneity to many of these scenes that's quite remarkable for an age seventy years before the camera phone, when film was expensive and difficult to develop, and the cameras themselves were difficult to carry and set up. My mother was born in 1931, and this helped me understand the world into which she was born.

Lesy's text is unobtrusive, being fitted into its own sections between long stretches of photographs, and greatly illuminates the circumstances that led to the creation of these photos, and how after years of neglect they finally found their way into an archive. Highly recommended for lovers of 20th century American history and of street photography.… (mer)