FIELDS OF VISION: Images from the FSA-OWI Collection
This series of small photography books presents the lesser known work of a number of great American photographers that worked for the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information during 1935-1444. Each book in this series presents 50 images by a photographer, and an introduction to the collection of images and their life.
The three new books published this month present the work of Esther Bubley, John Vachon, and Jack Delano. These books are a follow up to three others that were published in September 2008 featuring the photographs of Russell Lee, Ben Shahn and Timothy Egan.
All images are from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. There are around 171, 000 black and white film negatives and transparencies, 1,610 color transparencies, and around 107,000 black and white photographic prints in the collection. To explore the Library of Congress collection go here: www.loc.gov/pictures
Esther Bubley
“I have found the human race. It is like finding one’s family at last.” -- Esther Bubley
“Esther Bubley chewed up the instruction manual and spat it out. She remained untamed, creative, surprising, and funny to the end, a genius in black-and-white.”
Melissa Fay Greene in the introduction to Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Esther Bubley.
John Vachon
“[W]e are today making a conscious effort to preserve in permanent media the fact and appearance of the 20th century” to “leave for the future a very living document of our age, of what people today look like, of what they do and build.” -- John Vachon
“The greatness of Vachon’s portrait of America is that it’s not a happy-all-the-time Bedford Falls nor a ghastly Pottersville, neither propagandistically pro- nor anti-American, but achieves some truer, more complicated, liminal version of the nation at midcentury”
Kurt Andersen in the introduction to Fields of Vision: The Photographs of John Vachon.
John Delano
“What impels me to click the shutter is not what things look like, but what they mean.” -- Jack Delano, Photographic Memories
“Delano never tells us the meaning of his photographs. Rather, he lures us into an image, and before we know it, we’re asking ourselves what it means to us” Esmeralda Santiago in the introduction to Fields of Vision: The Photographs of Jack Delano