"DUST BOWL DESCENT" par Bill GANZEL. Editions University of Nebraska Press. 1984. Grand in-8 format oblong, couverture toilée noire sous jaquette photo. 130 pages. Texte en anglais illustré de très nombreuses reproductions photographiques noir & blanc, in-texte et hors texte, pour les anciennes par les photographes de la F.S.A. tels : Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein… et pour les plus récentes par Bill Ganzel.

 

"The Great Depression was a pivotal time in the history of the United States. It was also the subject of some of the most moving documentary photographs ever made: Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott - among the founders of documentary photography - produced some of their most powerful work for the Farm Security Administration, an agency of the New Deal. Among their best-known photographs are images of the Great Plains, and of the Dust Bowl migrants, taken between 1935 and 1942. ln 1974, Bill Ganzel, a photographer and journalist from Lincoln, Nebraska, went on the road to photograph the aftermath of the Dust Bowl and to interview its victims forty years after the Great Depression. For seven years, carrying copies of the FSA photographs, Ganzel sought the same people and scenes that the FSA workers had photographed. Dust Bowl Descent is the record of Ganzel's successful venture. Matching FSA photographs with pictures he has made (most often of the same persons or locations), and commenting on the pairs of photographs with excerpts from his interviews, the book shows what Ganzel saw and heard. ln the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, and California, he found people whose lives were changed by the hard times of the 1930s, some who became prosperous and others whose hard times had never ended. He found farms thriving, small towns withering away, people whooping it up or barely getting by. ln pictures and words, Dust Bowl Descent brings alive a time, a place, and the strong faces of a people made famous in photographs. It is a vivid reflection of the past and present of America and Americans…"

 

Ref LPB1099