"FSA: THE AMERICAN VISION" par Gilles MORA & Beverly W. BRANNAN. Editions Abrams, New York. 2006. Imprimé en Italie. Fort petit in-4, couverture cartonnée noire sous jaquette photo. 358 pages. Textes en anglais, "To make a dent in the world" par Beverly W. Brannan et "The FSA's documentary style: from reportage to vision" par Gille Mora, illustré de près de 470 reproductions photographiques noir & blanc hors texte par une quinzaine de photographes tels : Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Theodor Jung, Arthur Rothstein…

 

"In 1935 the United States Farm Security Administration undertook one of the greatest documentary photographic projects ever sponsored by a national government. Under the direction of Roy Stryker, the agency sought to assemble a comprehensive pictorial record of America's cultural and economic conditions during the Great Depression. The project, which continued into 1943, launched a stellar group of young photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, and Gordon Parks, who fanned out across America and created images of intense and lasting power. Together they produced an unparalleled archive of America's rural and urban panorama. Their photographs captured ordinary people - factory workers, farmhands, miners, and maids - at work (or searching for it), at home, and at play. ln some 165,000 black-and-white negatives, housed since 1944 at the Library of Congress, they created an indelible portrait of American life in the years before World War Il. Yet the iconic status of individual photographs - including images of migrant agricultural workers and desiccated Dust Bowl landscapes - may have overshadowed the FSA's greater collective achievement. A landmark in the history of photography, the FSA project developed a documentary method that reshaped photojournalism and came to influence all of contemporary photography. "FSA: The American Vision" offers a new look at this extraordinary collection of images, presenting 470 photographs, many of which have never been published before. Each photographer's FSA work is organized in a documentary series, rather than as isolated prints, followed by a gallery of his or her most notable images. With their work thus seen on a greater scale and in an expanded context, the FSA photographers may now be recognized as the progenitors of a new American photographic vision."

 

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