Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943

by Michael Lesy

Over 400 rarely or never-seen photographs of a vanished America. Long Time Coming is derived from the 145,000 photographs made between 1935 and 1943 by a team of now-famous photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), whose ranks included Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. We are all familiar with the iconic images of poverty that are usually associated with the project. The agency's mission, however, went well beyond photographing dispossessed rural people, and this book is proof. It includes 410 remarkable images made in large cities (including New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, and Pittsburgh) as well as dozens of small towns and villages throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. These are images that have rarely been seen―some twenty percent have never been published before―images that present a portrait of a vanished America, a visual record of everyday existence that enhances and enlarges our assumptions about the era. Setting the pictures in context, Michael Lesy's iconoclastic, groundbreaking text intercuts excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some given as "assigned reading" to the project photographers) with an extended look at Roy Stryker, the FSA's controversial director. It presents the FSA photographs in a very different light from the bleak vision to which we are accustomed. 410 photographs

Genres: Photography, History, Nonfiction

480 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2002

About the author

Michael Lesy’s books include Angel’s World and Long Time Coming. In 2006 he was named one of the first United States Artists Fellowship recipients, and in 2013 was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. A professor of literary journalism at Hampshire College; he lives in Massachusetts.

Reviews

[John Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jerstyn Morehay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding curation of photographs from the Farm Security Administration's 1935-1942 collection, preserved and catalogued by the Library of Congress. Michael Lesy's illuminating text outlines the hows and whys of the collection, whose ambition was to be nothing less than a photographic record of the United States. Among the photographers whose work for the government agency is included here are Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, and Russell Lee. Throughout his commentary, Lesy offers a fascinatingly complex portrait of the editorial head and organizer of the FSA, Roy Stryker.

[Duchess Raven Waves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great coffee table book. Really enjoyed the photographs. Like a peek into the past.

[Margot Note]

This book features never published FSA images, especially of urban and small town life. I fell in love with Lesy since I discovered Wisconsin Death Trip.