Accidental Mysteries

From 1935 to 1944, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), decided it needed publicity images to explain to the American people the need for public programs, such as FDR’s New Deal. The FSA hired Roy Stryker, an economist from Columbia University to head the project. What he did was set up one of the most important photographic documentary projects in the history of the nation.

Stryker started by hiring photographers like Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Russell Lee, John Collier, Jr., and Jack Delano. In what today seems like the greatest gig in photography, these determined photographers set out across the country with their cameras in hand.

These images and their negatives are part of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) and free to reproduce digitally. Prints can be ordered of any image for a nominal fee. While most of us have seen or know of many of the most famous, seminal images of that period, I selected for today’s post images of signs from across America. All of the images you see today are from the low-res digital images available on their site.

Photo by Carl Mydans, September 1936. Manchester, NH.