John Foster|Accidental Mysteries
September 26, 2014
Photogrammers at Yale
A team at Yale University has developed an innovative web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) between 1935 and 1945. The original effort was led by the legendary Roy E. Stryker and resulted in an unprecedented look at American society during the Great Depression and the war years. The collection of negatives and prints is held by The Library of Congress and includes now-iconic photographs by Walker Evans, Dorathea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Ben Shahn.
The platform is aptly called Photogrammar. It includes an interactive map of the United States that plots the FSA photographs using historical data for county, state, national, and census data over the ten-year period. This site is the photo historian’s dream and illustrates some commendable information design.
After receiving a grant from the NEH, the site was created by a dedicated team at Yale led by Laura Wexler, who has a joint appointment in American Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is also the founder and director of the Photographic Memory Workshop.
Wexler says that the Photogrammar site “plans to associate the photographs with other kinds of material, such as the famous ‘shooting scripts’ of the FSA and the papers of its director, Roy Stryker.” Photogrammar is a mind-boggling site of navigational clarity and information, allowing public access to date of approximately 90,000 photographs that can be accessed by photographer, date, and place.
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By John Foster
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