Photogrammar, or how to time travel to the Great Depression and WWII…

In the middle of the Great Depression, the New Deal administration sent photographers such as, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and many more, to record the American life across the country and sensitise the public to the hard conditions of the farmers hit by the crisis of the 1930s. This intensive project, which produced some of the most iconic images like the Migrant Mother of Dorothea Lange, has been brought back to life by the University of Yale in their clever database called Photogrammar.

This catalogue of 170,000 photos is accessible online, and allows you to search the pictures, by keyword, photographer name, year or via an impressive interactive map of the United States. And it is indeed a fascinating collection!

The pictures, all taken between 1935 and 1945, are real snapshots of this troubled time (with of course the subjectivity of the photographers to take into account like any photo-documentary) : we discover (or rediscover) images of early gamblers in Las Vegas, child playing in the streets, but also the daily struggles of rural workers and urban job seekers.

This compilation allows you to explore this decade through the eyes of these talented photographs and it creates a fantastic time travel for any viewer.

Arthur Rothstein, son of a cotton sharecropper, lauderdale county, Mississippi, 1935

Walker Evans, Main Street Morgantown West Virginia, 1935

Carl Mydans, Front of a typical house offering furnished rooms for rent, District of Columbia, 1935

Arthur Rothstein, George Washington Bridge from New York City side, 1941

Arthur Rothstein, Employment agency, Sixth Avenue, New York, New York, 1937

John Collier, Grand Central Terminal, New York City, 1941

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