Photo Farming in the Early Days
November 9, 2015
Have you ever wondered what your town looked like while it was still urban and used as farmland? Instead of having to visit your local historical society or library (although we do encourage you to do so), the United States Farm Security Administration and Office Of War Information (known as FSA-OWI for short) developed Photogrammer. Photogrammer is a Web-based image platform for organizing, viewing, and searching farm photos from 1935-1945.
Photogrammer uses an interactive map of the United States, where users can click on a state and then a city or county within it to see the photos from the timeline. The archive contains over 170,000 photos, but only 90,000 have a geographic classification. They have also been grouped by the photographer who took the photos, although it is limited to fifteen people. Other than city, photographer, year, and month, the collection c,an be sorted by collection tags and lot numbers (although these are not discussed in much detail).
While farm photographs from 1935-1945 do not appear to need their own photographic database, the collection’s history is interesting:
“In order to build support for and justify government programs, the Historical Section set out to document America, often at her most vulnerable, and the successful administration of relief service. The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) produced some of the most iconic images of the Great Depression and World War II and included photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein who shaped the visual culture of the era both in its moment and in American memory. Unit photographers were sent across the country. The negatives were sent to Washington, DC. The growing collection came to be known as “The File.” With the United State’s entry into WWII, the unit moved into the Office of War Information and the collection became known as the FSA-OWI File.”
While the photos do have historical importance, rather than creating a separate database with its small flaws, it would be more useful if it was incorporated into a larger historical archive, like the Library of Congress, instead of making it a pet project.
Whitney Grace, November 9, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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