Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Peter Marshall
<petermarshall@...> wrote:

> Having seen the colour work, although I find it interesting, it
seems to 
> me to lack the authority and power of the black and white images by the 
> same photographers that we are more familiar with. And of course there 
> are around a 100 times as many black and white images.

I think we have to allow that those black and white images have been
with us for a lifetime as, in fact, the authoritative visual record.
On the other hand, these slides, having been "disappeared" by a
bureaucratic error, have been with us only briefly. I grant that I
haven't seen too many "powerful" images from this collection, but the
sample size is small, and there are technical issues as well in my
way. In addition, I would guess that the photographers were, perhaps
cautiously, dealing with what must have seemed a very different medium
and way of thinking than the one they had learned and mastered.

I feel that my own imagining of that era might have been somewhat
different if these images had had as much time to sink into my
consciousness as those now iconic ones, although I couldn't say
exactly how, or by how much.

I do find interesting a thesis of the show (as I understand it): that
the color media is coincidentally an appropriate way to see the
rapid transformation of both national socio-economic reality and the
agency's focus, from depressed agriculture to booming industry, from
rural to urban, peace to war, as the Farm Security Administration
became the Office of War Information.

- Bob L