Digital BW, The Print

I think you can see all 1600 of the images on line at the LoC, though I 
only looked at a few hundred of them. You can also download some big 
scans from the original slides (43Mb) and make your own prints, though 
I've yet to try it. (You could even print these in black and white if 
you were desperate to keep on topic!)

It is a relatively small collection, because there was little immediate 
use for these images, and the photographers were still concentrating on 
shooting in black and white during this period. And of course you are 
right, the photographers weren't used to thinking in colour, and 
certainly hadn't learnt to cope with the contrast of the film. The color 
work seems to me essentially an interesting footnote to what we already 
know, but nothing more. The same changes in emphasis have often been 
remarked on in the black and white work. Weren't they explicit in the 
directions given to the photographers at the time?

Regards

Peter Marshall
petermarshall@...     
_________________________________________________________________
My London Diary	              http://mylondondiary.co.uk/
London's Industrial Heritage: http://petermarshallphotos.co.uk/
The Buildings of London etc:  http://londonphotographs.co.uk/
and elsewhere......



l33ry wrote:
> --- 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
>
>
>
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