American Portrait

The photographs of the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information form an extensive pictorial record of American life between 1935 and 1944. Many of the most famous Depression-era photographers were fostered by the Farm Security Administration project. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks were three of the most famous Farm Security Administration alumni. The project initially documented cash loans made to individual farmers by the Resettlement Administration and the construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording both rural and urban conditions throughout the United States as well as mobilization efforts for World War II.