Picturing a Nation: The Great Depression’s Finest Photographers Introduce America to Itself

A National Book Award winner mines photographic gold to show—and tell—the story of the Great Depression.

In an exquisitely curated volume of 140 full-color and black-and-white photographs, Martin W. Sandler unpacks the United States Farm Security Administration’s sweeping visual record of the Great Depression. In 1935, with the nation bent under unprecedented unemployment and economic hardship, the FSA sent ten photographers, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, on the road trip of a lifetime. The images they logged revealed the daily lives of Southern sharecroppers, Dust Bowl farmers in the Midwest, Western migrant workers, and families scraping by in Northeast cities. Using their cameras as weapons against poverty and racism—and in service of hope, courage, and human dignity—these talented photographers created not only a collective work of art, but a national treasure. Grouped into four geographical regions and locked in focus by rich historical commentary, these images—many now iconic—are history at its most powerful and immediate. Extensive back matter includes photographer profiles and a bibliography.