Imagine looking at a state in 40-year intervals. Documenting Kentucky: Three Photographic Surveys, does just that in a new show at the Frazier History Museum in Louisville Kentucky.
Between 1935 and 1943, Roosevelt’s New Deal Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) sent photographers all over the United States, creating what came to be the visual record of the Great Depression.
Photographing in Kentucky were: Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, Esther Bubley, John Vachon, and most notably Marion Post Wolcott.
In the era before television and the internet, news came to Americans through newspapers, magazines, and movie newsreels. RA and FSA released their images to these sources. As FSA Information Division Director Roy Stryker said, “We were introducing America to Americans.”
With the American Bicentennial imminent, I founded the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project (KDPP) in 1975 with the goal of photographing in each of the state’s 120 counties.
Informed by the National Endowment for the Arts that the Project could possibly receive funding if I added at least two more photographers, I enlisted Bill Burke and Bob Hower.
Their work was exhibited at the Speed Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The Frazier History Museum revived KDPP’s work in 2011 as Rough Road: The Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project 1975-77. The response to that exhibit was so strong that Hower and myself reincorporated KDPP and hired a diverse group of 26 photographers to document the state anew beginning in 2015.
Documenting Kentucky: Three Photographic Surveys runs through Nov. 9 at the Frazier History Museum, 829 W. Main St., Louisville, Kentucky 40202.
This story is republished with permission from The Daily Yonder. Read the original.
Photographer Ted Wathen lives in Louisville. His work has been exhibited at venues such as the George Eastman House, the International Center of Photography and the White House.
