Sean Rocha

Rare color images of the Great Depression

Our mental image of the Great Depression is in black and white.  This is partly impressionistic, because the era was so grim and gray, and partly technological, because color photography was not widely used in the 1930s and ’40s — though, as an earlier post noted, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was photographing the Russian empire in color in the years before WWI.   But the Denver Post has published a spectacular collection of color Depression-era photographs from the Library of Congress and to see the period in color is to be caught somewhere between hardship or deprivation and an idealized Norman Rockwell mythology of sunny American small-town life.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 25th, 2011 at 8:59 am. It is filed under That is Genius and tagged with color, Library of Congress, photography, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.