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Wed, Dec 12, 2012
"Relevant and timely."—Artillery Magazine (Los Angeles), on More American Photographs
The Wexner Center presents Depression-era photographs juxtaposed with recent photographs from the Great Recession in More American Photographs, on view January 27–April 7, 2013. Organized by the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, the exhibition combines a selection of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photos, taken by 12 photographers during the 1930s and ’40s, with recently commissioned photos of 21st-century America by 12 contemporary photographers. The exhibition—organized by the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco—combines a selection of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photos, taken by 12 photographers during the Great Depression, with recently commissioned photos of 21st century America by 12 contemporary photographers. The exhibition features more than 120 images, including more than 50 FSA photos and more than 60 commissions produced in 2011, select FSA archival materials, books, vintage cameras, and two documentary films running on a continuous loop.
Over a nearly nine-year period (1935–1944), the director of the FSA’s Historical Section, Roy Stryker, tasked photographers with capturing the “third of a nation” that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described as “ill-housed, ill-clad, [and] ill-nourished.” The resulting images offered a thorough documentation of American culture from the height of the Great Depression to the brink of World War II. Almost 80 years later, many of these images remain iconic depictions of American life in the ’30s and ’40s.
Today, as America emerges from the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, these iconic images of the past are paired with new photographic work by artists who were commissioned—much like the FSA photographers—to travel America and document the land and people. Focusing on such 21st-century afflictions as the decline of manufacturing, the collapse of the housing boom, the lack of economic mobility, environmental disasters, and the increasing disparity between rich and poor, the new photographic project revisits Stryker’s file and updates it, documenting how some parts of America have floundered while others have flourished.
More American Photographs debuted at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, California, in late 2011. The exhibition also traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver in the spring of 2012.
A catalogue inspired by Walker Evans’s 1938 book American Photographs accompanies the show, and is available at the Wexner Center Store.
FSA photographers in the show: Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon
Contemporary photographers: Walead Beshty, Larry Clark, Roe Ethridge, Katy Grannan, William E. Jones, Sharon Lockhart, Catherine Opie, Martha Rosler, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, Hank Willis Thomas
