Farmer talking with warehouse man about price he received at auction for his tobacco, November 1939, Durham, North Carolina. Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott.
“Tobacco Comes to Town”: Farm Security Administration Photographs, Durham, 1936–40 features images made during the Depression in and around Durham County, North Carolina, by four of the Farm Security Administration’s most prolific and influential photographers–Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Marion Post Wolcott. The FSA employed documentary photography to communicate the realities of the moment as well as to build a public collection that would, as Roy Stryker, the agency’s information director, put it, “introduce America to Americans.” The collection of FSA photographs at the Library of Congress contains over 160,000 images from across the United States, with nearly 400 of them from Durham County.
On view through June 30, 2014
Opening reception: Thursday, March 20, 5:30–7 p.m.
Allen Building Gallery, 2nd floor (Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.–6 p.m.)
Duke University West Campus
421 Chapel Drive, Durham, North Carolina
Directions/map
Tom Rankin, director of Duke’s MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts, writes, “What is certainly affirmed in “Tobacco Comes to Town” is the resonant power of the documentary arts. These photographs, made some seventy-five years ago, simultaneously evoke the familiarity of recognition and the realization that much of our collective past has been forgotten or, at times, deliberately ignored.”
Sandra Walton, coordinator for the Allen Gallery and administrative coordinator for Duke’s Academic Council, selected the images from the Library of Congress’s Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection of FSA photographs; Rachel Boillot, an MFA | EDA candidate, made prints from the digital files provided by the Library of Congress.
