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Bust to Boom: Documentary Photographs of Kansas, 1936-1949

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Very few of the adults pictured in this book smile with their teeth showing. You can see why by the handful who do: the teeth tell you better than anything else that this is Kansas in the 1930s and dental care is an unaffordable luxury.

The earliest photographs in this book were created on behalf of the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal project which (among many other things) attempted to educate the public about rural poverty. These photographs show closed banks, empty expressions, and farms turned to dust -- the people here did not know what had hit them or when the Depression would be over. The late 1930s photographs are not entirely bleak: they document 4-H fairs and the FSA's improvement efforts. The photographs from World War II show Kansas at work: at Fort Riley, on trains, in wartime industrial jobs. By the time the post-war photographs were taken (for Standard Oil of New Jersey), Kansas had recovered to become a different, and more modern, state.

Oddly for a photography book, the text commentary is so outstanding that it almost outshines the pictures. The author, Donald Worster, gives the reader an interesting history of Kansas as it approached the "Dirty Thirties," when the dust turned day to night, no one had a spare dime and the state started to empty. Worster describes the state during World War II, when young men went to war and everyone else went back to work. Although the state slowly recovered, the Depression, the war and their aftermath scarred all Kansans who lived through them. Worster's erudite and highly readable commentary creates in one's mind a separate, unique set of pictures that enhances the experience of viewing the actual photographs.