Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943 [Hardcover]

Michael Lesy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2002

Over 400 rarely or never-seen photographs of a vanished America.

Long Time Coming is derived from the 145,000 photographs made between 1935 and 1943 by a team of now-famous photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), whose ranks included Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans. We are all familiar with the iconic images of poverty that are usually associated with the project. The agency's mission, however, went well beyond photographing dispossessed rural people, and this book is proof. It includes 410 remarkable images made in large cities (including New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, and Pittsburgh) as well as dozens of small towns and villages throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. These are images that have rarely been seen—some twenty percent have never been published before—images that present a portrait of a vanished America, a visual record of everyday existence that enhances and enlarges our assumptions about the era. Setting the pictures in context, Michael Lesy's iconoclastic, groundbreaking text intercuts excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some given as "assigned reading" to the project photographers) with an extended look at Roy Stryker, the FSA's controversial director. It presents the FSA photographs in a very different light from the bleak vision to which we are accustomed. 410 photographs

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

The Farm Security Administration's ambitious program, inaugurated in 1935, to document American life in photographs produced a file of nearly a hundred and fifty thousand negatives. Hundreds have since become iconic, almost to the point of cliché: portraits of rural poverty, migrant workers, and mining towns by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn. Here, in a collection all the more impressive for its understated presentation, Lesy examines the conception and evolution of the file under the F.S.A. administrator, Roy Stryker, and spotlights some four hundred pictures, many previously unpublished, from the program's eight-year existence. These depictions of ordinary life—social gatherings, urban streetscapes, and small-town rituals—succeed, by their range and depth, in restoring a sense of the extraordinary to an enterprise now frequently taken for granted.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Review

A beautiful book...best looked at not just once and slowly,but several times over. -- Killing the Buddha.com, 31 January 2003

All the more impressive for its understated presentation...extraordinary. -- The New Yorker, 17 March 2003

Beyond the lush and entrancing photographs, there is the history one reads between the lines of captions. -- Chicago Tribune, Beth Kephart, 23 February 2003

Blunt,impeccably thorough...articulate...a double edged hacksaw. -- Laura Anne Brooks, Pulp, 20 February 2003

Don't miss at least looking at...Long Time Coming. -- Our Town, 23 January 2003

Here is an America long gone but well worth remembering. -- Smithsonian Magazine, Owen Edwards, January 2003

It's great to see this smart blend of photographs neatly arranged in this terrific volume. -- Picture Magazine, January/February 2003

One of the most fascinating aspects of Long Time is the glimpse it affords of obscure but remarkably talented photographers. -- Creative Loafing, Felicia Feaster, 8 January 2003

Revelatory and exceptional. -- Owen Edwards, Smithsonian, January 2003

The collection...reveals the artistry and compassion of a talented group of photographers. -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bob Hoover, 2 February 2003

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (December 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393049434
• ISBN-13: 978-0393049435
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 11.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,245,861 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking backwards, November 20, 2002

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943 (Hardcover)

A stunning book of 410 photos from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information archives now in the Library of Congress. This book takes a different approach to the many others which use FSA photos, here you will not see many of those well-known images of poverty in rural areas, the effects of land erosion, the plight of Southern sharecroppers, not even the greatest FSA photo of all (in my view) Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother but instead a comprehensive and wonderful showing of the ordinary and everyday in American life from 1935 to 1943.

All these fascinating photos are divided into eight sections, City Life, Hard Work, Hometowns, Hill Towns, Coal Towns, Family Farms, Hard Times and Amusements. Most of them are from 1938 to 1943 so there are few by Walker Evans who left the FSA in 1937 but plenty by Russell Lee, the most prolific FSA photographer. The photos (well printed on excellent paper) are presented one to a page with a caption, photographer's name and date centred below. Because these are FSA images they depict a very detailed picture of everyday life and in 1941 when the US joined the Second World War it was decided to expand the coverage to record the war effort and life in general. This is the main reason I like the book plus the eighty-two photos never published before.

Between the eight photo sections author Lesy writes (in a very honest way) various essays about Roy Stryker, who ran of the FSA and how he organised the photographers work through his exacting shooting scripts (these were partially inspired by Robert Lynd and his 1925 book, `Middletown' based on Muncie, Indiana which turns out to be average small town USA, tough luck Peoria, Illinois!) how this huge file of images was distributed to the media, correspondence between Stryker and the photographers and more. I found one section (pages 230 to 235) called `The Middletown Spirit' very intriguing, it is a list of the things that the folks of `Middletown' (or small towns anywhere) believed in and as well as the goodness that one would expect it also reflects an alarming collection of deeply conservative beliefs, ethnic prejudice and a Horatio Alger like deference towards business. The back of the book lists all the negative numbers so you can order prints from the Library of Congress and in fact see 60,000 photos from the FSA/OWI collection on the Library's `American Memory' website.

Because of what these photographs show, the quality of presentation and production, I think this will become the definitive reference book for the period. A glorious reminder of the American spirit.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subversive in the best sense of the word, February 23, 2003

By 

juliarabig (NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943 (Hardcover)

A beautiful book of photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and others culled from the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration collection (a New Deal project that covered far more than farms), Long Time Coming may strike you at first as a nostalgia trip back to the days depicted on the cover: when whole towns lined up to watch their Boy Scout troops march down the street waving American flags. But Lesy hasn't combed the archive's 150,000-plus negatives only to offer up a tribute to lost Americana. Try putting this book out on your coffee table; lean close, and you'll hear it ticking.

Many of the images in this book -- a little girl sprinting up an alley in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, beneath rows of washing and before the disinterested stares of the older girls and women; the backs of five bony men as they carry a homemade coffin up a rocky path in Jackson, Kentucky; an angry black Muslim in Chicago leading his two stricken-looking sons on an errand or into fanaticism -- are as haunting and disturbing as anything Lesy has presented in his earlier work. They are also weirdly filled with hope. Neither inspiring, exactly, nor sentimentally-portrayed, the men, women, and children in these photographs might, looked at by themselves, fade away quickly. Gathered together in all their painful glory, they seem possessed of a Faulknerian quality: They endure.

Long Time Coming is best looked at it not just once and slowly, but several times over. At least once go through quickly, flipping the pages as if to set the coal miners, preachers, nuns, farmers, carny barkers, and bankers contained therein into continuous motion. Follow the running girl from Ambride, PA to the family wrestling and splashing and staring at the camera (beneath a giant billboard for Iron City Pilsner, "Just a sip at twilight") in a "homemade swimming pool for steelworker's children" on the following right-hand page; and on to a thick column of a mother -- the girl grown up? -- marching, baby in hand, past "Factory workers' homes, Camden, New Jersey," and then back to an alley, where now a young black boy stands staring at the camera defiantly even as he keeps his distance from it.

Sequences such as these abound throughout Long Time Coming, stories of escape and capture, of growing old and being born again. But beyond those literal progressions, there are stories told by shapes: A woman in a long black coat dominates the middle of a frame of a pleasant residential street in Woodbine, Iowa, as does a bent-over drifter crossing a dry, empty road in Dubuque, and a traffic cop standing like a statue in the middle of street glistening with rain in Norwich, Connecticut. The black hole at the center of a mountain man's guitar leads to the white sphere of a black musician's maracas, which in turn foreshadow the white straw hats seen from above at a cockfight in Puerto Rico.

That these stories slowly reveal themselves as morality plays is no accident; both Lesy, and the man who originally commissioned the photographs, intended them as such. There are eight chapters of text interspersed throughout Long Time Coming, in which the mastermind of the F.S.A. documentary project, a man named Roy Stryker, is introduced, mocked, and redeemed. A bureaucrat with tyrannical tendencies, Stryker drew up lists of books for his photographers to read in order to "understand" America -- cut-and-dried sociology, experts on regional hygiene -- and "shooting scripts" the photographers were supposed to adhere to. "Husking bees. Barn dance; hay rides -- Halloween -- football games; making pies -- mince meat and pumpkin; turkey dinners; picking feathers from the ducks." In his attempt to control reality's representation, Stryker ended up composing prose poems of Americana, which in turn became the major chords of a symphony much expanded by the keen eyes of the photographers.

The whole is a requiem mass. The fact that its subject -- the United States -- continues to exist doesn't so much refute its minor chords as make them all the more relevant to the Coplandesque sweeps of optimism: elements of a portrait of what the country was, is, and -- isn't this the point of all propaganda? -- may yet be. Roy Stryker saw these photographs as facts; the ordinary citizens who viewed them understood them as testimonies. "Every new form of communication," writes Lesy, "every new kind of media, has been and will always be a blind, blunt, crippled effort to make the past into the present, the far into the near, the outside into the inside, to turn us all, for a moment, into supernal beings.... The File" -- the collection of 145,000 photographs -- "had the potential to create, over time, an experience of totality that felt boundless... It's as grand a thing, in its own way, as Yosemite or Yellowstone. It's the common property of every citizen of the United States. It belongs to us. It is us."

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unbelievable!, September 12, 2003

By 

Voracious Reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943 (Hardcover)

Mike Lesy has done it again! At first glance, Long Time Coming harks back to a book that brought him his first small measure of fame over thirty years ago-- Wisconsin Death Trip. Both books demonstrate Lesy's love for macabre old photographs taken by long-dead photographers and showcase his talent for writing captions.

But despite superficial similarities, these are two very different books. WDT is clearly written by someone trying to make a name for himself in the academic world. Based on photos from the late nineteenth century, the subject matter was far removed from any of the author's own memories or experiences. In contrast, I can imagine many of the photographs in LTC, however, evoking powerful childhood memories. Yet, this book is anything but nostalgic. The maturity and depth of life experience of its editor shows on every page-- a sort of creepy, subversive confidence (detractors might even call it arrogance) lurks in virtually every sentence. The almost sinister commentary greatly accentuates the oddness of the photographs themselves.

In my mind, LTC firmly establishes Lesy as the eminence grise of the coffee table book. A fitting cap to a long career, it won't be off my coffee table or my toilet tank for a long, long time. Buy it!