Customer Reviews

Picturing Arizona: The Photographic Record of the 1930s (The Southwest Center Series)

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Whatever potential the book had, it has been lost by printing it in too small a size. The pictures are both unique and interesting but anything other than a close up is much too hard to discern, even with a magnifying glass. The copy is much too verbose and the font painfully small, especially for the probable target reader of such a book, i.e. at least a senior "boomer".

Skillfully edited by Associate Professor of History Katherine G. Morrissey and former Arizona Library Special Collections archivist Kirsten Jensen, Picturing Arizona: The Photographic Record Of The 1930s offers more than one hundred images by well-known photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Laura Gilpin, offering a wide range of perspectives on Depression-era Arizona history. A thoughtful text commentary accompanies poignant black-and-white photographs, which reveal an unfolding picture of character, struggle, determination, and ordinary life amid the Arizona desert landscape. Picturing Arizona is a moving visual experience, perfectly capturing Arizona grit and character of a bygone era.

I love this book. It brings together a great new perspective of the Depression, our government's goals during the New Deal, and views and motives of different photographers of that era. Fascinating to see the empathy of Dorothea Lange reflected in her work, the starry America of Russell Lee, the humor and self esteem of regular folks who took pictures of their families and the ambition of commercial photographers to make a living with their art.