The Photographs of Ben Shahn

The approximately 172,000 film negatives and transparencies in the Library of Congress's collection from the Farm Security Administration (FSA), later the Office of War Information (OWI), provide a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and World War II.
This government photography project, headed by Roy E. Stryker, employed many relatively unknown names who later became some of the twentieth-century's best-known photographers, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Carl Mydans. Initially conceived to document government loans to farmers and their subsequent resettlement in suburban communities, the project expanded to create a visual record of agricultural workers across the United States, Later, Stryker's photographers recorded both rural and urban centers as the nation prepared for World War II.

Timothy Egan is a national enterprise reporter for The New York Times. In 2001, he was part of a team of reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the paper's series exploring racial attitudes across contemporary America. He is the author of four books, including The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2006), which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2006. Amy Pastan is an independent editor and scholar, formerly of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The Preface is by W. Ralph Eubanks, director of publishing at The Library of Congress.