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.