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

by Michael Lesy and Dina Nayeri

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393049434
• ISBN13: 9780393049435
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 5.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 11.3" x 10.2"

Customer Reviews

Magificent collection of timeless photos...

These images are windows into an era of American life totally lost to us now. Not only have they been carefully selected and arranged, but the printing work is the best I have seen in a recently published retail book of photographs. (I'm a photographer.) The tonalities are magnificent & the images are nice & large & beautifully laid out with lots of surrounding white space like matting. Just superb & a real bargain at the price!

Unbelievable!

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!

Subversive in the best sense of the word

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

Looking backwards

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.