The project I’m covering is Photogrammar, a database of photography projects sponsored by the federal government from 1935-1944, which was collected by the Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).
Even with over 170,000 photos in the collection, only about 88,000 were placed into the FSA-OWI’s cabinets, organized using Paul Vanderbilt’s Lot Number system and Classification Tags system. (This is what is used to search throughout the Photogrammar website).
The photos themselves were taken throughout the decade-long time period, which also happened to be when World War II was being fought (although the United States would not enter the war until after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941). They were taken by various photographers, 15 of which are shown on the Photogrammar website. The team behind Photogrammar took the negatives of these photos and scanned them, digitizing them to be added to their digital archive and shown to the world via computer screen.
The Photogrammar team decided the best way to create meaningful visualizations for this set of data would be to make their main map a density map by county (shown above) and by photographer. By doing so, they were able to succinctly show where the Federal government was sending its contracted photographers, although the reasons why can only be speculated. However, what is more interesting are their visualizations that can be seen under the “Lab” tab on the top right hand corner of their website. Under the Lab, there are three different types of interactive visualizations that are dissimilar to the two main maps and can allow for further analysis of the images, from how Vanderbilt decided to classify the images as, to the metadata dashboard where the relationship between the photographer, the date, and the subject can be further analyzed.
*Also, funnily enough, my hometown is featured on the Photogrammar website here. In one of the pictures, I recognize some buildings that are still around in the Historic Downtown.
I think you did an amazing job giving a very informative introduction and a strong analysis on the three main categories that we covered in class: sources, processing, and presentation. I also really loved the personal connection at the end! It really made this blog post a warm reading! Great job and thanks for sharing!
This post is extremely informative! I feel like I can clearly understand the purpose and categorization of this website through your description alone. This site reminds me of what we talked about in class regarding lost histories, so it is very important that this site exists to document the human experience during a turbulent time in the world’s history. I also thought it was very interesting that you were able to locate your hometown on the site, what a great way to connect yourself to the time period!