A collaboration to facilitate the archiving and publication of a new documentary photography project was announced today by the Library of Congress and the photography group known as Facing Change: Documenting America.
Facing Change was founded in 2009 by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers Anthony Suau and Lucian Perkins and is a contemporary counterpart to the work done in the 1930s and 1940s by photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration, a federal project that documented the experiences of Americans at all economic levels during the Great Depression and World War II. Those period photographs—including work by such iconic names in photography as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Gordon Parks—are now available to the public through the Library of Congress, which holds them in its Farm Security Administration Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division.
All 175,000 of the historic images also are online at www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/.
The collaborative agreement announced today will allow the Library to publish books based on the Facing Change images, which document numerous aspects of contemporary American life through photographs, sound and video files. The Library will begin by exploring born-digital archiving and preservation practices with the Facing Change photographers, building on experience gained through the Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.
Direct to Facing Change Web Site