One of the best known New Deal programs is the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) photographic project. The vast photographic archive has been mined over and over for visual evidence about the Great Depression. These photographs frame and undergird our nearly mythological attachment to and understanding of the New Deal. A good number – perhaps most famously, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother -- have moved into the American iconography. They have been critiqued, appreciated, and reconstructed.

They, and other historical photographs, are used most frequently to evoke times and place distant from direct experience. Viewed – and analyzed – primarily as aesthetic objects, they bear a potent emotional content through which the viewer can imaginatively travel in time and across space.