Full Color Depression

When Janey Comes Marching Home

Upcoming Exhibitions





Full Color Depression
First Kodachromes from America's Heartland
Kreps Gallery
January 23–July 23, 2012

A reception will be held Thursday, April 19, from 6–9 p.m., with a talk by Bruce Jackson at 7 p.m.

There will be a public auction of the photographs on June 21.





The photographs taken by the Library of Congress’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) team—composed of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and others, under the leadership of Roy Emerson Stryker—include some of the most recognizable images of rural and small-town America during the Great Depression. Beginning in 1935, the team captured at least 175,000 black-and-white images of cities, towns, and the countryside throughout America’s heartland. Some of the photographers also captured lesser-known color images using a film called Kodachrome. No one knows exactly how many frames they shot for the FSA in color, but only 1,615 survive. Until recently, most of these images had not been seen since they were initially processed by Kodak’s lab in Rochester well over half a century ago.

Kodachrome, the most stable fine-grain color film ever made, was introduced as 16mm movie film in 1935. During the following three years, it became available in canisters for 35mm cameras and in sheets for medium- and large-format cameras. By late 1939, the processing was as good as the film, and some of Stryker’s FSA photographers began experimenting with it. They continued their work after the FSA project was absorbed by the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942, through its dissolution in 1944. Unlike black-and-white film, which could easily be developed while on the road, Kodachrome required a more complex process and was sent to Kodak to be developed. As a result, the photographers often did not see their final images. They were rediscovered in 1978 in the Library of Congress Archives by Sally Stein, who was researching photography from the 1930s for her dissertation. Today, all of the project’s surviving color images are available as high-resolution scans from the Library of Congress.

For this exhibition, Bruce Jackson, a photographer himself, has selected, printed, and, in some instances, restored a representative group of images; some of the prints required more than a thousand separate corrections. This selection of images ranges from the first tentative explorations of Marion Post Wolcott—who used the film in the same way she used black-and-white film—to the more complex color work of Russell Lee and Jack Delano—who were beginning to understand that color photography was different than monochrome—and the hyped advertising-style propaganda images of Arthur T. Palmer from the early years of World War II. Color photography would not find a firm base in the art world until an exhibition of works by William Eggleston was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, but as the images in this exhibition demonstrate, the path was marked decades before by Stryker’s FSA team. Their assignment was to document what America looked like during and at the end of the Great Depression; in the process, they discovered new ways the camera lens could see and represent the world.

This exhibition is organized by Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of English and James Agee Professor of American Culture at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The original color transparencies are in the Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Collection at the Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsac/.

When Janey Comes Marching Home
Lyndhurst, Porch, and Universities Galleries
February 6–April 21, 2012

The recent launch of the Veterans Oral History Project in North Carolina brings When Janey Comes Marching Home to CDS. The exhibit includes more than forty large-scale color photographic portraits and accompanying oral histories of female soldiers from all five branches of the military who served in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The exhibit, and a book of the same name (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), is a collaboration between photographer Sascha Pflaeging and author Laura Browder, the Tyler and Alice Haynes Professor in American Studies at the University of Richmond. In taking the photos, Pflaeging was interested in “documenting these women visually while the situation is still present, their feelings and emotions still raw and very real.” The resulting portraits, and accompanying text, convey stories that are by turns moving, comic, heartbreaking, and thought-provoking.

When Janey Comes Marching Home will run through April 21, 2012, in the Lyndhurst, Porch, and University Galleries.

Click here for slideshows and for more information on the exhibit and the book.

When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans was made possible by generous grants from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the College of Humanities and Sciences, Virginia Commonwealth University. The exhibition was organized by the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, where it premiered in 2008. The exhibition tour is administered by the Anderson Gallery, School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, with additional support from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.







Hugh Mangum
Lyndhurst Gallery
April 30–October 20, 2012

Capstone 2012
Porch and University Galleries
May 7–September 8, 2012






CDS Gallery Hours
Monday–Thursday: 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Friday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Saturday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday: closed






Additional support for CDS Exhibitions is provided by the Office of the Provost at Duke University.






banner image:

Partial view of the Lyndhurst Gallery, one of four exhibition spaces at CDS. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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