Grad Student Research Alert! #teamrhetoric Where do ideas come from? I found this today, in an old “idea” notebook. Dated 8.29.95, it’s my first recorded mention of the dissertation idea that eventually became my first book. Note that I started out pretty ignorant: “WPA” in confident blue pen got crossed out in pencil for the more accurate “FSA.” Gotta start somewhere, people!
The New Yorker’s got great stuff on Chicago’s role in the Great Migration: a story/review of Isabel Wilkerson’s new book by Jill Lepore, 1940s photographs from Wayne Miller and the FSA, and contemporary pix by John Lowenstein.
Take a minute to check it all out, especially the slideshows.
image credit: Edwin Rosskam, 1941, FSA/OWI, Library of Congress
New from University of Illinois Press: Ben Shahn’s American Scene: Photographs, 1938 by John Raeburn. Raeburn is the author of one of my favorite recent books on the history of photography, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography. I was very pleased to be invited to review and blurb this new one on Shahn.
A friend sent me a slideshow of Farm Security Administration color photographs at the Denver Post’s photo blog. I love this one of a group of Iowa “rosies” working at the railyard in Clinton, Iowa in 1943. The rich saturation of these early color images is simply gorgeous.
Photo credit:
“Women workers employed as wipers in the roundhouse having lunch in their rest room, Chicago and Northwest Railway Company. Clinton, Iowa, April 1943. Reproduction from color slide. Photo by Jack Delano. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.”
Visual Politics: All things visual in public life. Presented by Cara Finnegan, scholar, teacher, rhetoric geek. Lover of photography, art, print culture, politics, and troublemakers.
