Historical photographic documents in the public domain Huge photography archive goes public: the Library of Congress
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Tags: documentary photography, Farm Security Administration, Flickr, history of photography, historical photographs, Library of Congress
The American Library of Congress is making its collection publicly available on the Internet at Flickr Commons. For users, this means endless browsing through valuable historical photographs.
In the collection, you can find an incredibly wide selection of documentary photographs of American society. Those who know a little about the history of photography will immediately think of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). For those who do not know what that is, here is a brief summary: the FSA was an aid program for American agriculture, and among other things, it maintained a large group of photographers to document the lives of the population. Among them were some of the most influential documentary photographers in history: Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange are probably the best known names.
The vast archives of the Library of Congress contain many other treasures in addition to the FSA recordings. The fact that they are now gradually becoming publicly accessible should mean nothing less than that the largest free archive of documentary recordings in the United States will soon be freely available to everyone. There is a lot to discover, such as the image above: on August 25, 1944, thousands celebrate the liberation of France from the Nazis.