I don’t know if there is a picture of our immigrant fruit pickers and their living conditions that could trigger such a response today. If we keep our labor “illegal” and on the run, does that mean we do not need to see the people who work to put food on our tables? Unimaginable that the Bush administration, intent on dismantling everything associated with the New Deal, would allow, much less commission, a cadre of free-ranging photographers to record the true conditions of migrant workers and their families in camps, or of the poorest of the poor, descendents of slaves, displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Besides, American poverty actually looks different in post-war America than it did during the Depression. The excess of stuff and televisions and junk food and cars and mail order catalogs and credit cards and easy access to malls and chain stores masks all kinds of poverty and decay.

Contemporary color photographs highlight this excess in a way that black and white photographs might not. Black and white film makes florid things seem dignified, chromatic.

Some very few of the FSA/WRA photographers did use the new Kodachrome color film to record images for the archives. They are available in a book called Bound for Glory. In color, the conditions of cotton pickers in the Depression-Era South are apparent in new ways; the sun scorches, we can feel it. Thirst and heat are harder to convey in black and white.