Years later I was working in publishing in New York and was assigned to do publicity for a new book about the Farm Security Administration photographs of the Great Depression and beyond, 1935-1943. Of course, the Depression had started in 1929, and there was no federal program to document the early years. Most of the famous photos were made out west and in the south, far from Boston. I had seen some of these images, Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and also the photos of Walker Evans in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

There were 300 photos in the book, out of more than 160,000 archived at the Library of Congress. Essays in the book focused on Roy Stryker, administrator of this vast government project, and on the way the archive was cataloged and organized.

Stryker was ruthless about images that weren’t right for his project. He destroyed what he didn’t want by punching a hole in the print and in the negative.  (He even punched a hole in a self-portrait by one of his best staff photographers, John Vachon.)

I went down to Washington to work with people at the Library of Congress on the publication of the book, and explored the cabinets where the images and negatives were stored. An overwhelming experience for me, to touch these things, to smell them as I opened the heavy filing cabinets and the contents seemed to breathe up at me. Overwhelming, also, to realize that all of these pictures belonged to me and all the other citizens of the United States.

It was a revelation that this huge government project, combined with the sensibilities of photographers in the field, could yield propaganda, documentation, visual poetry, art, and a new American thing that was a mix of all those things: lyric documentary.