The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 7)
By Errol Morris
(and here is the link to all seven parts)
In 1974, Bill Ganzel, a photographer from Lincoln, Neb., went on the road trip. For seven years, carrying copies of photographs by Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans and others, Ganzel sought the same people and scenes that the F.S.A. photographers had taken during the 1930s. In 1986, he published “Dust Bowl Descent.”
BILL GANZEL: When I was in college, I saw an exhibit at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery — which is on the University of Nebraska campus — of FSA photographs, and was just really taken with the way that they brought down to day-to-day living what the big historical event, the Depression, was all about. I was looking at Migrant Mother’s face and saw desperation. I started doing some reading about that. My family was going back to Washington, D.C. We got an aunt who lives there, lives in D.C. And somewhere I came across the information that all these photographs were in the Library of Congress. And I thought, well, rather than doing the tourist stuff that I’d done before, I wonder what it would be like to go to the Library of Congress? I did. A college student coming in and claiming to be a researcher, and they bought it. They said, “O.k., yeah. Come on in. Sign these forms, and you can look at the photographs.” I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to the F.S.A. room. At least what it was like then was that it — just file cabinet after file cabinet. And you can sit there and flip through photographs. There are 80,000 photographs in the collection. Obviously I never got through the entire collection. But I decided to look at a local area, the Great Plains. And then what was I going to do with those photographs when I came back? I had photocopied some of the photographs just to have them. And somehow thought, “Well, o.k., I can go out for a weekend or whatever. And maybe I can find the same place, just to see how it changed.”.........pic: library of congress
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