Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939–1943

Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939–1943 was organised by the Library of Congress to present the largely overlooked colour photography produced by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and its successor, the Office of War Information. The photographs were made between 1939 and 1943, during the transition from the final years of the Great Depression to the mobilisation of the United States for the Second World War. The FSA photographic programme had developed from the Resettlement Administration project established in 1935 and directed photographically by Roy Stryker. Although the programme became internationally recognised through its black and white photography, approximately 1,600 colour transparencies were also produced by FSA and OWI photographers. Most were made using Kodachrome, which Eastman Kodak had introduced commercially in 1935. Photographers represented in the colour collection include Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Arthur Rothstein, Alfred T. Palmer and Charles Fenno Jacobs. Their subjects range from farms, agricultural workers, schools and small towns to railways, factories, aircraft production and the wartime workforce. Jacobs contributed colour photographs from his May 1942 assignment in Southington, Connecticut, where he photographed schoolchildren, streets, shops, community events and Memorial Day activities shortly before joining Edward Steichen's United States Navy photographic operation. These photographs demonstrate that colour was being incorporated into American documentary practice while black and white photography remained the dominant medium for government, newspaper and magazine reproduction.

The Library of Congress published Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939–43 in association with Harry N. Abrams in 2004, with an introduction by Paul Hendrickson, before opening the exhibition at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on 8 September 2005. The exhibition contained seventy digital prints produced from original colour transparencies preserved within the FSA and OWI collection. Its importance lay in presenting a part of the government photographic archive that had received considerably less attention than the approximately 170,000 black and white photographs associated with the programme. The colour images provide additional historical information about clothing, advertising, architecture, industrial materials, machinery, landscapes and domestic environments while also demonstrating how established documentary photographers responded to the technical and visual possibilities of colour film. The photographs chart changes in the subjects commissioned by the government as the emphasis moved from Depression era rural and social conditions towards industrial production and wartime mobilisation after the United States entered the war in December 1941. Bound for Glory therefore established these photographs as more than an unusual colour supplement to the better known FSA archive. They form a distinct record of American documentary photography during a period when modern colour processes were beginning to enter professional practice and provide a colour record of American society immediately before and during the country's transition to wartime production.

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The photographs featured in Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939–1943 were produced by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information.

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