Government as photographer

And doing a darned good job of it. Picturing the Century: One Hundred Years of Photography from the National Archives (779.997391 B968p) is based on an exhibit of representative holdings from one of the largest photographic archives in the world -- the National Archives and Records Administration. Its 8 million-plus photographs and 9 million aerial photographs were either taken by government employees or contractors, or were collected by a Federal agency for one reason or another. Many of the photos were taken by famous photographers - for example, 226 original signed Ansel Adams prints of the American West, Dorothea Lange's photos of the devastating impact of the Great Depression on migrant farm families, and presidential photos taken by David Hume Kennerly and Yoichi Okamoto. But there are also a lot of surprises in the collections. Here's an example of one of Lange's photos, this one of a Japanese family during World War II:



The caption reads: "Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus. Identification tags were used to aid in keeping a family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. Mochida operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township."

This one was taken by an unknown photographer:



These guys are American servicemen, former prisoners of the Vietnam War, who are cheering as their aircraft takes off from an airfield near Hanoi.

There's something so haunting about the black-and-white treatment. The color photos just don't seem to have the same impact.