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Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43 | 
 enlarge | Author: Paul Hendrickson
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
Buy New: $13.79
You Save: $21.21 (61%)
New (26) Used (19) from $6.37
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 56753
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.3
Dimensions (in): 11.9 x 8 x 0.9
ISBN: 0810943484
Dewey Decimal Number: 779.9973917
EAN: 9780810943483
ASIN: 0810943484
Publication Date: May 1, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new book - May have a remainder mark. SLIGHT SHELF WEAR ON DUST COVER AND SMALL RIP
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Thanks to famous documentary photographs of Americans during the Great Depression, we tend to visualize everything that happened in the 1930s in black-and-white. In fact, Kodachrome first became available in the U.S. in 1935, and several photographers for the Farm Security Administration experimented with the new color film as they traveled across the country. Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43 presents an oddly startling world of small towns and country roads ablaze in the vivid hues of real life. A sunburned family in Pie Town, New Mexico, eat a dinner of homemade biscuits, grits, and gravy. Sisters wearing print dresses all made from the same rose and blue fabric seem dazed at the wonders of a state fair in Vermont. Work horses graze on bright green grass under a moody Kansas sky. Chosen from an archive of about 1,600 vintage color slides, the 175 photos in the book are the work of several documentary photographers, including Marion Post Wolcott and Jack Delano. Partway through this panorama of Americana, the tone and subject matter shift. Suddenly, the U.S. is at war, and the casual, unposed quality of the earlier images shifts into self-conscious glorification of the American war effort by the Office of War Information, with shots of steel mills and train yards, and of women newly hired by factories to assemble bomber parts. It's clear from Paul Hendrickson's engaging introduction that the pre-war images are the ones he finds most captivating. This slender volume--which aptly borrows the title of Dustbowl troubadour Woody Guthrie's autobiography--offers a window on a distant era in which grinding poverty and racial segregation coexist with the simple pleasures of rural and small-town life. —Cathy Curtis
Book Description
The photographs of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which recorded American life in the late 1930s and early 1940s, remain among the most moving and famous documentary images from the first half of the 20th century. Yet few people know that, along with thousands and thousands of black-and-white photographs, the FSA photographers also took color pictures. Here, for the first time, is a selection of the best of the FSA color photographs-introduced by National Book Award finalist Paul Hendrickson and assembled to create a vivid portrait of America as it emerged from the Great Depression to fight World War II. Covering countryside and city, farm and factory, work and play, the images in this book open a window onto our national experience from 1939 to 1943, revealing a world that we have always seen in our mind's eye exclusively in black and white. Never before has there been a book that paints this picture in full color. Published in association with the Library of Congress.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Familiar photos you've never seen June 16, 2008
Seeing these images from the late 1930s to early 1940s is so surprising and still very familiar. These people, places and things are fresh in their freckles, chipped nail polish, rutted tire tracks and dusty streets. Gorgeous photos and fine details on the New Deal programs that caused these photos to exist in the first place.
My two favorite photos were an exuberant, pin-curled girl with her county fair prize ribbons proudly pinned to her new checked dress and the county fair "girlie" show girls backstage, weary and too young in their bedraggled costumes.
I wished that the book had more of these scenes from small town (or even big town life). The last portion of the book focuses on scenes from the factories preparing for war, and the essay explains why these photos were the focus. Nevertheless, the most moving photos to me are the ones showing the small town experience that puts color to the Grapes of Wrath black and white stills in my mind. We are very lucky that these photos have been preserved and so well reproduced for viewers today.
Very Worthwhile Collection June 1, 2008
There are some outstanding shots in this book. As a photographer who prefers color, I was fascinated to see transition from the B&W in early part of the century to color. A very good book to have if you are interested in yet another contribution (B&W to color) of these first documentary photographers.
A time machine of a book. December 28, 2007
This book is a miracle--a gorgeous collection of crystal-clear, full-color photographs that somehow depict a world that many people, myself included, have long unconsciously assumed existed solely in black and white.
Color photographs, hundreds of startling and beyond-Technicolor images of the tail end of the Great Depression and the first years of World War II, fill this beautiful and artfully designed book, and the experience of leafing through them is a revelatory one, an immersive, affecting, transformative one. Just look at these people, these places, these signs: these are not ghosts; these are not the silvery images of museum walls and newspaper archives; these are people; this is the real world; this is the past looking a terrifying hell-of-a-lot like the present, like you, like me. This is poverty and happiness and history and a world gone by, and this is all of that made immediate, and brought to you and to me as if we had just stepped out of a time machine to wade through it all ourselves.
This book is unbelievable. I don't think I could recommend a book more highly, and the only reservations I hold regarding it are the ones that come from being so altered, so changed, so turned upside down by something like this, by something that can make a person view the past and everything so differently. From Pie Town, New Mexico to Lincoln Nebraska, from UFO-like blimps over South Carolina to fishing holes in Louisiana, this is the past of America made alive, made new, made real.
The book's introduction, by writer Paul Hendrickson, is terrific is well, expertly putting the photographs into context, and invoking both explicitly and implicitly the spirit of James Agee, Walker Evans, and LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN. It draws attention to small details of many of the images, details that may have gone unnoticed otherwise, and emphasizes these images' importance to history.
I absolutely love this book, though at times I can barely handle it. I recommend it as highly as I can recommend anything, though I can't guarantee it will leave you unscathed, unchanged, even okay. But get it, read it, see it, and then watch yourself start to see the world, see America, see the past, see it all it in a different way.
Inspiring June 13, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My mother saw the Bound for Glory exhibition in Germany and was so impressed with it that she got ME this book, knowing how much I love to photograph rural Georgia (USA), then became so captivated by it that she was reluctant to give it up. The first time I opened the book I was so overwhelmed that I had to close it again; the images are stunning and truly inspiring, and each photo has so much depth, it takes time to properly digest. Not your average photo book. Highly recommended.
Back and White into Technicolor - Spectacular March 15, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Like many of us, I have come to think of this era in balck and white - a perception honed through years of poring over my parents books and photo albums. Looking at these images gives me the sense of Dorothy exiting her sepia farmhouse into the Technicolor Munchkinland - it's mezmerizing, and the images themselves tell detailed stories about their itme and place. Another book that evokes the same feelings in a more contemporary moment is Sam Fentress' Bible Road, which has beautifully rendered photographs from across the American landscape in black and white and color - if you like Bound for Glory, you are bound to like Bible Road.
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