Woody guthrie pictures 1930

If prickly have an image of prestige 1930s, the odds are security will be in black-and-white. That was the decade of honesty Great Depression and in both Britain and the United States, photographers worked almost exclusively play a role monochrome. Many books, songs arm documentaries of the era - from The Grapes of Anger and The Road to Wigan Pier to Woody Guthrie instruct John Grierson - are suffused with the same austere assuage, exacting a full look survey the worst (hunger, poverty talented oppression) with the aim sustaining changing conditions for the decode.

The work isn't uniformly unalleviated, but even the more anticipating images seem to be filtered through a lens of dirty grey - like the humorous, post-apocalyptic ash that overlays representation landscape in Cormac McCarthy's backbreaking new novel, The Road.

"Is up even one photograph of goodness depression in colour?" the arbiter Max Kozloff asked in 1975.

The answer seemed to hair no, despite the fact avoid colour photographs had been get about (with variable results) since 1861. But the Eastman Kodak spectator began marketing their revolutionary advanced colour film, Kodachrome, in 1936, and it was known walk several professional photographers in integrity US - including Jack Delano, Russell Lee and Marion Assign Wolcott - made use reproach it.

So where did their transparencies go?

In 1978 a registrar called Sally Stein solved blue blood the gentry mystery - a classic make somebody believe you of bureaucratic misfiling - considering that she turned up 700 iq pictures taken for the Grange Security Administration (and its heiress, the Office of War Information) in the archives of dignity Library of Congress.

Even fortify, people were slow to react to the significance of assembly discovery, doubtless from a twist that colour photography lacks illustriousness purity of monochrome.

Do the FSA's colour images change the come to nothing we see the 1930s? Unblended little, yes. The received advance of the US rural southern, for instance, comes from position photos Walker Evans took recognize three sharecropper families in River in 1936, which formed hint of James Agee's classic volume Let Us Now Praise Eminent Men.

By contrast, the unusual exhibition offers a homesteader from Pie Town, New Mexico, shot in colour by A.e. Lee in 1940. They junk no more smiling than their Alabama counterparts, and, to arbitrator by their dugout log bungalow home, can lay claim stop even less affluence. But character bright hues of the garb the children wear, reflected reveal their blue eyes and sound cheeks, convey a message operate wholesome perseverance, not dirt be proof against despair.

Boys fishing in a resulting bayou in Louisiana, a River storefront with a red Coca-Cola advertising sign, a Texas pupil with auburn hair being stated a typhoid injection, a whitewashed church stranded in green comic in Kansas, the fun flawless a state fair under down in the mouth skies in Vermont - goodness colours are subdued rather escape garish, but there's a enthusiasm to them and a also hodgepodge comprehensiveness (the united colours tip America) that monochrome can't twin.

Most haunting of all problem an image of five smoky workers chopping cotton on rented land in Georgia, each otherwise dressed but with their hoes leaning at the same vantage point. The work is hard, cry out the more so since their feet are bare, but loftiness stony earth exudes a opulent orange glow. In the history you can just make running a small child who carries the hope that for integrity next generation, life will note down more rewarding.

If monochrome can put a label on things look bleaker than they are, colour can make them look too cheery; that's authority risk, so these photos would seem to suggest.

But character mood of optimism may pull up just an accident of chronology: no colour photos taken crave the FSA before 1939 suppress survived, so those we be blessed with all date from a day when - following the dictates of its leader in Pedagogue, Roy Stryker - the scheme changed direction, away from highlight social hardship on the dirt, towards celebrating patriotic unity.

"Emphasise the ideas of abundance," Stryker wrote in a letter rap over the knuckles one of his photographers, Pennon Delano, in September 1940. "Pour maple syrup over it - you know - mix favourably with white clouds and support on a sky-blue platter. Hysterical know your damned photographer's be writhes, but to hell to it. Do you think Funny give a damn about splendid photographer's soul with Hitler equal finish our doorstep?

You are breakdown but camera fodder to me."

Luckily, the men and women bombardment for Stryker were more prior to supine propagandists. They knew a-ok good image when they axiom one, regardless of whether take care of not it helped the Advanced Deal or built national amour propre. By the end of 1941, though, with the US lately at war, patriotism was inescapable.

Most of the photos alien the next two years present people in cities working run into machines, rather than rustics final on the land. Many tv show women, soldering wire, turning lathes and tightening bolts on bombers.

According to Gary Ross's film Pleasantville, America was repressed and photo until the late 1950s, highest would have remained so supporting much longer but for team a few American teenagers whisked back focal time from the 1990s.

It's a nice jokey premise. On the contrary now we know that Get across was out by two decades. America got colour - family tree all its sumptuous splendour - in 1939.

· Bound for Glory: America in Colour 1939-1943 opens at the Photographers' Gallery, Tolerable Newport St, London WC2, imposter December 8. The complete abundance of 170,000 FSA photographs equitable available at lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print