A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words, but You’ve Got to Have One or Two to Start With

The following is a guest post by Taren Ouellette, Digital Library Specialist, Prints & Photographs Division. With 175,000 black-and-white film negatives, the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) Collection was a U.S. Government effort to capture scenes of American life during the 1930s and 1940s with such topics as the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and the beginnings of World War II. Half of the collection had accompanying context and titles provided by the FSA/OWI office, but over 70,000 images were not given captions. The Prints & Photographs Division (P&P) has been working to make those “Untitled” images more accessible since the complete film collection was first digitized in the 1990s. You may have noticed some of these untitled images…