FSA Color--Belle Glade, Florida

This is a migrant worker dwelling in Zora Neale Hurston's Florida, Belle Glade 1944 taken in kodachrome color by photograph Marion Wolcott.  Fascinating.

Afro-Americans in the 40s--Color FSA Photos

These are photographs from the color collection of the FSA at the Library of Congress taken by Marion Wolcott and dated 1944.  These first three were taken in Belle Glade, Florida and illustrate some of the living conditions of migrant workers in Florida.  This is the kind of location Zora Neale Hurston would have visited in compiling her Mules and Men (1935) and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

This next photograph is also by Marion Wolcott in 1944 of a dwelling occupied by "mulattoes" in Louisiana.  You can see such photographs for yourself at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsachtml/fsowhome.html.  This is the front page of the color collection of the Federal Security Adminstration Collection, 1939-1944.  One can then browse the subject index (African Americans or Negroes), Creator (Marion Wolcott) and/or geographic location (Belle Glade, Florida or Louisiana).

This photo is also by Marion Wolcott and is taken upon the occasion of a picnic in St. Helena, South Carolina, obviously a picnic.  The people are moving naturally, not posing.  Also in the 40s. 

30 Americans: Rubbell Family Collection

“Thirty Americans” contains a near-comprehensive repertoire of the tropes of black postmodernism and the African-American sublime, in which the negativities of slavery, Jim Crow, blackface minstrelsy, racism, sexism and sexual slavery are constantly invoked and interrogated for the rich, dark spaces and designs that their still-warm undersides may reveal. Every African-American artist I can think of whose work I admire finds some way to signal his or her existential outsiderness. In a dominant visual culture in which blackness is often viewed as a negation of both culture and worth, the outside holds as much interest and cachet as the inside. We black people always want to know, regardless of our education and family background: What relation does your work have to the outside where most black people continue to be found everywhere you can look?

30 Americans: Rubbell Family Collection, Miami, Florida: 2008.