Overview

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) from 1935–1945. Among them are many of the best known and most widely admired American documentary photographs of the Great Depression and the home front during World War II (example, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother). But as searching in Photogrammar makes clear, there are hundreds of lesser-known images that are also fascinating and important. Considering the images and metadata housed at the Library of Congress FSA-OWI archive as a “large, messy data set,” Photogrammar makes it possible to aggregate and associate them in new ways.

Photogrammar’s multi-layered interactive maps support teaching and public engagement as well as original scholarship, while the Photogrammar Labs pages provide further provocations. Photogrammar was funded by an NEH Office of Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant and has, as well, enjoyed continuing support by Yale.

Photogrammar was recently named one of the inaugural recipients of the ACLS’s new Digital Extension Grants. Visit the ACLS News page to see the announcement!