It’s All Done Gone: Arkansas Photographs from the Farm Security Administration Collection, 1935-1943

Reviews of It’s All Done Gone: Arkansas Photographs from the Farm Security Administration Collection, 1935-1943

"The devastation of the Great Depression found its greatest chroniclers in the Farm Security Administration's matchless cohort of genius photographers, whose work in Arkansas is the focus of Patsy G. Watkins's illuminating study. The whole all-star team–Evans, Lange, Lee, Rothstein, and Shahn–worked for a New Deal bureaucracy among the nation's most vulnerable citizens, but images loosed in the world are understood in unpredictable ways, mixing as they do the voices and purposes (sometimes in harmony, at other times in tension) of their subjects, their makers, and their makers' bosses. Watkins's careful attention to this archive presents some 180 of its most compelling images in a coherently arranged and richly contextualized format. By her efforts Arkansas joins the Alabama distinguished by James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the Mississippi ennobled by Eudora Welty's One Time, One Place."–Robert Cochran, author of A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice