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If you do not already know the photographs of Gordon Parks, I highly recommend them to you. He was the first and only Black photographer to work for the Farm Security Administration, and he later went on to a brilliant career. In 1942 he made an extended portrait of Ella Watson, "US government charwoman," at work and in her home. Some of these photographs and the story behind them are on the Library of Congress Web site: [url] http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap07.html [/url]. Parks was interviewed in the 1960s about how he got his start during the Depression: he tells his story at [url] http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/parks64.htm [/url]. Among the photographers working for the FSA, Dorothea Lange took more photographs of Black folks than any other FSA photographer, with the exception of Parks. Her photographs, and the long captions that accompany them, give a picture of both the similarities and the differences faced by Black and White farmers in the South (see, for example, the stories and photographs in my book, [i]Daring to Look [/i] on sharecroppers and tenant farmers in North Carolina).

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