Material / Image Research Lab (MIRL)

An enormous and valuable stash of images comprising “a visual encyclopedia” of the US in the 1930s and ’40s has been re-discovered.  It comprises 41,000 photographs by Roy Stryker, the founder of the Farm Security Administration’s photography documentation project, now at the Library of Congress.  (The 175,000-image FSA collection includes the iconic Dorthea Lange “Dustbowl Family” photos as well as many other highly reproduced images.)  This initial batch of 41,000 was stored at the New York Public Library, and got waylaid as the LC project moved forward.  Incredibly these photos could be signed out by any library patron.  In 2005 it was discovered that many of these NYPL photos were not in the LC collection, so they are now being digitized and added; the first 1,000 are available here, together with the rest of the FSA material.   Read more of this great story here through the NY Times.