Baltimore Street Photographer, Great Depression-era edition

23 Photos

Yale University recently unveiled a platform called Photogrammar, which hosts 170,000 images taken from 1935 to 1945 — which spans parts of the Great Depression — by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information. There are more than 1,600 that feature the city of Baltimore during this time, and The Sun has identified more than a dozen “themes” from these images that we will roll out in The Darkroom in the coming weeks and months.

A majority of the photos from Baltimore focus on its industry at the time, but there were many that captured everyday life. And as the producer of The Darkroom’s ongoing series on Baltimore street photographers, I thought it a perfect fit to start with these photos. Photographers John Vachon, Marjory Collins, Sheldon Dick, Arthur Rothstein and Arthur S. Siegel were some of the photographers assigned to Baltimore. Captions in quotes are the original text provided for that photo.

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