Hank O'Neal: A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and its People 1935-1943

Description

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of this classic, the indelible work of the now-iconic Farm Security Administration photographers Featuring the work of the 11 photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration--perhaps the finest photographic team assembled in the 20th century--A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and Its People 1935-1943 was first published in 1976 to great acclaim, and was named one of the 100 most important books of the decade by the Association of American Publishers. By any measure this is a remarkable book, wrote Alden Whitman in The New York Times, one of the few beneficent fruits of the Depression and one of the few collections of photographs to limn both the starkness of American life in those years and the indomitable strength of those who endured them. For the project, John Collier, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Theo Jung, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, John Vachon and Marion Post Wolcott were invited by photographer Hank O'Neal to choose the best of their own work and provide commentary, resulting in an oversized hardcover full of large, black-and-white images of America during the Great Depression. For the 40th-anniversary edition of this remarkable volume, all of the photographs, texts and historical materials that comprised the original edition have been carefully reproduced, followed by a new afterword by O'Neal detailing the events that followed the book's initial release. Elegant in its simplicity, A Vision Shared is a reminder of the power of photographic storytelling, as readers are pulled into the lives of ordinary Americans and the places where they lived.

Hank O''Neal was born in 1940 and, in addition to being a photographer, his career has included stints in the worlds of government, education, and record and concert production. In 1970, O''Neal took his first serious photographs and two years later met Berenice Abbott, with whom he worked closely for the next nineteen years. About the same time he met Walker Evans and all the other living Farm Security Administration photographers. O''Neal is co-editor of Berenice Abbott (2008) and the five-volume The Unknown Abbott (2013), and has published more than a dozen other books on various subjects, mostly related to photography, music or both.

... you're jolted by the miserable ways many people lived through the Depression, by the artistry and compassion of the photographers...by the uncondescending ways they found to give these usually nameless Americans a sense of dignity... No kidding, this book should be in every American home.--Malcolm Jones "Daily Beast" What gives the book its enduring importance is that O'Neal sought out nine of the 10 surviving photographers, as well as Lange's widower and Ben Shahn's widow, and had them select the photographs they wanted to include, write the captions, and tell him their stories. .. What most pleases O'Neal about "A Vision Shared" is the human element: The tribute it offers not just to a remarkable body of work but, even more, to that body of work's creators.--Mark Feeney "Boston Globe"