Mick Hartley

A classic piece of Americana from Shorpy – "Abandoned garage on Highway No. 2. Western North Dakota."

[Photo: Shorpy/Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration]

Full size here.

I wouldn't want to make too much of it, but it's surely worth at least noting that one of America's most successful – I think we might even say iconic – artistic movements, the work of photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee here, was government-driven through the FSA rather than being the result of good ol' private enterprise.

I wrote a piece about the FSA - ooh, a long time ago – in response to a foolish attempt in a book I'd just bought to compare their work with Thirties propaganda photography in the USSR.