Today I came across a gallery of photographs from the great depression on the NPR website. What’s interesting about these photos is that fact that they’re in color, unusual for 1939-43. That was the era when color was beginning to take off in Hollywood films, but was still a rarity in still photography.
Seeing images of depression-era Americans is stunningly different from seeing them in the black-and-white pictures. They seem like real people. They could be your neighbors, your family. They no longer seem like history.
