The photo book A Vision Shared by Hank O’Neal was first published in 1976 (order the 2017 re-issue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de). It documents efforts undertaken under the FDR Administration to create a visual, historical record of the situation in the United States during the Great Depression.
Introducing his second term in office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke the legendary words spread by radio stations around the country: “I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished.”
The Roosevelt Administration was determined to change that situation. Among the member of FDR’s “Brain Trust”, a group of Columbia University academics, was the economist Rexford Guy Tugwell (1891-1979). He helped design the presidents New Deal farm program and the Resettlement Adminstration, which aimed at relocating the rural poor to productive land. His friend was the Columbia historian Roy Stryker (1893-1975) who originated the idea of a visual history that would be directed toward the documentation of rural poverty and want. It would be a powerful argument for action that Congress could not ignore.
Roy Stryker hired first class photographers to undertake that task. Among them were some of the best, including Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange. They produced some 164,000 developed negatives and some 77,000 finished photographic prints.
Decades later, the American music producer, author and photographer Hank O’Neal, when spending time at New York’s Witkin Gallery, looking through a bin of photographs, he came across a wonderful Walkers Evans image entitled Street Scene, Vicksburg, Mississippi, March 1936. It was priced at $15! When he asked the gallery owner why it was so inexpensive, O’Neal was told that thousands of photographs from the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress were for sale.
At the time, Hank O’Neal spent quite some time in Washington, D.C. So he went to the Library of Congress and looked through “The File” with tens of thousands 8 by 10 prints affixed to ancient cardboard mounts. He even found hundreds, maybe thousands of old Kodachromess, taken by Russell Lee, Jack Delano and other FSA photographers in the early 1940s, but now long forgotten, just waiting for someone to rescue them and make dye-transfer prints, which is what Tennyson Schad did a decade later.
During the following months, Hank O’Neal studied the photos at the Library of Congress and came across two recently published books, In This Proud Land (1975) by Nancy Wood and Portrait of A Decade (1972) by Jack Hurley. Jack O’Neal told Les Pockell, the editor at St. Martin’s Press who had published his first book, The Eddie Condon Scrapbook of Jazz, published in 1973, that he would like to make a book that would reproduce a selection of about 300 photographs stored at the Library of Congress, which were in the public domain and thus free of charge in terms of publication rights.
Subsequently, Hank O’Neal created his landmark A Vision Shared with 300 photos. Unlike the previous books published on the subject, he wanted all the photographs to be selected by the photographers themselves, and he wanted them to talk about their works. He selected eleven (of a total of nineteen) photographers who produced over 95% of the photographs taken during the years of the Resettlement Administration’s photographic project. He presented them in chronological order from 1935 until 1943. Nine of the eleven photographers he had chosen were still alive and all came on board of the project as did the widow and widower of the two who were deceased.
Hank O’Neal visited everyone, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, John Collier, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, Theo Jung, Walker Evans as well as Ben Shahn’s widow Bernarda Shawn and Dorothea Lange’s widower Paul Schuster Taylor. From 1974 until 1976, Hank O’Neal put together a remarkable book with the photographers still alive selecting the works they wanted to have published; they were allowed to make any sort of statements they cared to in conjunction with their photographs; and all photos would be reproduced in the same sizes as they exist in the Library of Congress (unless directed otherwise by the photographer). In addition, Hank O’Neal wrote short biographies of all the eleven photographers presented in his book, telling their stories from their point of view.
The photo book A Vision Shared by Hank O’Neal was first published in 1976 (order the 2017 re-issue from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de).
