Nearly 45,000 images from the famous photographic collection produced for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and Office of War Information (OWI) have been put online by the Library of Congress. The images, many of which were never printed before, are available at the library's American Memory web site at http://www.loc.gov. These images form a pictorial record of American life from 1935 to 1945, and include striking and evocative photographs by artists of the camera such as Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, and Ben Shahn. These photographers working for the government focused first on rural life and the hardships caused by the Great Depression, and later turned to the mobilization effort for World War II.

The library intends ultimately to put the entire FSA-OWI collection of 164,000 black-and-white negatives online. More than 1,600 color images are already available at the American Memory web site. The database software used at the site enables researchers to retrieve the images in various ways.