About

While working on my documentary website, Vanishing South Georgia, the aesthetic which guided me was born in images of dusty farms and and the hard-working people who populated them. The photographers of Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) Information Division went on to become some of the most respected and influential photojournalists in American history; the work  of John Vachon, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Walcott, and Carl Mydans at Irwinville remains a poignant and surprisingly broad souvenir of good people in bad times, an invaluable visual thumbprint of the perseverance and determination of the common man.

I’ve studied Irwinville Farms obsessively over the years, and have spent much of my life around Irwinville, Georgia. Many of the structures built by FSA remain today. The images seen here are largely drawn from the public domain collections of the Library of Congress and are available on their website, but this site attempts to make them more accessible, in an attempt to encourage comments and reminisces by people who remember Irwinville Farms, or descendants who share its story.

–Brian Brown,  27 September 2011