Holiday Gift Suggestions – Through a Lens

Louisiana FSA photographs

The Farm Security Administration enlisted photographers during the Depression to document how rural areas needed federal assistance. They hired nationwide, including three for Louisiana, which were photographers Ben Shahn, Russell Lee and Marion Post Wolcott.

Bryan Giemza and Maria Hebert-Leiter have taken this visual history shot from 1935 to 1943 and compiled the photographs, along with a history of the endeavor, into “Images of Depression-era Louisiana: The FSA Photographs of Ben Shahn, Russell Lee and Marion Post Wolcott,” by LSU Press. This fascinating history is mostly of rural Louisiana, but there are shots of New Orleans as well.

Giemza is director of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina Libraries and author of “Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South.” Hebert-Leiter teaches at Lycoming College and is the author of “Becoming Cajun, Becoming American: The Acadian in American Literature from Longfellow to James Lee Burke.”

Lens on fire

Armand “Sheik” Richardson, a native of New Orleans, has been capturing the city in photos for a lifetime, including owning Penumbra Photos which focused on forensic and commercial photography. He relates his love of the camera along with photographs, many of which are of the city’s musicians and unique traditions, in “A Fire in My Lens: An Insider’s Look at New Orleans,” published by Pelican Publishing. He includes shots of Mardi Gras, the “Bone Men,” jazz greats, Second Lines and jazz funerals, parade grand marshals and so much more.

Richardson is also the founder of the Arabi Wrecking Krewe who provided disaster relief after Katrina and the book contains photos of that time in the city’s history, as well.

Louisiana Book News is written by author Chere Dastugue Coen who writes novels under the pen name of Cherie Claire.