The Bitter Years:

Accompanies a display of the original exhibition opening at the Centre national de l'audiovisuel, Luxembourg, in Autumn 2012 'The Bitter Years' was the title of a seminal exhibition held in 1962 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Edward Steichen. The show featured 208 images by photographers worked under the aegis of the US Farm Security Administration in 1935-41 as part of Roosevelt's New Deal. The project launched many photographic careers, most notably those of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, whose work featured alongside that of ten other photographers, including Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans and Arthur Rothstein. Their images are testimonies of a people in crisis, hit by the full force of economic turmoil and the effects of drought and dust storms.
The Bitter Years celebrates some of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century and, since no proper catalogue was produced at the time, provides a whole new insight into Steichen's impact on the evaluation of documentary photography.