As absurd as it sounds, there is a kind of psychological truth to it — having seen mostly black-and-white pictures of the world pre-1960 or so (I’m not counting Technicolor movies), I begin to imagine the past unfolding in monochrome. Every once in a while, though, a really old color photo made with some obscure, early color process will slip through and blow my mind.
But this really takes the cake: the Library of Congress has just created a Flickr page, on which they’ve posted nearly 2,000 color slides — many of them hauntingly beautiful. The photographers worked for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information, for whom many famous black-and-white pictures were taken around the same time (the iconic “Migrant Mother,” for instance).
But rather than sending you off to pick through thousands of these photos on Flickr — something of a laborious process — we’ve compiled our favorites here. These are portraits almost as compelling as “Migrant Mother,” but even more vivid — almost hyper-real — for their eye-popping color. (In fact, they hardly seem like historical photos at all.) For whatever reason, they’ve remained obscure until now, and we thought they deserved a little extra attention.
