Jack Delano - Colour Photographs.

Jack Delano (1914–1997) produced some of the most extensive colour work within the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographic programme during the early 1940s. His surviving colour transparencies date principally from 1941 to 1943 and include work made in Puerto Rico, the United States Virgin Islands and across the continental United States. In Puerto Rico during 1941 and 1942 he photographed agricultural workers, sugar cane plantations, farms, towns, streets and domestic life. During 1942 and 1943 his colour assignments increasingly documented wartime transportation and industry, particularly the American railroad system. In Chicago he photographed the Chicago and North Western Railway's yards, roundhouses, locomotives and workers, while later assignments recorded the Pennsylvania Railroad's coal operations at Sandusky, Ohio and other elements of the wartime transport network.

Delano's colour photographs were made on early Kodachrome transparency film, part of the approximately 1,600 colour photographs produced by FSA and OWI photographers between 1939 and 1944. Kodachrome was a relatively slow reversal film requiring careful exposure and produced a positive colour transparency rather than a printable colour negative. The surviving archive includes 35 mm colour slides and larger colour transparencies, while Delano simultaneously worked in black and white with 35 mm and approximately 4 × 5 inch negatives. The colour material demonstrates deliberate use of daylight, artificial industrial illumination and available light, with exposures structured around Kodachrome's limited sensitivity and latitude. His railway photographs frequently use locomotive paintwork, workers' clothing, signal equipment, workshop interiors, steam, snow and artificial lighting as structural elements within the frame rather than treating colour as an addition to an established monochrome composition.

Delano's 1940s colour photographs are reproduced extensively in Bound for Glory: America in Colour 1939–43 (2004), the Library of Congress study of the FSA and OWI colour archive, alongside work by Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, John Collier Jr. and Arthur Rothstein. His railroad work, including a substantial selection of the original Kodachrome photographs from 1942 and 1943, is collected in The Railroad Photography of Jack Delano (2016), edited by Tony Reevy with a foreword by Pablo Delano. His Puerto Rican photography is also represented in Puerto Rico Mío: Four Decades of Change / Cuatro Décadas de Cambio (1990), which places his early 1940s photographs alongside later images of the same island. The original FSA and OWI colour transparencies are preserved by the Library of Congress and constitute Delano's principal surviving body of colour photography from the 1940s.

Jack Delano

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Brown Plains - Johan Glossner

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Photographs by Jack Delano (1914–1997).
Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information Collection.
Photographed in the United States and Puerto Rico during the early 1940s.
Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Licence: No known restrictions on publication.

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