'Bound for Glory': New Deal America in Color

Russell Lee/Library of Congress

Homesteaders Faro and Doris Caudill.

In the last years of the Depression, government photographers roamed the country to capture images of America: at play, at work, and struggling to survive. It was a New Deal project, the Farm Security Administration's -- and later the Office of War Information's -- attempt to document life in the United States.

The black-and-white images that emerged became emblems of the time. Dorothea Lange's photo of a migrant mother, for one: grimy and tattered, her face creased with work and worry.

What has been less known is that some of the photographers were also trying out a new technology: Kodachrome, the color film that had just come onto the market.

Now, some of those forgotten full-color images have been collected in a book, Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43. The large-format volume is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and the publisher Harry N. Abrams.

In an introduction to the collection, author Paul Hendrickson writes that he's fallen "head over heels" with the color pictures taken in the years before the nation was plunged into World War II.

NPR's Melissa Block spoke with Hendrickson about the book and the revelation of seeing Depression-era images in color.