Out of the Forties

Gulf Publishing Company, 1983. Hard cover. Very Good/Very Good. Lee, Russell. In Very Good+ condition with Very Good+ Dustjacket. In the early 1980s, journalist Nicholas Lemann decided to find out what had happened to some of the people and places the Standard Oil photographs record. First published in 1983, Out of the Forties is at once a compilation of the stories he heard and a portrait of a nation that has seen the strong yet sometimes repressive bonds of family and community give way to the greater prosperity and personal freedom of subsequent decades. The Standard Oil New Jersey (SONJ) photography collection itself, is the product of an in-depth photo-documentary project achieved between 1943 and 1956. As an initiative set up by the corporation’s public relations department, the project aim was to document the benefits of oil on everyday life in the United States. As a whole, the Standard Oil New Jersey photography collection offers the largest representation of American life in the 1940s.Roy E. Stryker (1893-1975) became director of the SONJ photographic project after his previous undertaking ended when the Farm Security Administration (FSA) department was disbanded in 1943, and he continued at Standard Oil until 1951. Stryker shaped the SONJ project much as he had the FSA, and even brought a number of FSA photographers with him to Standard Oil. The principal collection photographers included Charlotte Brooks, Esther Bubley, John Collier, Jr., Harold Corsini, Arnold Eagle, Russell Lee, Sol Libsohn, Gordon Parks, Edwin and Louise Rosskam, Charles Rotkin, John Vachon, and Todd Webb. Stryker and the SONJ photographers accomplished a complete socio-geographical portrait of the times, and their work is still recognized as one of the finest documentary projects ever undertaken.