JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The catalog description for the slim 1931 pamphlet,  The Southern Forestry Educational Project Final Report (American Forestry Association of D.C.) 1937, doesn’t exactly make the generally-curious reader generally curious. As it turns out it packs a lot of data and info into its thirty-two very tight and crisply-written pages–better yet are the photo illustrations, which were a real surprise, and have for the most part nearly every measure of what documentary photography would become in just a few years under the Farm Security Administration. American Forestry sent trucks out into the deep parts of Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia to host community meetings in which there were lectures and movies on forest use, maintenance, and fire prevention–for many first movie experience. All tolled from 1928 through 1931 there were 7,370 lectures and “picture shows” given to some 1.1 million attendees, which sound like pretty big numbers to me.  

[The analysis shows that of the 4,606 picture shows only 504 were given at “Negro schools”; of the 2,764 lectures 1,200 were given to audiences at schools for African Americans.]