The Likes of Us:
America in the Eyes of the Farm Security Administration

by Stu Cohen, edited, with a foreword, by Peter Bacon Hales
David R. Godine, Publisher

A challenging book, from first to last. Stu Cohen had originally started on the book in the late 1980s, collecting prints from the original FSA negatives in the Library of Congress and locating rare documents from the photographers and Roy Stryker, the FSA photographic division’s director in the 1930s and ’40s. The finished book had been under contract with another publisher for a long stretch, during which Cohen died, and the project fell into the publishing world’s version of a black hole. The manuscript and the prints eventually made their way to Godine, where I was given carte blanche to get the book to press. We were fortunate to find the photographic historian Peter Bacon Hales to gently update the text and fill it out with his own foreword. Eager to avoid the cliché high-modernist design so common with books of FSA imagery, I sought out magazines of the period in which the photographs would have been published – particularly vintage issues of Fortune magazine – to inform the layouts and typography. 

Hardcover with jacket, 8 × 11"