Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Fanfare for the People

A while back, I wrote a blog post about the wonderful color images that the Library of Congress has made available as one of their photostreams on Flickr. These pictures were all taken by photographers working for the Farm Services Administration or the Office of War Information. I was looking at the collection again recently and I was so impressed with the portraits of the people portrayed in their daily work. These photos also captured a time when women were working in factories in dramatically increased numbers to augment the war effort.

I started toying with the idea of setting some of these photos to music. What music could be more appropriate than Aaron Copeland's Fanfare for the Common Man. Copeland wrote the piece in August of 1942 at the request of Eugene Goossens, the conductor of the Cinncinnati Symphony Orchestra. This was one of eighteen fanfares that were composed by various conductors but by far the one which has lived on beyond its original intention.

So here is a little slideshow that I put together using a few of the photos which show people at their work, much of it working with technology. I hope you like it.

[Update: This box shows up as 4:3 while the original is 16:9. You will see the images cropped here but if you double-click through to the YouTube page you can see it in full format.]

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