Who will document the Closing of America?

50,000 jobs were lost by 10am this morning--that's just the news wire announcements from well-known American corporations. With the closing of some vintage factories like the Ford plant and others, who will be documenting this for the future?

The last Depression heralded in an era of great photography. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston launched their Group f.64 named after the f-stop that produced their sharp images. Ansel Adams came from a non-political family but his iconic images of the American wilderness supported the environmental movement for decades. Edward Weston was more of the West Coast Bohemian culture but his contribution to documenting the social situation of the day was teaching his lover and model Tina Modotti how to photograph. Modotti went on to be a radical photographer of unrest in Mexico, the Spanish Civil War and later became entwined with the politics of the Comintern, eventually fleeing detection from Stalin's assassins in Mexico. Lewis Hines documented the effects of the Depression on the East Coast cities.

It wasn't until Rexford Tugwell brought Roy Stryker to Washington to head the photography session of the Farm Security Administration under FDR that the human toil of the Depression was documented in a systematic way. In 1936, Walker Evans, borrowed from the FSA project, spent the summer in Alabama with James Agee, photographing tenant farmers. The results we now remember as the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. A year later Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell published their photo-documentary book You Have Seen Their Faces, a study of Southern poverty. In my opinion, the most stunning of these works is Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor's American Exodus, documenting the Dust Bowl migration.

The man packing his machines to be shipped to China, the last SUV off the assembly line, the hundreds of people camped out at dawn for medical care in Kentucky, the ghost towns of McMansions in Illinois and the soon to be deserted super mall in Potomac Mills, Virginia. Hopefully, some young photographers are out there shooting this period of our history. I hope we hear from them soon.