The Boy

This photograph, captioned only “Son of a woodcutter in Eden Mills, Vermont,” was taken in August 1936 by Carl Mydans for the Resettlement Administration which became the Farm Security Administration and, later, the Office of War Information. From the mid-1930s to mid-1940s, the federal government commissioned more than 160,000 documentary photos including this one. There are no copyrights. The photographer went on to become a giant in his field. Mydans was one of Life magazine’s first photographers and worked for decades covering events and wars across the globe. Born in 1907, he died in September 2004. To see more photographs from this era, go to http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html and use Vermont as a search word. This is a site within the Library of Congress Web site, loc.gov.