It's All Done Gone

In 1935 a fledging government agency embarked on a project to photograph Americans hit hardest by the Great Depression. Over the next eight years, the photographers of the Farm Security Administration captured nearly a quarter-million images of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the South, migrant workers in California, and laborers in northern industries and urban slums.

Of the roughly one thousand FSA photographs taken in Arkansas, approximately two hundred have been selected for inclusion in this volume. Portraying workers picking cotton for five cents an hour, families evicted from homes for their connection with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the effects of flood and drought that cruelly exacerbated the impact of economic disaster, these remarkable black-and-white images from Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, and other acclaimed photographers illustrate the extreme hardships that so many Arkansans endured throughout this era.

These powerful photographs continue to resonate, providing a glimpse of life in Arkansas that will captivate readers as they connect to a shared past.

"By reproducing these glimpses of the past...It's All Done Gone immerses us in the Depression era. It's All Done Gone is not just worth reading, it is worth lingering over."
--David Welky, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Spring 2019
"Over eight years, nearly 250,000 photos were taken of migrant workers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers and laborers. About 1,000 are identified with Arkansans and about 800 were taken in the state. Of those, just over 180 are gathered thoughtfully, poignantly in Patsy G. Watkins' It's All Done Gone: Arkansas Photographs From the Farm Security Administration Collection, 1935-1943."
--Sean Clancy, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 2018
"The devastation of the Great Depression found its greatest chroniclers in the Farm Security Administration's matchless cohort of genius photographers, whose work in Arkansas is the focus of Patsy G. Watkins's illuminating study. The whole all-star team--Evans, Lange, Lee, Rothstein, and Shahn--worked for a New Deal bureaucracy among the nation's most vulnerable citizens, but images loosed in the world are understood in unpredictable ways, mixing as they do the voices and purposes (sometimes in harmony, at other times in tension) of their subjects, their makers, and their makers' bosses. Watkins's careful attention to this archive presents some 180 of its most compelling images in a coherently arranged and richly contextualized format. By her efforts Arkansas joins the Alabama distinguished by James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the Mississippi ennobled by Eudora Welty's One Time, One Place."
--Robert Cochran, author of A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice