Carl Mydans (1907 - 2004 )

Carl Mydans was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1907. He studied at Boston University, where he worked on the Boston University News, and went on to become a reporter for the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. Mydans would take a second-hand camera with him when he went out for stories; this is how his talent for photography was discovered. He has since become known for his photographic documentation of the poor living conditions of rural America and for his written and photographic accounts of war.

In 1933 Carl Mydans wrote “Why Ford Workers Strike,” an article about a strike at the Edgewater, New Jersey plant of the Ford Motor Car Company. In it he stated the reasons for the strike and the conditions the workers had to deal with.(1) In 1935, he was invited by Roy Stryker to join the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a federal agency that worked to document the plight of America’s rural poor. During Mydans’s involvement with the FSA he traveled to various states, including New Jersey, and photographed the activities and living conditions of migrant workers. Mydans left the FSA after a year to join Life magazine and began working on war photography.(2)

In 1939, Mydans and his wife Shelley were sent to Europe as Life magazine’s first husband-and-wife photographer-reporter team to photograph World War II. They were in the Philippines when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and were taken captive until December of 1943. In 1944 Mydans traveled to Italy with the Allied forces and photographed the campaign in Monte Cassino before moving on to France, where he documented the D-Day landings. He also photographed the end of the Pacific War and Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies in September of 1945.(3)

After the war Mydans moved on to work for Time magazine. He continued to use photography to document current events around the world including the 1948 earthquake in Fukui and the Korean War.(4)

Through Mydans’ abilities as a photographer and writer, the world was given an in-depth and personal look at the tragedy and drama involved in war and other disasters. His accounts of the earthquake in Fukui brought the viewer right into the midst of the tragedy as it was taking place; he literally took pictures as the earthquake flattened the city around him. He also wrote a detailed eyewitness description of the event. Mydans’s books, “History!” and “In the Eye of the Storm” do the same. Through the images and written accounts in these books, readers are transported right into the midst of the events occurring around the photojournalist. Mydans’s books give readers a deeper sense of awareness and understanding of war by letting them experience it first-hand, through someone who was there. Carl Mydans died on August 16, 2004.

(1)Newdeal.feri.org (see link below)

(2-4)Spartcus web site (see link below)

Additional reference:

Iconblvd.com (see link below)

Youngsters during a rest period, Radburn, New Jersey

Youngsters during a rest period, Radburn, New Jersey, November 1935. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection.

Children in the window of their home which was formerly a store, Hamilton Road, Franklin Township, Bound Brook, New Jersey. February 1936. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of Wa

Wooden church in Negro section near Lincoln Highway near Franklin Township, Bound Brook, New Jersey, February 1936. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information.

Carl Mydans photographed people and places in a variety of locations.(1) His work for the FSA took him to eastern states ranging from Vermont to Tennessee, and to such midwestern states as Indiana and Wisconsin. He photographed people in their homes, children playing, farm scenes, workers (electricians, plasterers, construction workers, fence builders, and weavers), as well as quarries, sawmills, and markets.

Some viewers admire Mydans’s images of people, including families and children, most highly. Nevertheless, his work for the FSA also included the photographic documention of several planned communities including Jersey Homesteads, near Hightstown, New Jersey, and Radburn (now Fairlawn), New Jersey. Three of Mydans’s photographs of Radburn are posted on this web site in the “Architecture” category. He also photographed Bound Brook, New Jersey. (KNO)

(1)Library of Congress web site: http://memory.loc.gov