Photographing the State of the Environment in the 1970s

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

In the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency sent over 70 photographers to all 50 states in order to document the environmental concerns of the regions. The EPA had only just formed in 1970, and the interest in the state of the environment was high. With some of the best photojournalists of the time sent out with little restrictions to find stories, the results of the federally-funded project — called Documerica — didn’t just capture smokestacks looming ominously over homes and the festering pockets of pollution (although it had plenty of that), but also daily life from all corners of the country and the trends and cultural diversity of the time. Read on

Swimming in the fountain of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, August 1973 (photograph by Dick Swanson, via U.S. National Archives)

July 4th at the Kosciusko Swimming Pool in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn (photograph by Danny Lyon, via U.S. National Archives)

Hunters with a deer at a check station in Colorado, 1972 (photograph by David Hiser, via U.S. National Archives)

A traveling organ player at the Flint Hills Rodeo in Kansas, June 1974 (photograph by Patricia D. Duncan, via U.S. National Archives)

A Senior Citizens’ March to protest inflation in Chicago, October 1973 (photograph by John H. White, via U.S. National Archives)

Inspecting logs at a lumberyard from a burn area in Yosemite National Park (photograph by Charles O’Rear, via U.S. National Archives)

The “granite fire” area of the 1973 Sierra Mountain Range forest fire (photograph by Charles O’Rear, via U.S. National Archives)

Entering the smoke from the August 1973 Sierra Mountain Range fire to haul off logs from fire-damaged trees (photograph by Charles O’Rear, via U.S. National Archives)

Fountain Square in Downtown Cincinnati, May 1973 (photograph by Tom Hubbard, via U.S. National Archives)

Navajo Generating Plant Under Construction on land leased from the tribe (photograph Lyntha Scott Eiler, via U.S. National Archives)

Swimmer at Havasu Creek on the Havasupai Reservation in Arizona, a heavily touristed waterway, 1972 (photograph by Terry Eiler, via U.S. National Archives)

View from Dead Horse Point in Utah, May 1972 (photograph by David Hiser, via U.S. National Archives)