Kodachrome, give us those nice bright colors

"I've spent 30 years looking at black-and-white images of this era, and they're full of meaning, but the color ones have a different dimension," says Beverly Brannan, a curator of photography at the Library of Congress. "This is how the world actually looked."

The images seen here are part of a 70-photograph exhibit, titled "Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943." It is the first major exhibit that the Library of Congress has mounted from its collection of more than 1,600 little-seen color images taken for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. They were produced at a time when the United States was slowly emerging from the Depression and heading into World War II.

According to Brannan, color photography had just begun in earnest in 1935. By 1937, Kodak Co. felt secure enough in the medium that it distributed color film to government photographers so they could experiment. The results are simply stunning.

All of the color photos -- as well as more than 160,000 black-and-white images of the period -- can be viewed here.

The 70 images in the exhibition were chosen from among 175 photographs found the companion book Bound for Glory by Paul Hendrickson, available at Allen County Public Library. The book includes Library of Congress reference numbers for each of the photos, which allows readers to search for the specific image online or order prints from the LOC’s Photoduplication Service.