THE GOODS : Art History for Little More Than a Late Fee

On the wall of my living room is a spectacular, 15-by-19-inch photograph of a young girl in a straw hat by one of this country’s most esteemed photographers, Walker Evans. In glorious black and white, it is one of the most haunting and famous images captured by Evans during the Depression.

This is no poster, it’s the real thing--a pristine photographic image from the Evans negative. But before the IRS starts investigating how I was able to buy one of the landmark photos in art history, I hasten to add that it cost me all of about $20.

Evans was one of the scores of photographers employed by the federal government during the Depression and into the 1940s to make a visual record of American life. The images belong to the United States government--one of the cheap-but-impressive art collecting tips of all time is that anyone can order a beautiful print from the Library of Congress for a pittance.

Unfortunately, there is no museum or art gallery where you can go to see this collection. It resides at the library, where images first need to be searched out in a reference system and then located by call number (the same number needed to order a print).

But soon, the entire collection will be available to anyone with access to the World Wide Web on the Internet. The Library of Congress has begun to put digitized versions of the photos onto its wonderful site, “American Memory” (https://lcweb2.loc.gov/amhome.html).

Currently, all 1,609 color photos taken under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information, from 1939 to 1945, are online. This is only a small part of the collection--the black and white photos taken for those agencies number about 108,000. These images are scheduled to join the color work on the site sometime next year.

The color photos are far less well known than the black and white images, but several are by two of the best known of government-sponsored photographers.

Marion Post Wolcott took color shots for the FSA of mining operations in Tennessee, farming in Georgia and migrant workers in Florida, among other topics. And Arnold Rothstein, whose pictures of Dust Bowl conditions are among the most memorable of the Depression, captured color images in Texas of a civilian pilot training school and migrant labor camp.

Other noted photographers whose works are in the color collection include Jack Delano, Russell Lee and John Vachon.

There are several images taken in the Los Angeles area, mostly of home front activity during the war years. Many are of women in war supply factories, including a shot by David Bransby of a worker testing electrical assemblies at Vega Aircraft in Burbank and several pictures of riveters and other workers taken by Alfred Palmer at Douglas Aircraft in Long Beach.

The “American Home” site is not the easiest to navigate around and some of the text is written in bureaucratese, but after a few minutes you get the hang of searching out photos by artist, subject matter or location. For each image there are brief notes including a description, date and the Library of Congress reproduction number for ordering purposes. (The color photos are more costly than the black and whites because of additional processing involved. For example, an 8-by-10 print of the worker at Vega Aircraft would cost about $75, according to a Library of Congress employee reached at the order number, [202] 707-5640.)

While you are at the “American Home” site, be sure to check out its other treasures, including the reproduction of four Walt Whitman notebooks that were discovered missing from the Library of Congress in 1944 and not found until this year. The notebooks, which contain Whitman’s observations as a nurse during the Civil War and early drafts of his “Song of Myself,” turned up when a New York lawyer settling his father’s estate took them to Sotheby’s auction house for appraisal.

By the way, 10 of the Whitman notebooks, library officials say, are still missing.

* Cyburbia’s Internet address is David.Colker@latimes.com.