N.C.'s Depression

It's the furthest thing from a "blockbuster" exhibition. No Monets are on the museum's menu. But a modestly scaled display of photographs from the 1930s at the N.C. Museum of History is the real deal - make that, the real New Deal.

"In Search of a New Deal," the exhibit in downtown Raleigh, consists of a few interesting 1930s artifacts and, mainly, 50 photos taken by Farm Security Administration photographers in North Carolina from 1935 to 1941. These are no ordinary snapshots. They are carefully composed, painstakingly developed and revelatory of their time and place.

That setting is mainly rural North Carolina. There was a Depression on - you'll know it when you see it - but life went on too, with its joys, sorrows and endless hard work in field and barn.

It so happens that today the band of FSA photographers is well known and even famous (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, etc.) and that several of the pictures in the exhibition are masterpieces of their kind. There's some New Deal ideology at work in the photos, upholding government programs for the poor, but mainly these pictures show the human spirit, beaten down but not broken. And they remind us of an impoverished North Carolina that today still exists for some - think of migrant workers - but has largely given way to more prosperous times.

Thanks heavens for that, and for this artful view (which will run until 2011) of our state.