A Photographic Blast From the Past

In January 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency asked nearly 100 freelance photographers to roam the country in the pursuit of a single goal: documenting “the environmental happenings and non-happenings” of the decade. By 1977, the photographers had submitted more than 80,000 images for the project, known as Documerica. About one-quarter of the photographs were shown in public exhibitions but then filed away and largely forgotten.

Rediscovered by Jerry Simmons, an archives specialist at the National Archives and Records Administration, the collection has been unearthed in time for its 40th anniversary. More than 15,000 images have been digitized and posted at the National Archives Web site, and a selection is also available on Flickr.

“I was completely fascinated with the photographs,” said Mr. Simmons, who discovered them during a catalog update that quickly deviated from the routine. He embarked on independent research and started up a blog on the project, seeking out people and places that had in many cases been nameless for decades. In one such instance, he had the town librarian in New Ulm, Minn., post fliers inquiring after the identity of a young half-smiling bride.

“I can’t stop thinking about the pictures,” said Mr. Simmons, whose New Year’s resolution is to complete his second article on the project.

The E.P.A. was only 13 months old at the project’s start, and the photo collection captures the transition between an era of nearly unrestrained resource use and industrial pollution and another of aspirational environmental legislation and conservation.

 “Documerica was the visual echo of the mission of the E.P.A.,”said Chester Higgins Jr., who was hired in 1973 to capture images in New York City and is now a photographer for The New York Times. “At the time, New York City was captured in a soup of pollution that ranged from bad air, which caused horrific heat inversions, to chemically polluted waters, which depopulated the healthy fish.”

Gifford Hampshire, a press officer at the young agency, came up with the idea for the project and urged the agency’s first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, to make it a reality. Mr. Hampshire drew inspiration from a similar program initiated by the 1930’s Farm Security Administration.

“Future Americans should understand our successes and failures,” Mr. Hampshire wrote in laying out guidelines on goals and expectations for the photographers.

In its early years, particularly under Mr. Ruckelshaus’s tenure, Documerica received ample financing and support. But before long the rising urgency of other issues like the military drawdown in Vietnam and the oil crisis of 1973-74 siphoned budgetary support from the program. By 1977, Documerica was a peripheral project with “no more fire in the belly,” Mr. Hampshire wrote. The last public showing of photographs from the project closed in August 1978.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the project, the E.P.A. started a second, more populist photodocumentary project last year that enlists people around the globe to submit current photographs of “life and our environment.”