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Louisville, KY 40202
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Hours: Monday – Saturday: 10:00 am – 5:00 pm, Sunday: 11:00am-4:00 pm
Documenting Kentucky: Three Photographic Surveys
Featuring The Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project
Website: kydocphoto.com Facebook: KDPP2 Instagram: @kydocumentary
Dates: April 24 – November 9, 2025
Events: Panel Discussion>
Featuring Hower, Wathen, Swensen, and Greeson moderated by Tom Rankin of Duke University
October 22, 6-9pm
Imagine looking at Kentucky in 40 year intervals.
That’s exactly what Documenting Kentucky: Three Photographic Surveys brings to the Frazier History Museum.
The story starts in 1935, during the heart of the Great Depression. The Resettlement Administration (RA) hired photographers to document rural poverty throughout the United States. Later renamed the Farm Security Administration, its photographers made the definitive visual record of the Depression. Photographing in Kentucky were: Marion Post Wolcott, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Esther Bubley and John Vachon.
In 1975 Ted Wathen founded the Kentucky Bicentennial Photographic Project with the goal of photographing in each of Kentucky’s 120 counties, making a visual record of the state during the Bicentennial period. Bob Hower and Bill Burke joined Wathen, and the Project was subsequently renamed the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project (KDPP). The original KDPP’s work was exhibited nationally and is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
In 2011 Wathen, Hower and Burke revived the original KDPP’s work and exhibited it at the Frazier History Museum as Rough Road: The Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project 1975-77. The Response to Rough Road was overwhelming. Viewers kept coming to the photographers saying, “You need to do it again.”
Documenting Kentucky: Three Photographic Surveys is a direct response to that appeal to “Do it again.”
Wathen and Hower reincorporated the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project, and hired a diverse group of 26 photographers to document the state anew. Their plan was to integrate the new work with the photographs from the Farm Security Administration, and the original KDPP. Three looks at the same state done in 40 year intervals.
The theme and intent of the exhibit is a visual tone poem to the state of Kentucky; three photographic surveys spanning 90 years. How we look, play, worship and inhabit the land.