The Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project

Help us create a visual history of Kentucky! 

Inspired by the iconic images of rural America captured by the photographers of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930's and early 1940's, the original Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project(1975-77) undertook a 3 year photographic documentation of all the state’s 120 counties.

In 2015 Ted Wathen and Bob Hower decided to renew the Project and survey the state again; to see what a fresh look might tell us about ourselves as Kentuckians. With a larger team of younger and more diverse photographers (now numbering 26!), we’ve once again photographed in all 120 counties, penetrating deeper into the culture, people, and land of Kentucky. While much of the photography has been completed , WE STILL NEED YOUR HELP.

We are presently editing over 100,000 photographs for a 2025 exhibit at the Frazier History Museum and a book to be published by the University Press of Kentucky. We need to pay our writers and designers and help underwrite the exhibit and publication costs. Will you help us? Learn more at:  http://kydocphoto.com.  Watch our video above to see some of the imagery we've been creating. THANK YOU!

Who We Are

Our project is the second iteration of the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project (KDPP) and is the third major photographic survey of the State in the past 80 years. During the 1930’s and early 1940’s the Farm Security Administration sent some of America’s leading photographers across the country to “introduce America to Americans.” Part propaganda, part social activism, and part visual history, that work has now also been widely accepted as “art,” forming much of our impression of life, especially rural life, during the Great Depression. Several of those photographers, most notably Marion Post Wolcott, but also Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and John Vachon, worked in Kentucky during that time period, documenting and describing both the land and its people.
With the work of these and other notable 20th Century documentarians as inspiration, 3 photographers – Ted Wathen, Bob Hower, and Bill Burke - set out in the mid-1970’s to photograph in all 120 counties of Kentucky, with a goal of describing, recording and interpreting what the State and its communities looked like, to create a time capsule as it were, which could be opened later by those seeking to know and understand life in Kentucky during the time of America’s Bicentennial. Funded in large part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, we slept in our cars or camped, cooked our own food, and scoured the ins and outs of the State for subject matter over the course of 3 years, producing thousands of black and white negatives in various film formats. While artists at heart, we also well understood the importance of impartial description and recording what was in front of our eyes, knowing that what might seem mundane today would be valuable and rare as time erased the present world and memories faded. The work from those 3 years was shown at the Speed Art Museum, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The George Eastman House, The Kentucky Historical Society, and a number of other venues. 60 prints from the original project are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. After lying dormant for a number of years, in 2011, as part of Louisville’s Photo Biennial, the project was revived. Scans were made from the original negatives and then printed to 2’ x 3’ scale, and approximately 90 images were exhibited at the Frazier History Museum. The show was a resounding success and audience members urged us to do the project again.
So here we are. In 2015 we received a startup grant from Betty and David Jones Sr. to test the waters; to see if the idea was still viable in the 21st Century, and to see if we were still up to the task. It is and we are. This time, however, our intent has been to hire a much broader and more diverse team of photographers to help us look at the state anew, to explore new ways of conceiving what “documentary” means, and to penetrate even deeper into the culture and land than we did in the first project. To this end, we have to date hired 24 new photographers to join two of the original three team members on the new version of the Project. An exhibition of work from over 20 of Kentucky’s counties was held for public viewing at Metro Hall in Louisville from September 2019 through February 2020. Although we are documentarians, we also believe that the best of our work rises above journalism and description to art; that our best imagery is personal, evocative, complex, and says something larger about Kentucky and the human condition.