Much Here is Beautiful brings together an archive of photography surveys that document life in America during the years before and after the Bicentennial in 1976. To celebrate this milestone anniversary of the country’s founding, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) created a grant program to fund a series of regional photography surveys that examined both people and places across America. Inspired by the legacy of the Farm Security Administration’s photographs during the Great Depression, the NEA envisioned these surveys as a new portrait of the nation, during a pivotal chapter in its history. Lasting for six years, the NEA funded over seventy photo surveys, yielding thousands of pictures taken by over 200 photographers.


The surveys were meant to be collected and archived at the Library of Congress and made accessible to the public, however that plan never came to fruition. Instead, in 1981 the NEA transferred their incomplete archive of nearly 1000 survey photographs to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM). After years of extensive research, these surveys are brought together for the first time to examine this decisive moment of federal support for photography that shaped a generation of artists.


The book opens with an introduction to the history of federal survey photography, beginning in the ninetenth century and leading up to the Bicentennial. The 1970s surveys are organized in four geographic sections: Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. From the California coast to the Kansas heartland to the streets of New York City, the photographs offer an expansive and evocative portrait of America in the 1970s and early 1980s.