Carl Mydans

Carl Mydans
Carl Mydans in 1935
Born	May 20, 1907 Medford, Massachusetts
Died	August 16, 2004 (2004-08-17) (aged 97) Larchmont, New York
Nationality	American
Employer	Life magazine
Spouse(s)	Shelley Mydans

Carl Mydans (May 20, 1907 – August 16, 2004) was an American photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration and Life magazine.

Mydans grew up playing on the Mystic River near Medford, near Boston, Massachusetts. His father was an oboist.

Mydans became devoted to photography while in college at Boston University. While working on the Boston University News he abandoned childhood dreams of being a surgeon or a boat builder in favor of journalism. His first reporting jobs were for The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. After college, he went to New York as a writer for American Banker and then in 1935 to Washington to join a group of photographers in the Farm Security Administration. There he worked with other photographers like Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn to document the conditions of the American rural workers.

In 1935, he traveled throughout New England and America's South, documenting the end of a rural-based economy, and gained a measure of renown for his images of bedraggled Arkansas farmers and their families. It was the Great Depression, and the poorest of America's poor were devastated by the economic downturn. "One picture, of a Tennessee family living in a hut built on an abandoned truck chassis, portrays the misery of the times," noted Mydans' Times of London obituary, "as starkly as any photographs by his more celebrated contemporaries."

In 1936, he joined Life as one of its earliest staff photographers (Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Thomas McAvoy and Peter Stackpole were the original staff photographers) and a pioneering photojournalist.