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Across 2,000 square feet on the third floor of the Frazier History Museum in Louisville, roughly 150 photographs capture moments from three different eras in Kentucky that span nearly 100 years.
In one moment, it’s 1940 at the Shelby County Fair dirt track, where a dapper young man sporting wingtip shoes and a snazzy hat judges the health of a row of plump babies sitting comfortably in the laps of their well-dressed mamas.
Fast forward 76 years to the 2016 Shelby County Fair. Little Miss and Little Mister Shelby County sit next to the dirt track. He’s sporting shorts, flip-flops and an oversized crown. She is pretty in pink with a sparkling tiara.
Another moment portrays a couple getting baptized in a Morehead creek during the Great Depression. Roughly 80 years after that, a Leslie County woman rises from her baptismal submersion in a Hyden lake.
Standing alone in a 1977 moment is a young man using a payphone, his wife and baby hugged to his side.
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All of these can be seen at the Frazier’s latest exhibit, Documenting Kentucky: Three Photographic Surveys, open through Nov. 9. “It’s so valuable for us to have here at the Frazier,” said Amanda Briede, the senior curator of exhibitions. “Not only does [the exhibit] represent all of Kentucky’s counties, it also shows the history of Kentucky and being able to visually see that history from all over the state. It’s really showing such a breadth of time and space and really what Kentucky is, and it’s such a beautiful exhibition.”
In the throes of the Great Depression, the National Farm Security Administration commissioned photographers to visually document rural America. The images, many taken in poverty-stricken rural Kentucky, were then used in newsreels and publications across the country.
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In 1975, Louisville photographer Ted Wathen had the idea to solely document Kentucky by capturing moments in every county in the Commonwealth. He brought on fellow photographers Bob Hower and Bill Burke, thanks to a small grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, for the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project (KDPP).
Their work was exhibited at the Speed Museum in Louisville; the George Eastman House and International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York; and, ultimately, the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
“Then it lay dormant for 30 years,” Wathen said. “We revived it at the Frazier in 2011, and the response to that show was just overwhelming. People kept saying you need to do it again; you need to do it again. So, we did it. We started it again.”
In 2014, the KDPP was reborn with a new grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council, and contributions from multiple donors.
Library of Congress; P&P
Wathen said they went from three “upper-middle-class white guys with graduate degrees” in the 1970s, to more than two dozen photographers—many coming from different countries asking to be a part of something special, even if the pay wasn’t spectacular.
“It’s not generous. It wasn’t as much as they would make doing commercial work,” Wathen said. “But if you talk to them, they’ll all say this is the best thing they ever did.”
Arkansas photographer Rachel Boillot confirmed that in a blog post on KDPP’s website, kydocphoto.com.
“As a member of the KDPP team, it is my great honor to record our present in order to contribute to this canon of visual history that I so revere,” she wrote. “It is this very conviction that keeps me going.”
Wathen said more than 200,000 photos were taken during the two periods, and they all weave a story of moments of stark change between 1975 and today.
“People ask the question, ‘What’s the difference between the ’70s and the project you see now?’ ” Wathen said. “If you were gay, you were in the closet … In the ’70s, I never saw an interracial couple. Nobody was walking around with these little devices in their hands all the time.”
Wathen noted that even the demographics have changed.
“You drive through rural Kentucky now, and you see tobacco barns falling down all over the place. And because the small farms have disappeared, land prices in Kentucky are cheap,” he said. “So, the Mennonites have moved in. The Amish have moved in. In the 1970s, I never saw any Amish.”
The photos will be turned over to the University of Louisville Photographic Archives once the exhibit ends in November.
The photos from the National Farm Security Administration’s Great Depression project are now preserved in the Library of Congress and available for public use.
Wathen said Kentucky’s moments of history are never over. “We would like some members of the current crop of photographers to take up the mantle and start the project anew in 2055, thus keeping the 40-year cycle intact,” he said.
Documenting Kentucky: Three Photographic Surveys
The exhibition will be on view through Nov. 9, 2025, and will include a series of public programs, including a collaboration with Louisville’s Photo Biennial.
Through nearly 150 photographs, visitors will gain new insight into the everyday lives of Kentuckians—how they lived, worked, celebrated and endured across decades of cultural and economic change.
“The stories these images tell—some stark, some joyful, all deeply human—remind us of the power of photography to record and reflect a place and its people,” Frazier Senior Curator of Exhibitions Amanda Briede said. “This exhibition is not just about Kentucky’s past. It’s also a mirror held up to its present and a conversation about its future.”
Frazier History Museum
829 West Main Street, Louisville
502.753.5663
Monday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Sunday 11 a.m.-4 p.m.