“The devastation of the Great Depression found its greatest chroniclers in the Farm Security Administration’s matchless cohort of genius photographers, whose work in Arkansas is the focus of Patsy G. Watkins’s illuminating study. The whole all-star team—Evans, Lange, Lee, Rothstein, and Shahn—worked for a New Deal bureaucracy among the nation’s most vulnerable citizens, but images loosed in the world are understood in unpredictable ways, mixing as they do the voices and purposes (sometimes in harmony, at other times in tension) of their subjects, their makers, and their makers’ bosses. Watkins’s careful attention to this archive presents some 180 of its most compelling images in a coherently arranged and richly contextualized format. By her efforts Arkansas joins the Alabama distinguished by James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the Mississippi ennobled by Eudora Welty’s One Time, One Place.”
—Robert Cochran, author of A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice
“Over eight years, nearly 250,000 photos were taken of migrant workers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers and laborers. About 1,000 are identified with Arkansans and about 800 were taken in the state. Of those, just over 180 are gathered thoughtfully, poignantly in Patsy G. Watkins’ It’s All Done Gone: Arkansas Photographs From the Farm Security Administration Collection, 1935-1943.”
—Sean Clancy, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, October 2018
"By reproducing these glimpses of the past...It’s All Done Gone immerses us in the Depression era. It’s All Done Gone is not just worth reading, it is worth lingering over.”
—David Welky, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Spring 2019