In the 1930s and 1940s, a group of talented photographers under the direction of Roy Stryker was sent to South Carolina to document the lives of ordinary people in a project funded by the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, the Office of War Information, and Standard Oil of New Jersey. The results of the best efforts of those photographers are published together in A South Carolina Album, 1936-1948. The introduction by Constance B. Schulz tells the story of South Carolina and its people from 1920 to 1948.

The more than one hundred photographs featured here capture the textures of life from a time so recent that many South Carolinians remember it, but so distant in the rush of modern events that the images evoke powerful nostalgia. The photographers represented are Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano, and Martha Roberts.