Exhibit Revives 1970s: “In-Between” Decade
The Guardian says: ‘Leisure suits, hot pants and patched jeans. Disco and Datsuns. The Bicentennial, wide ties and cassette tapes. Environmental negativity like the Tacoma Smelter (pictured), in Washington state, which emitted arsenic and lead residue. The 1970s. The weird, in-between decade – part 60s, part 80s. A mix of optimism, pessimism and cynicism. An American stew of smog, Watergate and Earth Day. It’s all history now, unheralded, in a way, but the National Archives in Washington, D.C., is looking to change all that with a striking new exhibit that provides, in scores of color pictures, a portrait of the United States in the 70s. Entitled “Searching for the 70s: the Documerica Photography Project,” the exhibit is based on an archive of 22,000 photos that were taken by the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s and then forgotten. The project was supposed to document environmental problems of the time, but wound up illustrating the broad fabric of life across the country.
