Buried machinery in barn lot, due to Dust Bowl conditions. Dallas, South Dakota, May 1936
Reason
This is a very historic an iconic image (it's even included in the top tier United States article). It was nominated once before 6 months ago Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Dallas South Dakota. However, that was the image taken from the online USDA site. I contacted them and obtained a high resolution image which I uploaded to the commons. For whatever reason, the thumbnail on the website (i.e. the image previously nominated) is sepia, and the one they sent me has been converted to greyscale. In addition to being a historic image of an unrecreatable natural disaster, the composition is very striking. Focus and contrast is adequate, cropping/framing is dynamic. The image clearly illustrates the severity of dust bowl conditions.
Support Kudos to Andrew c for taking the time to request a high-res copy. Like the gruesome whipped slave pic below, I've seen this pic many times in U.S. history textbooks. This pic is almost synonymous with the whole Dust Bowl ordeal. Very encyclopedic and of very high quality. Jumpingcheese20:12, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Support Great historic image, even though the sky is completely blown and you list South Dakota twice in the list of articles.--HereToHelp02:14, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, if you have a stylesheet that doesn't turn the hyperlink underlines off (or if you hover over the links in monobook) you will see that the second SD is part of the title for the Dallas article. ;) Cheers! -Andrew c02:44, 16 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support As Jumping cheese mentioned, this is yet another historically significant image, like the famous whipped slave picture. This photograph is to the Dust Bowl as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother is to the Great Depression — it epitomizes the overwhelming nature of the climatic devastation caused by the drought and dust storms. It’s also a solid digitization of the original work; I don’t think that the sharpness is an issue at all, and the technical quality of the image is very high. As to HereToHelp’s contention that the sky is “completely blown”, well, this is a 71-year-old image, and I doubt that the (sepia) original looked any better due to the limitations of the equipment of the era (the digitization that failed previously definitely didn’t have a better-looking sky). But that’s just a guess on my part, of course — I can’t know for sure. Either way, this image certainly is iconic and encyclopedic with regards to the Dust Bowl, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be featured. —BrOnXbOmBr21 • talk • contribs • 12:31, 17 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]