Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial

From the California coast to the Kansas heartland to the streets of New York City, the photographs in Much Here Is Beautiful: Photography Surveys of the U.S. Bicentennial offer an expansive and evocative portrait of America in the 1970s and early 1980s. Explore selected images from photography surveys that document people and places in the United States from the 19th century to the years before and after the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. ​

To celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, the milestone anniversary of the country’s founding, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) created a grant program to fund a series of regional photographic projects that documented both people and places across the country. Inspired by the legacy of the Farm Security Administration’s photographs during the Great Depression, the NEA envisioned these surveys as a new portrait of the nation, during a pivotal chapter in its history. Lasting for six years, the NEA funded more than 70 photo surveys, yielding thousands of pictures taken by more than 200 photographers. ​In 1983, 1,000 photographs by NEA grant recipients were transferred to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among the material received by the museum were prints from thirteen of the survey projects.