In the 1970s, the U.S. Commissioned Photographers to Document the Country’s People and Places. You Can Now See More Than 200 of the Powerful Images

In “American Journal,” poet Robert Hayden calls the nation “an organism that changes even as I examine it.” Hayden wrote the poem in 1976, the same year that he became the first Black American consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a role that would later be known as the U.S. poet laureate. A couple years later, “American Journal” was published in a poetry collection of the same name. Born and raised in Detroit, Hayden chose to write the piece as though he were an extraterrestrial visiting the United States from another world to study the country and then report back to his planet.

In America, he writes, there is “much grandiloquence,” “much buying and selling,” “much violence” and “much that repels.” But, he writes of the country’s landscapes, from its mountains to its canyons, “much here is beautiful.” That line became crucial for the curators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, who chose to make it the title of their newest exhibition. Bicentennial,” open now through April 18, 2027, features more than 200 images that showcase America’s people and places. The pictures are drawn from the photography program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to commemorate America’s 200th birthday in 1976.

Over a multiyear period, the agency supported 72 projects that produced thousands of photos from hundreds of photographers, some known and some unsung, around the country. The agency’s aim was to create an archive of American imagery, photographic surveys of the land and its inhabitants around the time of the bicentennial. In the early 1980s, the NEA transferred prints from several of the surveys—about 1,000 photos—to the Smithsonian after the program ended.

The recently unveiled exhibition, co-curated by the museum’s John Jacob and Krystle Stricklin, brings together a selection of the survey images for the first time. Much like the NEA projects themselves, the photography on display spans geographically across the entire nation. The photos are often striking in their ability to reveal America as a home—to people and animals, to cities, plains and rock formations.

Hower shows a family full of happy faces on the Fourth of July in 1976 Kentucky. In 1979 Wyoming, an Australian cattle dog stares through a fence under a dreamy blue sky with scattered white clouds, photographed by Penny Wolin. In another Wolin image from that year, Dolly Parton smiles brightly, dimples showing, ahead of her Cheyenne Frontier Days debut.

Also in 1979, Kenneth McGowan captures a moment in California: an impeccably dressed woman pumping gas into a shiny blue car. The next year, in Washington State, Emmet Gowin documents the devastation wrought by the freshly erupted Mount St. Helens, the landscape barren as the cratered volcano looms in the distance.