They set out to photograph all 120 Kentucky counties. They found 'common humanity'

Bob Hower and Ted Wathen of the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project look over prints at the Frazier Museum, Wednesday, October 8, 2025. The exhibition features work from the Depression-era Farm Security Administration efforts (1935–43), and the original Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project (1975–77) and present day.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the different camera formats used by photographers in the 1970s and the exhibit's final date at the Frazier Museum.

In January 1975, Ted Wathen walked into the offices of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. with a typed-up proposal to photograph life in all 120 Kentucky counties.

Ahead of the nation's bicentennial, the NEA was funding "photographic surveys," inspired by the Depression-era photography projects of the Farm Security Administration. Marion Post Wolcott and others captured Kentucky in unflinching black and white images in the '30s and '40s. Wathen needed two more photographers to take on a new survey.

By June, Wathen, Bob Hower and Bill Burke were crisscrossing the commonwealth, equipped with, Polaroid cameras, "all the Polaroid film we could shoot" and little else.

"You got 20 bucks a day, and that was your food, gas and lodging," Wathen said, "and there was no salary."

Between 1975-77, Wathen, Hower and Burke photographed every county in Kentucky. In addition to Polaroid, the crew also shot in other formats, from 35mm to 8 X 10.

The project documented bucolic scenes and rural poverty, rolling Appalachian forest and the aftermath of strip mining. Mostly, it centered people — working, parenting, playing and praying.

The work was shown in venues from the Speed to the Smithsonian, and its warm reception led to a renewal of the project. From 2015-24, Hower, Wathen and more than two dozen other photographers again scoured the state, documenting another period in Kentucky life.

The Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project at the Frazier Museum on Wednesday, October 8, 2025. The exhibition features work from the Depression-era Farm Security Administration efforts (1935–43), and the original Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project (1975–77) and present day.

Both projects, along with selections from the FSA project, are hanging on the third floor of the Frazier History Museum this year through Nov. 9, whittled down from more than 100,000 images spanning 90 years.

Hower and Wathen strolled through the exhibit in October, each peering through sets of round glasses at photos taken last year or last century. They answered questions from museum visitors; a Greenup County native told them images outside Ashland brought back old memories.

Photos of the same places, taken decades apart, show subtle but momentous shifts. A mountainside once ravaged by road construction sprouted new vegetation to hide the scars. Rows of once-lucrative tobacco crops vanished from behind a decayed home.

Two photos nearly 45 years apart, captured and provided by the Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project, show homes in Jenkins, in Letcher County. Jenkins was built by the coal industry as a company town. Left: Ted Wathen, 1975. Right: Bob Hower, 2019.

The film cameras used during the 1970s survey allowed the photographers to take a picture and produce a small, black and white Polaroid print to the subjects. The "crummy" print was meaningful in a time before cellphone cameras, Hower said.

"You don't give back very much, usually, to people you photograph," he said. "In this case, you were able to kind of even the scale a little bit, and give something back to people who were kind enough to let you invade their lives and take their pictures."

The Kentucky Documentary Photographic Project amounts to a lifelong project for the photographers ― "This is our legacy," Hower said ― and took years of travel though every corner of the state, from the rolling mountains in the east to the sprawling croplands of the west.

"I still love road trips," Wathen said. "I would much rather drive on a backroad than go to a movie."

Hower and Wathen hope another cohort of photographers will pick up the work in 2055. And in the most recent photographic survey, they sought out a younger, more diverse group of photographers, "to see the state with new eyes."

"When we did the first project, it was three upper-middle-class white guys ... you have a certain way of looking and seeing and how you relate to people," Wathen said. "We wanted people that could get into women's issues, that could really get into African American issues."

Parts of rural Kentucky are hurting, and some of the project's photos depict poverty, economic stagnation and boarded-up main streets. But other frames show joy, culture and renewal. Hower pointed to a "new economy" blooming in the mountains around recreation and tourism.

"We're here to support this kind of work," said Casey Harden, senior director of engagement at the Frazier, "because what we want is to make sure that Kentucky stories get told, Kentucky history gets told."

Amid stereotypes as a flyover-country monolith, Hower said the state is "way more complicated than that" — both in its geographic variety and the diversity of its inhabitants.

"It's an interesting place, and the people are interesting, and what people do here isn't all that different from what people do everywhere. It's common humanity," Hower said. "Anybody in the world can look at these pictures and relate to them."

Connor Giffin is an environmental reporter at The Courier Journal. Reach him directly at [email protected] or on X @byconnorgiffin.