Picture Perfect: Iowa in the 1940s

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Everett Kuntz snapped hundreds of photos documenting everyday life in and around his hometown of Ridgeway, Iowa. But it wasn't until learning he had cancer in 2002 that Kuntz finally printed the photos.

Immediately, he noticed how the images preserved a time thought to be lost forever...a time when America was still emerging from the Great Depression and rapidly approaching World War II.

Yet the photos depict a sense of hope in the people of Ridgeway -- an innocence that epitomized the calm before the storm.

Kuntz's photographs show the faces, fields and porches of small-town America, and serve as a historical record of both a bygone era and a rural Iowa that has all but disappeared.