In 1975, he received a $3883 Youthgrant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to curate a traveling exhibition of 126 photographs from the renowned Farm Security Administration (FSA) project directed by Roy E. Stryker.
From 1935 to 1942, the FSA employed photographers Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, John Collier, Jr. and Jack Delano to document rural America and help acquaint more affluent Americans with the severity of the Great Depression.
The exhibit featured works by photographers Edwin and Louise Rosskam, Sol Libsohn, Harold Corsini, Esther Bubley, Russell Lee, John Vachon, Charlotte Brooks, Todd Webb, Martha Roberts, and Gordon Parks.
[2] The exhibition—and Plattner's book of the same name—received wide publicity in the New York Times, Forbes Magazine and was the subject of an in-depth profile on Charles Kuralt's CBS Sunday Morning Program.
Plattner conducted oral history interviews with the project's key photographers—Clyde Hare, Harold Corsini, Esther Bubley, Russell Lee, James P. Blair, Richard Saunders, Elliott Erwitt, Sol Libsohn, and Arnold S. Eagle—and co-authored and edited Witness to the Fifties, published in 1999 with the help of a grant from the Howard Heinz Endowment.