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Religious History and Visual Culture
Colleen McDannell
| Selected Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographs have become classic images in the American visual repertoire. Could an American history textbook exist that does not call on this file of public-domain photographs to illustrate depression-era suffering, dust bowl ecological disaster, or everyday life in the 1930s and 1940s? Now that the Library of Congress has digitized and made available on the World Wide Web over 160,000 black-and-white images and 1,600 color photographs, we can explore the richness of this national treasure even more fully.1 The story of the file is well known: In 1935 the former economics professor Rexford Tugwell was appointed as director of the Resettlement Administration, later to become the Farm Security Administration. One of the "alphabet" agencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the FSA was charged with improving the condition of America's farmers. Tugwell asked one of his former graduate students, Roy E. Stryker, to head a photographic project that would produce a visual record of the current state of agriculture and the government's efforts to improve it. Stryker hired (and fired) men and women who were given cameras, shooting scripts that suggested topics of interest, background materials, and per diems and told to go out and take pictures. Of the hundreds they took, a very few were made into traveling exhibitions or reproduced in the print media. After World War II broke out, this "historical section" of the FSA was moved into the Office of War Information (OWI) and Stryker resigned. Photographs continued to be made until 1944 when the FSA/OWI file was deposited at the Library of Congress. Some of those who "made pictures" for Stryker continued to photograph and are now celebrated in the history of American photography: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks. Others, of no less talent, include Jack Delano, Russell Lee, John Vachon, John Collier Jr., and Marion Post Wolcott.2 |
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As with any multiyear, multipersonality project, the goals of the historical section were continually shifting. In its early years, photographers were assigned to document the problems of rural America and New Deal solutions. The photographers also sought to make visually compelling photographs. In addition, Stryker hoped to make a record of "America," which for him often meant small-town life. By the late thirties, the pressures of fascism and eventual war in Europe added the goal of propaganda to that of documentary. Photographers were sent off to cities to make pictures for books and government pamphlets. We also must not forget the random nature of photography. Pictures could be snapped for no reason at all. The outcome of those multiple intentions is a large collection of images of various quality, most of which have never been published or even widely seen. |
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When I began working on the FSA/OWI file in the early 1990s, I had to go to Washington, D.C., to the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, where part of the file had been developed, roughly categorized by subject, and put in large filing cabinets. Microfilm contained the photographs in "lots"—interpretive units of pictures often taken at one time by one photographer on one subject or region. In addition, there was written correspondence between Stryker and his photographers as well as miscellaneous scrapbooks and background information that had been saved and microfilmed. The staff at the Prints and Photographs Division was (and is) fantastic, but the work was very tedious and getting to D.C. expensive. Even more problematic was obtaining a physical copy of a photograph. While the cost was reasonable, it took months to get an acceptable copy. At one point, the FSA/OWI negatives were moved away from the Washington area because of fears that the nitrate negatives would explode. At another, access to the storage area was stopped because of some mysterious mold. Delays in getting copies of the print meant delays in really looking at the photograph. Even when images became available online, it was impossible for me to see everything in the photograph; a good print was absolutely necessary. Consequently, I have great respect for scholars such as F. Jack Hurley and James Curtis, who produced their excellent work on the FSA photographs prior to digitization. Working with images includes a host of practical problems that need to be factored into the researching and writing process. |
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