| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Colleen McDannell. Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2004. Pp. 319. $45.00.
More than sixty years after its photographers ceased roaming the country with their cameras, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documentary project remains something of an enigma. Scholars have framed the vast FSA file variously as an instrument of New Deal propaganda, a collection for posterity, a tool for social justice, and as photographic art. Colleen McDannell reveals that, when it comes to its representations of religion, the FSA file is all of these. In this thematically focused yet wide-ranging book, McDannell uses the FSA file as a resource for meditating on the role of religion in 1930s America.	1
McDannell's chapters span the life of the project from its beginnings in 1935 to its end in 1943, creatively synthesizing the variety of ways that religion appears in the FSA file. She begins by exploring the personal relationships of project participants to religion, not only the photographers' relationships but also those of influential project chief Roy Stryker. Successive chapters take up the range of images of religion in the file. McDannell explores the relationship between religion and art by taking up the file's curious number of photographs of empty churches. She also explores representations of religion in the South, considers how charity work like that of the Salvation Army is represented in the file, and studies photo-stories about Jews in Connecticut, Spanish Americans in New Mexico, and African Americans in Chicago. Throughout the book, McDannell remains attentive to the ways that the photographs suggest dynamics of race, class, and gender as they construct rhetorics of religion.	. . .

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