| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 95.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI Photographers. Dir. by Jeanine Isabel Butler. Prod. by Alastair Reilly and Catherine Butler. Butler Films, 2008. 60 mins. (PBS Home Video, http://www.shoppbs.org)
According to Documenting the Face of America, the 77,000 photographs made for the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) between 1935 and 1943 constitute an extraordinary and unparalleled national treasure, a claim that is surely unexceptionable. Of all the New Deal's cultural initiatives none lasted longer or was more artistically distinguished, and in the decades after the expiration of the fsa its photographs have continued to be reproduced and exhibited so copiously and frequently that they have substantially shaped the national memory of the Great Depression.	1
Documenting the history of the Historical Section and the achievements of its photographers present a formidable challenge to historians. An examination of those topics calls for attention to the work of at least ten photographers, each of whom made several thousand pictures depicting a dazzling array of topics; an account of how the section, as a tiny unit in a sprawling federal agency, accommodated its sponsor's aims as well as those of the New Deal more generally; and an analysis of the shifting political and cultural tides that influenced its pictures over eight turbulent years of depression and war. Despite, or perhaps because of, its celebratory earnestness Documenting the Face of America does not satisfactorily meet this challenge. It gives short shrift to the photographers' indispensable role in the section's achievement; simplistically characterizes the New Deal's programs as "radical" with no attention to their sometimes conservative impulses and often contradictory aims; and divides the section's life-span into two neat eras, before and following Pearl Harbor, neglecting key fluctuations in its staff and emphases during its six prewar years.	. . .

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