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The Great Depression, which began with the stock market crash of 1929 and lasted for the next
decade, was a time of desperation and disorientation in America. Economic, agricultural,
and industrial decline was unprecedented. The DepressionÕs effects infiltrated all aspects
of American lifeÑfrom 1929 to 1933, almost half of American banks failed, unemployment reached
almost 30 percent, and farm prices fell 61 percent.
In an effort to bring the country back on its feet, President Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated a series of programs he labeled his New Deal. His programs were designed to reverse staggering unemployment and create new opportunities for economic growth. As part of his plan, he initiated projects for artists so they, too, could get back to work. One of these, the Farm Security Administration project (FSA), began in 1935. For this project, director Roy Stryker, an economist from Columbia University with a strong interest in photography, hired photographers and sent them across the United States to document Americans living in poverty. The FSA was initially designed to record tenant farmersÕ experience to publicize to Congress the need for the government-aid programs of RooseveltÕs New Deal. As the project continued, it expanded to include photographing everyday life in urban settings as well. Stryker distributed the images via exhibitions, books, and magazines, making middle America an additional audience for the photographs. The FSA was a landmark project for documentary photography. Images from this project resonate in American consciousness, even 60 years later. They provide a humanist and emotional record of this turbulent time in American history, an integral element to their lasting appeal. A literal definition of documentary is, simply put, the use of documents as evidence. Over the past century, however, we have assigned several additional layers of meaning to the word. Cultural historian William Stott states that Òthe power of documentary is the power to move.Ó Though documentary may connote Òjust the facts,Ó the truth is, that without an emotional element, these documentary images would lose much of their power. Even though there is little adornment in the FSA photographs, they arouse enormous empathy. Partly, this emotional strength comes from the faces of the people representedÑtheir stoic expressions, sometimes their laughter, or their proud stances even in the most desolate onditions. The FSA photographs included an emotional messageÑthat even in the poorest sections of the country, people were surviving in, and were even ennobled by, adversity. FSA photographers were also instrumental in establishing documentary photography as an art form. The emotional impact of these photographs is enhanced by the fact that they are not melodramatic but are presented plainly and straightforwardly. The straightforward approach to photography was a relatively new phenomenon which began during the first decades of the 20th century. Before then, pictorialist photographers, in reaction to criticism that photography was not fine art, created photographs using soft focus and light. The result was images in which the artistÕs hand was evidentÑromantic and blurry photographs that looked like paintings. This tactic changed during the 1910s when photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand began experimenting with straight photography. They used such techniques as dramatic lighting, sharp focus, and attention to detail as a way to establish photography as an art form in its own right, without comparison to painting. Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and other FSA photographers continued the use of sharp focus and attention to detail with their work for this project. They combined straight photography with their interest in social reform to produce ÒrealÓ images featuring strong, stoic individuals. This use of realism also made the artistÕs intervention in the photograph less evident, contributing to audiencesÕ acceptance of the images as a representation of truth without modification. Part of the tricky nature of photographyÑand documentary photography in particularÑis that it can sometimes be taken at face value and regarded as the ÒtruthÓ when all kinds of manipulation regularly occurs in the act of taking a picture. It is often easy to forget that the photographer, as with any artist, stands between the finished image and the audience. As noted by art theorist Hubert Damisch, ÒThe photographic image does not belong to the natural world. It is a product of human labor, a cultural object whose being...cannot be dissociated from its historical meaning and from the necessarily datable project in which it originates.Ó FSA photographers made careful selections of where to point their cameras, choosing their subjects, adjusting the camera angle, and cropping the photographÑselecting what appeared and, sometimes more importantly, what did not appear in the final frame. This manipulation made the project controversial in the 1930s and is an issue that is still debated today. A realistic focus on everyday American experience was a trend in the arts, generally, during the Depression. Painters, writers, and filmmakers, as well as photographers, depicted the ÒAmerican scene.Ó The 1930s were a confusing and complex time in America, and during such times, realism becomes a way to express order and achieve a sense of security. By finding and expressing beauty in plainness and the commonplace, artists and writers developed a sense of national identity and community sorely lacking in the tense and disorienting time of the Depression. The FSA project and its close examination of American life was part of a broader cultural trend that sought to create a tightly knit community with which all Americans could identify. Cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg wrote, ÒImages become history, more than traces of a specific event in the past, when they are used to interpret the present in light of the past, when they are presented and received as explanatory accounts of collective reality. They become history when they are conceived as symbolic events in a shared culture.Ó The images taken by the FSA photographers have, for many people, defined and shaped their memories of the Depression. The power of the Farm Security Administration pictures lies in their establishment of documentary photography as both an art form and a cultural record infiltrating American consciousness. It is that power that has fascinated scholars and the public alike about documentary photography and this important and rich project in particular.
Mary Kalish-Johnson |
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