A Bit of History...

Art or Education?The 1930s marked an age when photo documentation piqued the interest of America. At this time, photographers began taking pictures that carried deeper social and emotional and political significance. Photography itself had become a way to project the times in the most realistic of ways; no other media could so effectively capture human emotion and struggle in one frame. The Great Depression produced many evocative photographs thanks to the enlisting of numerous photographers by the Farm Security Administration.

The Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA) are well known for the influence of their photography program from the year 1935 to 1944. Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the struggles of the poor farmer. Roy Stryker, Head of the Information Division of the FSA, responsible for giving information to the public, adopted a goal for the agency of "introducing America to Americans." He envisioned a task force of thirty or forty photographers, fanning across the country to compile information on the American landscape and on RA’s relief efforts.

The FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the USA, for these images were to appear in popular magazines such as Life. By defining FSA photographs as objective documents, taken solely “for the record,” Stryker and his associates believed that they were serving the cause of historic preservation. The photographers were under instruction from Washington as to what overall impression the New Deal wanted to give out. Stryker's agenda focused on a few key themes: his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among tenant cotton farmers, and migrant farm workers. Above all he was committed to social reform through New Deal intervention in people's lives. Stryker wanted to implement photographs that "related people to the land and vice versa" because these photographs reinforced the RA's position that poverty was controllable thanks to changing land practices.

Though Stryker did not offer much direction in how to take the shot, he did send his photographers lists of desirable themes, such as "church," "court day," and "barns." Stryker sought photographs of migratory workers that would tell a story about their everyday life, what to them was “the norm”. For example, he asked Dorothea Lange to emphasize cooking, sleeping, praying and socializing. Roy Stryker found no ethical problem in posing subjects or changing the surroundings in order to point out a known social or economic problem. The program was thus not primarily artistic or anthropological. Stryker was willing to go to any lengths to tailor a picture to achieve a desired response from the public.

This sort of personal touch was frequently allowed in the photographs of the Great Depression, for it furthered the program’s main intent: capturing the sympathies of an urban, middle-class audience in the cause of reform, fashioning images that conformed to the values of their viewers. Thus the bitter realism portrayed in the FSA collection was “deliberate, calculated, and highly stylized.”

Author and historian James Curtis challenges the belief that documentary photographs are realistic, because they are taken with purpose, and are not simply random snapshots. As value for this investigation, his book provides an in depth analysis of Dorothea Lange’s ubiquitous “Migrant Mother”, and how Lange’s own morals and social values are displayed through the photograph. Furthermore, Curtis examines photographs not as a work of art, but as a window into the lives of the millions of people affected by the Depression, communicating the multiple dimensions of rural poverty. Stryker and his photographers strove throughout their careers to insist that the photos did represent some real truth, and qualities of agrarian America only visible through the eyes of those who suffer by it. Still, the photographer's prejudice often entered into the creation of an image, making the photos part enduring cultural record, part propaganda.