American Iconography: Assessing FSA Photographs, 1945

Abstract

In Washington, DC, in 1945, the German émigré art historian Edgar Breitenbach (1903–1977), a recently naturalized American citizen, was witness to and participant in a bold experiment in the ordering of visual documents. The vast assemblage of photographs recording American ways of life that had been generated during the Great Depression and war era under the guidance of Roy E. Stryker (1893–1975), working for a succession of government agencies, including the Farm Security Administration, was soon to be deposited in the Library of Congress. Stryker had appointed the visionary classifier Paul Vanderbilt (1905–1992) to give shape to the archive. Vanderbilt hired Breitenbach to help, and thus a European “iconographer,” trained in Hamburg by Aby Warburg (1866–1929), Fritz Saxl (1890–1948), and Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), found himself applying his skills to contemporary American cultural documents. Eight small exhibits mounted by the staff January–July 1945, three by Breitenbach, give insight into the thoughts and aspirations of the classifiers.