Documentary as art in U. S. Camera

Abstract

This essay studies how photographs made by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Depression negotiate the complicated rhetorical space between “art”; and “documentary”; in Edward Steichen and Tom Maloney's photography journal U. S. Camera. I conclude that Steichen's insistence upon separating the documentary purposes of the FSA project from issues of aesthetics relies upon the construction of a false dichotomy that is nevertheless rhetorically productive, for it recognizes the realities of the time—that a government photography project created to publicize efforts to manage poverty could not align it self with the discourses of art and expect to survive.