Religious History and Visual Culture

Abstract

Selected Farm Security Administration (fsa) photographs have become classic images in the American visual repertoire. Could an American history textbook exist that does not call on this file of public-domain photographs to illustrate depression-era suffering, dust bowl ecological disaster, or everyday life in the 1930s and 1940s? Now that the Library of Congress has digitized and made available on the World Wide Web over 160,000 black-and-white images and 1,600 color photographs, we can explore the richness of this national treasure even more fully.1 The story of the file is well known: In 1935 the former economics professor Rexford Tugwell was appointed as director of the Resettlement Administration, later to become the Farm Security Administration. One of the “alphabet” agencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the fsa was charged with improving the condition of America's farmers. Tugwell asked one of his former graduate students, Roy E. Stryker, to head a photographic project that would produce a visual record of the current state of agriculture and the government's efforts to improve it. Stryker hired (and fired) men and women who were given cameras, shooting scripts that suggested topics of interest, background materials, and per diems and told to go out and take pictures. Of the hundreds they took, a very few were made into traveling exhibitions or reproduced in the print media. After World War II broke out, this “historical section” of the fsa was moved into the Office of War Information (owi) and Stryker resigned. Photographs continued to be made until 1944 when the fsa/owi file was deposited at the Library of Congress. Some of those who “made pictures” for Stryker continued to photograph and are now celebrated in the history of American photography: Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks. Others, of no less talent, include Jack Delano, Russell Lee, John Vachon, John Collier Jr., and Marion Post Wolcott.2