FSA Photography: A Perspective

Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration [later FSA] photographer, in California. 1936
FSA/OWI Archive

During the 1960s many surviving FSA photographers, along with administrator Roy Stryker, were interviewed for the Smithsonian's American Archives of Art.

The series includes a 1965 interview with Romana Javitz. Unfortunately, the AAA site does not have a transcript, though there is a pdf (academic institution access needed) here.

Javitz was the distinguished head of the New York Public Library Picture Collection, from 1929 to 1968, and the force behind its real development. A good article about the collection and her career is here.

Trained as a painter, she had many friendships with artists who used the Picture Collection. Through her contacts in the Thirties, Javitz became involved in New Deal visual arts projects, and was one of the prime movers in creating the American Index of Design.

Through Walker Evans she met Roy Stryker. Javitz urged him to focus on building an archive, and in particular, to have data recorded for each picture as it was taken. Stryker also accepted suggestions for subject matter; after Javitz "would gripe about certain things I never could find pictures of, such as ice cream cones and other Americana, privies and so on ... very shortly ... someone would take a picture."

In 1936 Javitz began receiving anonymous mailings of FSA photos. When official arrangements became final for the FSA archive to reside at the Library of Congress, Stryker revealed that he had forwarded duplicates for safekeeping in New York, in case Congress had decided to impound the originals. About 40,000 of the 270,000 FSA images were given to the NYPL; over the years, around 200,000 of the images have been collected there.

Javitz in 1965 had some very interesting thoughts about the FSA, visual documentation of American life, archive and museum philosophies, and more.

Even if a few FSA images may be so familiar as to be chestnuts, Javitz insisted "that one 'Madonna of the Migrants' was used over and over does not blind the eye to the others."

Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California. 1936
Library of Congress - FSA/OWI Archive

Javitz saw repeated use of single images as a decision by publishers—and museums—to give the public a simplified message, when in fact

... most of these still photographs were not taken as one picture ... they were taken for a picture essay or picture story. These photographers were skilled, and I should say it was sensitive enough a story so that they made no attempt to tell the whole story in one picture. And I think that one thing that comes over from FSA pictures is that there are no isolated images. The image is a part of a long continuing tale. You meet the coal miner squatting waiting for the bus, you see him walking toward his house, you see his children, you see him on the porch, you see him going to work, and you just feel this thing is a non-isolated image, and nothing will hurt that feeling or take away from it except museum shows. I have a prejudice, as you notice. I am trained as an artist, my education is that of a painter. Of course, I couldn't have lived without a museum [but] I think museums are extremely snobby in their attitude towards the intelligence of the public ...

On the importance of FSA work in documenting American life, Javitz observed that ...

when the FSA... photographs came to us, they just gave us a complete new eye. ... it was the first time that we had images that were clean-cut. They weren't made to sell records or soap or whatnot. Before that, our pictures were very tainted by commerce from the point of view of selling. They were pretty-pretty, they were Saturday Evening Post ... Remember that even the Civil War photographs that were available were slight. ... the Rotogravure sections of the newspapers ...[were] photo-journalism before Life and Look. We had any amount of material on society because of the Rotogravures and Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, all those magazines and the inflation of the twenties. We can give you what the society woman would wear on the Riviera and what her dog looked like in Southampton. But we couldn't find a sunbonnet ...

The Civil Rights Act had been passed in 1964, just months before this interview, and Javitz notes how the FSA recorded conditions that could only lead to a movement for equality. The photographic record also showed, she observed, how the face of extreme poverty had changed little since the Thirties.

While "the body of FSA photographs is one of the most precious treasures in the Library of Congress," Javitz felt it was not sufficiently appreciated because the photos didn't have the monetary value of rarer, older American art, like Currier & Ives. She was disappointed too that the collection was not sufficiently accessible to the public, and suggested that good quality, low-cost quality reproductions should be available to schools and libraries. That is an area where one type of progress makes matters very different today; we may not physically handle prints as Ms. Javitz wished, but we can access images almost instantly, through LC's online archives.

Javitz in 1965 also lamented the contemporary lack of government support for arts, not merely to encourage talent, but because through the WPA programs

... America showed ... the world that we are not afraid to look at ourselves and we are not afraid of recording what we look like, and also we should show the world that we have a sense of history ... Nothing is as important today as a knowledge of the past, and we have certain records of the past, that are constantly available, but they're distorted because so little of it is true and so little is contemporaneous.

There's a profound cultural loss in how far the country has been pushed from this ideal.

We may have dazzling technology that Ms. Javitz, who died in 1980, would never have imagined. But, as far as representation of real life: our celebrity-centered media doesn't seem so very different from those rotogravures full of society ladies and their dogs.

August Read: Two Photographers

Iowa : WPA Federal Art Project

John Vachon's America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II; edited, and introductory texts, by Miles Orvell, 2003

Walker Evans: A Biography; by Belinda Rathbone, 1995

Along with the Library of Congress, WPA poster collection, LC's other great WPA image resource is the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information [FSA/OWI] photography archive.

(All photos and captions below are found there.)

Browsing recently, I saw a lot of striking images by John Vachon. A younger colleague of Evans and other, better-known FSA photographers, Vachon died in 1975 (as did Evans). His work has slowly gained more recognition, and this recent book of photographs, biographical and critical notes, plus some of Vachon's own writing, is a valuable appraisal of his career during the FSA/OWI years.

After being expelled from graduate school, Vachon was hired by Roy Stryker, head of the historical section of the Resettlement Administration [the RA, which later became the FSA]. The year was 1936; national picture magazines like Life and Look were reaching a mass readership, and photography was becoming central to the era's culture. Stryker devised a plan for RA staff to rally support for agency projects—and to illustrate the need for the New Deal itself—by photographing and distributing images of conditions around the country.

Vachon first worked at captioning photos. He had wanted to become a writer, and had not felt any particular interest in photography. Yet he had also been drawn to drawing and painting, and his writing showed strong visual observation.

As he came to know the agency's file, he offered to fill gaps by taking pictures around DC in his spare time. Stryker agreed; Vachon borrowed a camera and started out with guidance from Arthur Rothstein. Walker Evans also took an interest, insisting that Vachon learn to use a view camera.

Vachon would work six years, traveling much of the country, and becoming perhaps the most prolific of the agency's photographers. [Not all are digitized, but the LC site shows 5000 holdings of Vachon images]. Among reasons for the historical importance of this work, Miles Orvell finds that

Because Vachon worked for the FSA-OWI as long as did, his work forms a narrative from the despair and desolation of the Depression to the energy and mobilization of World War II.

In the summer of 1935, Walker Evans began the first assignment of his WPA employment: traveling through West Virginia to document homestead and cooperative projects initiated by the RA. In Belinda Rathbone's account, Evans found himself in a setting ideal for the approach he had been developing—

In the mining towns, deserted and depressed... the small company towns sprawling over the landscape, once thriving, now bankrupt, he saw through the American dream of an egalitarian society to its core of melancholy.

Scott's Run mining camps near Morgantown, West Virginia. 1935

It's a key quality of Evans' work, particularly during the Depression.

Son of an adman,

Evans also had an intuitive grasp of the ad world, a sense of the immediate present, and a talent for puns and double-entendres much like his father's gift for the catchy phrase. But unlike his father, he... [had] a sense of the emptiness and pathos that such things so quickly acquire with age.

Vachon's work also captures that "core of melancholy"—

Shack on the edge of the city dump, Dubuque, Iowa. 1940.

Advertising, Woodbine, Iowa. 1940

Cincinnati, Ohio. 1938

National Association of Manufacturers sign, Dubuque, Iowa. 1940

Roy Stryker was careful to soften socially critical work that might inspire political interference with his agency. Though Stryker insisted years later that there had been no pictures taken of strikes, the LC archive has Vachon photos of determined workers on picket lines.

From Dubuque, Vachon wrote to Stryker of his shock at seeing the city dump, where men foraged for food and lived in nearby shacks. There, in Orvell's words, Vachon recorded "with unflinching curiousity and empathy, the shocking reality of Depression life at the margins." He would later photograph subjects like the faces of homeless men in city missions, and African-American families maintaining dignity in the most impoverished of settings.

Unfortunately, many LC scans have poor detail, but plates in Orvell's book are beautifully printed (in Canada). Even in a setting staged to promote the agency's activities—Farmer applying to county supervisor for Farm Security Administration loan. Oskaloosa, Kansas—Vachon records a despairing man, who seems to shrink under the official's complacent gaze; his wife sits in the background, her body twisted in anxiety.

Vachon developed something of a father-son relationship with Stryker, while struggling to become independent. Under the strong artistic influence of Evans and the other FSA masters who had become his teachers, Vachon also struggled to develop his own approach.

Stryker tends to comes across as an impresario of what was often a kitsch Americana, giving staff "shooting scripts" of desired images. Belinda Rathbone quotes from one Stryker directive—to bring back shots of—

Bill posters; sign painters — crowd watching a window sign being painted, ... parade watching, ticker tape; roller skating; spooners — neckers; mowing the front lawn... the kind of things that a scholar a hundred years from now is going to wonder about.

While employed by Stryker, Evans characteristically worked at his own pace. He stalled on deadlines and fended off Stryker's nagging about trip expenses, until finally turning in work to fit his assignments. During his tenure Evans managed to collect enough pay to keep going—no small accomplishment for the times—while pursuing his own vision. This included Evans' and James Agee's 1936 trip to rural Alabama, where they undertook the work that would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Rathbone's excellent biography traces Evans' artistic development, examining both his family background and early creative influences. He had wanted to become a writer, but given a camera at about age fifteen, he also became fascinated by photography. He approached picture-taking as a "detective looking for clues." This seems to have been a reaction to his home life; his father had around this time left the family—moving across the street, to live with his divorced lover and her children—a situation never openly discussed.

When he began reading modernist writers, the teen-aged Evans gained a sense that there were ways of life other than his parents' upper middle-class façade. After moving to New York in his early twenties, he formed friendships with other aspiring artists, who joined Evans in photographing the city as a way of seeing it.

Late in the 1920s, he met Berenice Abbott, and through her discovered the work of Eugène Atget. Evans responded strongly, writing in a 1931 review—

His general note is lyrical understanding of the street... trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not "the poetry of the street" or "the poetry of Paris," but the projection of Atget's person.

For Evans, Atget evoked the "difference between a quaint evocation of the past and an open window looking straight down a stack of decades." This insight, writes Rathbone, was Evans' approach to analyzing "the elusive element of time in photography, which Atget had so mysteriously mastered."

In his work of the early Thirties, Rathbone finds that,

In drawing a distinction between the sentimental photography of the preceding generation and the pure documentary style that would soon overtake it, Evans made notable use of the metaphor of an open window and evoked a penetrating vista down through a "stack of decades." The receding vista, common to many of Atget's photographs, was becoming a particular interest of his. ...That his photographs saw through windows and porches and around corners gave them a new dimension and power and even an aura of revelation. They seemed to bring him closer to seeing into the past. In an old house in Copake, New York, he made a picture through one small room into another, which suggested a secret conversation between the dresser, the chair, and the Victorian portrait on the wall.

Like Atget's views of old Paris, Evans' photographs quietly animated the inanimate.

Church interior. Alabama or Tennessee. 1936

Evans worked for the FSA about two years; Vachon continued there as the war began and government photographers' work became focused on the war effort. In 1946 Vachon worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, photographing postwar conditions in Poland. Some of this work, edited by his daughter, Ann, was published in 1995 as Poland: 1946; The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon.

From 1947 to 1971 he was a staff photographer at Look, dubbed by his editors, their "photographer poet."

In 1954 he wrote the last entry in the journals he had kept since 1933, when he was nineteen and eager to write, or to create some kind of important art. Now he wrote of the conflict he felt, appreciating his luck at professional and travel opportunities, while observing of his Madison Avenue surroundings—

...I contribute, through my work with the magazine, to the thinking and forming of values which spread out from these stone buildings to the pliant acceptors of this false, refined civilization... though I say, truthfully, that I reject this civilization, and had rather been no part of it... I nevertheless rejoice in it, and pander to it, as I fly out in early morning airplanes to photograph a famous ballplayer in Evansville, Indiana, or to see a senator in Washington or Maine.

Orvell notes Vachon's attraction to the chance encounters of urban settings. In the evolution of the work, Orvell sees a link from the documentary approach of the Thirties, to the Fifties "snapshot aesthetic" of photographers like Robert Frank and Lee Frielander.

Magazines also provided Evans' income through the early 1970s. The conflict between that setting and his longing for independence, along with personal circumstances like two troubled marriages, fueled periods of problem drinking.

But Fortune seems to have given him freedom to make his own schedule and to do photo/text essays on subjects that interested him. Rathbone cites—

"'Downtown': A Last Look Backward," published in the August 1956 issue... Evans warned his readers that the district [lower Manhattan] would never be the same once a score of new construction projects then underway was completed. "The building boom now commencing," he predicted, "will change the face, and a good deal of the atmosphere, of the entire district."

...in March 1957, Evans produced "Before They Disappear," a photographic homage to the freight-car emblems he had loved since childhood. The portfolio, in color, showed the respectful attention to detail of a boy stamp collector; Evans knew when each emblem had first appeared and how it had been modified over the years..."

Rathbone concludes that—

While he mourned the loss of... treasures of his childhood, he argued vehemently against the idea that his photography might be driven by nostalgia... It was a sense of history in the rough he cherished, a sense that he had been better able to master in the days of the Depression, when America's material progress had stalled and the world stood still for his camera, poised for change. In the 1950s, an era that was loath to look backward, the meaning of Evans' enterprise hovered between one misinterpretation and another. He was not an aging social protest artist, nor was he a dewy-eyed sentimentalist. But there seemed to be fewer people around who knew what he was.

It was in the time when "the world stood still for his camera" that Evans' work was at its most affecting, and that the era found perhaps its greatest artist.

Fireplace in bedroom of Floyd Burroughs' cabin. Hale County, Alabama. 1936

History Lesson

Photographer: Howard Liberman, 1942
Library of Congress




Archive caption - each photo:

Manpower, junior size. "Who wants to be a junior commando?" teacher asks. Willing hands shoot up and eager voices cry "Yes!" Everyone in this Roanoke, Virginia class wants to be one of the thirty-million children banding together throughout the United States to form America's junior army, young fighters to collect scrap for ammunition.

Separate pictures; equal captions...

America desperately needs history lessons, yet gets a criminally Faux version.

With one graphic, Driftglass disposes of the con man given a giant public platform—and today's inappropriate-beyond-words setting.

As to the real August 28, 1963: links to audio and transcript of that day's MLK speech here.

And, published this summer, Charles Euchner's Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington looks extremely worthwhile.

I caught part of a radio interview with Euchner yesterday. Certain he would at some point be assassinated, MLK felt the burden of approaching each speech as if it would be his last and thus demanded the utmost eloquence he could muster.

Euchner also reflected that by the early Sixties television was countering the physical isolation of the disenfranchised and changing their outlook. Seeing daily images of how another America lived, it increasingly seemed natural that they too should have a chance at that better life.

Then: a positive, if unintended role played by TV, in raising expectations of equal rights and opportunity for all Americans.

Now: a media empire fuels the politically useful hatreds of its frightened, gullible audience. The same forces that fought justice then will do anything now to rewrite the history—through the media they control outright, and by pushing their spin into the rest.

Then: marchers came by foot, by bike, by whatever means they could—to march on a sweltering August day, in hope of making America a better place.

Now: it's easy for the suckers to get on board: the buses to DC are comfortable, air-conditioned, and paid by a billionaire's front group...

Dark Ages

Minneapolis, 1939
Photographer: John Vachon
Library of Congress

[Decades pass, centuries change; the spelling ability remains the same...]

It's not enough for the current fundie/wingnut astroturf* to merely fan nationwide racist hysteria.

Glenn Greenwald's take on the "9-11 mosque" insanity is worth reading; * identified at Update III.

Apparently, that was not have been good enough, so a Reagan appointee issues out-of-the-blue injunction against Science, on behalf of Snowflake Babies™.

It suggests a bad SciFi plot: petri dishes of embryo pods being readied to invade human society; humans being potentially capable of reason, something that must be stopped...

Or, was this mainly because the anti-women's health crowd needed some riling prior to the election—maybe teabagging operations haven't been working them up adequately?

Or, what's the "follow the money" angle here? In a Bush v. Gore-like decision, two researchers (as opposed to everyone else) are "harmed" by guidelines "lessening their chance of receiving funding for work on adult stem cells." [my emphasis, in that quote].

Whichever way, it's Politically-Connected Christianists: 1;
Scientific Advance/Potential Treatment of Diseases and Creation of Domestic Industries: 0

The Banality of Delusion

"Manpower, junior size... The Jefferson High School drum and bugle corps in Roanoke, Virginia started the junior commando rally with a fanfare and a drum roll... school children awaited the opening of the rally that was to number them as part of America's junior army to collect scrap for our armed forces."
Photographer: Howard Liberman
Library of Congress
NPR story this morning:

"Exiting Iraq, U.S. Brigade Traces Invasion Route."

From comments by soldiers at a stop on the way to Kuwait:

"...our job is done here (I just can't wait to get home...)"

"... we started really well; I don't know if there's more we could've done..."

"... we came here to liberate: freedom for a country. Things are gonna happen...but our main objective we came here to do has been accomplished..."

From a pep talk by their captain:

This is our nation's life work, right here...there are guys who have honorably retired from the army and have not seen this thing resolved. But you'll see it tonight: we're about to put "The End" on a big chapter in the book of military history.

Correspondent Mike Shuster does acknowledge, "That may be true for most of the American troops who have served in Iraq, but not for the 50,000 who will remain for another 15 months, nor for the Iraqis themselves."

Which is followed by audio from Tuesday's Baghdad suicide bombing that killed 61 police recruits.

The battalion's commander "says the US has done everything possible to stabilize Iraq." In his own words,

We've given them enough time to get it right themeslves, to secure the election, secure the population, defeat anti-government forces. It's time to go home and, you know, wish them the best of luck with the future. But at the same time, it demonstrates our commitment to the people of this country; we'll be strategic allies, our friendships are eternal...

Why do all the quotes have the same tone of corporate happy talk made in the wake of a horrendous executive decision?

Sure, the grunts have to tell themselves this stuff.

And they've had so many years of practice: with policies like the hijacking of the National Guard into the Bush wars along with stop loss; add the lack of job opportunities at home, and enlistees as a group have spent year after year in something they want to believe has had a purpose.

But the smugness of that commander's "best of luck" to our "eternal" friends is in no way real "history" or defensible sentiment. It's not even the least bit convincing as a form of "declare victory and get the hell out."

We certainly won't be "out." And the suffering we've unleashed won't end.

Our victory is, of course, conventional wisdom among our self-regarding deemers of what is to be the conventional wisdom.

Yet there are still a few non-believers. Robert Parry, for one, persists in trying to inject some pesky reality.

Paychecks

"Chicago, Illinois. Foreman handing out paychecks on Saturday at a Chicago and Northwestern Railroad yard."
Photographer: Jack Delano
Library of Congress

How many leftists wish we did get checks?

Except for a few bloggers—pretty much of the barely liberal-ish variety—plus a similar think tank or two: WTF "professional left" is there? In a country where even "liberal" has been successfully demonized for thirty years? When, in depressing reality, a very well-paid Professional Right controls the messages?

Yes, Robert Gibbs' outburst was taken personally by all who rightly interpreted it as yet another effort to throw the base under a bus...

Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher on the administration's going after the wrong targets—and the implicit contempt for the public (rather than corporate) good in Gibbs' sneer at the "Canadian health care system."

Meanwhile, wage slave America found a new hero.

Employee violates the holy writs of Customer Service (even if provoked), then grabs beers before deploying an expensive piece of equipment to clear out...

It's hard to decide what factor, or combination of factors, led to the instant elevation to folk hero. Was this due to the public's identification with someone who quits dramatically; disgust with worsening air travel conditions; the general coarsening of social interactions?

Steven Slater may well cash in on the instant fame. As Marcy Wheeler writes, it is quite a contrast with last year's air travel hero: Pilot "Sully" Sullenberger, who saved 155 passengers with a "miraculous" landing in the Hudson. A union professional, who led a crew of well-trained, union professionals, who were then joined by union first-responders, in a "Miracle Brought To You By America's Unions."

True heroism is often found in the stories of those who—against harsh odds—endeavor to organize workers. But there won't be mass media coverage, unless there's something that can be used to demonize unions.

An unspoken fact behind the Slater incident is what happens in this economy to someone who reacts to bad working conditions... Add a few years to Slater's 38, and for an older worker who suddenly walks off the job: how likely is that ex-employee to find a means of surviving?

Whenever there's news of a workplace shooting, I suspect that if there is any degree of rational thought behind the perpetrator's actions, it would be recognition that termination was the burning of his last bridge, and he will never see another paycheck.

Not that my job is particularly secure, or that I'm young enough to find something else easily. But I figure women will always have one advantage being hired for office jobs: employers feel confident that women doormats won't someday show up toting a semi-automatic...

As for those leftists not on the payroll—who voted for Obama, some with great enthusiasm—they generally want what most of the country would, if our public discourse weren't so tightly controlled. Just little things, like a decent standard of living.

Instead of scenes like this, as 30,000 desperate people try to apply for 10,000 units of non-existent housing.

Scenes which can only be expected to multiply, as we complete the devolution to a third-world standard of living.

So, ask me a question I don't already know the answer to...

August WPA Calendar

Artist: Vera Bock
Library of Congress