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.