You Have Seen Their Pictures

by HARTLEY E. HOWE

Government photography, focused on the somber side of rural America, has produced some of the most vivid human documents of our times. Here is the story of the photographic section of the Farm Security Administration, told by a writer who knows the men and women behind the cameras.

FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION PHOTOGRAPHS AREN'T THE sort of pictures a person forgets easily. A pregnant farm woman standing in the doorway of her battered cabin, a group of ragged children clustered about her. A father and two children running for shelter in a dust storm. Or a couple of fellows on the bum, trudging down the road past a big billboard reading: "Next Time Try the Train—Relax."
The story behind these photographs is not widely known, but it's a good story, and important to politicians, sociologists, economists, who can rind in the camera a highly useful tool. Important to people who want to record the world of today before it slips away into the world of yesterday. And above all, important to everyone who believes that democracy can succeed in a gigantic country like ours only when people are informed about the troubles of their fellow Americans and thus are impelled to do something to help them out.
Farm Security photography is government photography. The government has been using the camera almost since the days of Daguerre: to record patent drawings, to report wars, to show stay-at-homes the Indians and scenery of the Far West. And more recently, federal agencies have used photographs to teach people better ways to meet problems connected with crops, mines and forests.
What distinguishes FSA photography are its objectives. The first is to tell people, through pictures, about the great human problem with which the Farm Security Administration is struggling: the problem of giving a decent break to the lowest third of our farm population. The other basic aim is equally sweeping—to make a photographic record of rural America—a visual account of how America's farmers live, work, play, eat, and sleep.
That Farm Security photography has been able to venture successfully into these new fields is due to a combination of circumstances. First, the pioneer work of Lewis Hine in the early years of the century had already shown the possibilities of social photography. Such books as the Yale University "Pageant of America" had emphasized to scholars the value of pictures as historical records. Certain magazines had driven home the ability of pictures to tell a story. Now the New Deal was opening the door to experiments in new educational techniques. And at the same time photography was becoming a more flexible tool, with faster lenses, speedier films, better lights, and smaller, lighter cameras.
Another factor which has made for success is the field in which FSA's cameramen have worked. The Farm Security Administration's program has been as broad as the problems it has had to meet. Marginal farmers have been moved to richer soil and their old land turned to forest or pasture. Subsistence homesteads and cooperative farms have been set up for dispossessed sharecroppers. Tenants have been loaned money to buy their land. Country people have been encouraged to start cooperatives to buy machinery and provide themselves with medical care. Sanitary camps have been built for migrants. Greenbelt housing projects have been erected.
BUT FOR THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THE SUCCESS OF FSA photography, we must look to those who planned the program, directed it, and went out and took the pictures. The key figure throughout has been Roy Stryker, chief of FSA photography.
Head of the most vigorous group of photographic pioneers in the country, Roy Stryker doesn't know a great deal more about taking pictures than the average snap-shooter. And despite his executive post, he is not particularly interested in administrative problems. What he does understand is how to use pictures to put across an idea. This he learned at Columbia University where he arrived after the World War with a bride and a new ambition—to study economics. Brought up on a Colorado ranch, he had been a cowboy and miner, seen service overseas with the A.E.F., and spent several semesters at the Colorado School of Mines.
After receiving his degree at Columbia, Stryker stayed on as a graduate student, and then as an instructor in economics. He became interested in pictures while preparing photographs for a heavily illustrated economics textbook by Rexford Tugwell.
In 1933 President Roosevelt appointed Tugwell head of the Resettlement Administration, as Farm Security was originally called. Tugwell, fearing that the press would not give the new agency a fair break, turned to the movies, the radio and the photograph to tell Resettlement's story to the public. To head the photographic section of his information division he called in his old colleague.
Stryker brought important qualifications to his new post. He had learned how to tell the story of social and economic problems through pictures. He had great insight into rural America, blended of sound knowledge of its economic structure and sensitivity to its beauty and tragedy. He possessed the ability to make friends. He has been able to tell his photographers what he wanted and be a constructive critic. He can help them pick out the important elements in a place or a problem.
His approach to photography is through the subject matter. To Stryker a good photograph is one which achieves the ends for which it was taken. "If a photographer understands the social forces present in a scene," he once remarked, "the resulting photograph should be satisfactory pictorial presentation." There are, however, couple of important conditions attached to this theory. He presupposes that the photographer is technically proficient. And Stryker is coming to think more and more terms of not one picture but a whole series.
Farm Security's emphasis on what is taken, rather than how it is taken, has led to an extremely simple technique. Pictures are made from the viewpoint which shows the subject most clearly; unusual angle shots or trick lighting effects are extremely rare. Actuality always wins in any conflict with artistry.
Photographers in Action
FARM SECURITY MUST HAVE PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO Understand the social forces present in a scene." Technical ability is, of course, fundamental; the photographer must be able to forget his camera and concentrate on his subject. He must have a considerable knowledge of the history and geography of America. He must be able to get along with people and to sympathize with their problems. And since he is often away from Washington for months at a time, he must have enough old-fashioned horse sense to handle any situation that arises in the field.
But it would be difficult to discover the best training for FSA cameramen judging from the diverse backgrounds of the present staff. Arthur Rothstein began his career by taking scientific pictures in a New York hospital. Dorothea Lange abandoned her career as a portrait photographer. Russell Lee wandered into photography from chemical engineering. The newest member of the staff, Marion Post, a schoolteacher who picked up photography as a hobby, on the Philadelphia Bulletin became one of the few women news photographers in the country. John Vachon, who now does special assignments, didn't know anything about photography when he came FSA as Stryker's messenger.
ALL of them have studied the work of the earlier Farm Security photographers, particularly Walker Evans and Ben Shahn, and have been influenced by each other's pictures. Still they, keep their personal idiosyncrasies. Rothstein is perhaps the most pictorially minded of the lot, sometimes deliberately trying for what he calls a "magazine cover shot." Lange possesses remarkable sympathetic sight into human beings, if occasionally verging on sentimentality Lee is more consistent and analytical. Post reflects newspaper training in her unusually well developed narrative sense.
Before a photographer starts out he makes a special study of the subjects he is to cover. Here, for example, is the way Rothstein prepared for a recent trip into Idaho and Montana. He began with the geography of the area, the physical and economic. Then he traced its history such books as Parkman's "Oregon Trail" and the recent WPA guides. He gathered leads on specific stories, speaking to people with special knowledge, the editor of a cattle trade journal, for instance. He and Stryker worked on a series of stories, ghost towns, dude ranches, Montana farming. These were combined into a general shoot script. Once in the field the photographer may or may not follow this.
The photographer goes into the field with letters of introduction, but he sometimes runs into trouble. Once during a strike Rothstein took a photograph of an armed guard at an Alabama mine. Only a bluff that G-men would investigate any loss of government property saved his film from confiscation. Labor disputes of any kind make photography difficult. But there is little trouble with the people themselves. Sometimes they are proud, sometimes ashamed, but they are almost always willing to have their picture taken if they are sure they're not being laughed at. Often they have a pathetic faith that all would be well if only the President knew about their troubles.
Farm Security's photographers would be the first to deny that their work could not be improved. To this particular observer there sometimes seems to be a static quality in FSA pictures, as if the photographer had caught only a moment in the life of the place. Often the problem is shown in terms of a number of individuals—the house of one family, the cattle of another, and so on. FSA might well take a tip from the picture magazines and unify a series by following a representative family through different phases of their situation. The value of the pictures would be greatly enhanced with better caption material. The difficulties faced by the photographer in trying to take a great number of pictures and record data at the same time have resulted in far too little information being provided with each picture.
FOUR YEARS HAVE BROUGHT 25,000 PHOTOGRAPHS TO FSA's files. They represent the cream of the crop, the survivors of a rigorous weeding out. The problems of rural poverty remain the principal subject. The only records of FSA projects now kept by Stryker's office are photographs showing the construction of some of the larger communities. And the importance of publicity pictures—shots taken to illustrate news stories of FSA activities—has also declined.
The scope of the problem studies is enormous. Behind the whole problem of jobless farm labor lie the stories of its causes, such as farm mechanization and decreased production. In the forces which produce these conditions is yet more material: the story of the invention of agricultural machinery, of crop limitation, of changing dietary habits.
At present plans are being made to photograph various non-rural institutions which vitally affect the farmer: transportation, the great produce exchanges, the slaughter houses, the flour and textile mills, the multitude of middlemen, and the retail outlets. And more pictures are being taken of the upper two thirds of the farm population in order to have a standard of farm life with which to contrast the tragedy of the underprivileged.
Already the collection covers a lot of ground. For instance: under institutions, the cross-index includes a wide variety, from courthouses and town halls, through gas stations and barber shops to privies. Among the activities listed are strikes, auctions, drinking, gambling, parades, loafing. Groups of people include Negroes, Mexicans, Indians, Cajuns, mountaineers. Some eighteen crops are covered, from cotton to cranberries, while under "Culture of the U.S." we find listed the American roadside, interiors, primitive paintings, movies, religion, politics, architecture, and radio. Here is enough of America to provide a cud for future social historians to chew on.
Stryker and his staff are now experimenting with a new use for photography—as a tool for social research. This means using the great number of facts which the camera can record instantly in a photograph to make an analysis of problems. The experiment is being tried out in several southern counties by FSA in cooperation with a state university. The photographers and researchers are covering the area in pairs, and hope eventually to have a complete record of its economic and social set-up by combining pictures and written data.
Farm Security Tells Its Story
THE BEST PICTURES IN THE WORLD WOULD BE VALUELESS IF they got no further than a quiet grave in FSA's files. But these photographs reach the public in a variety of ways. Some are sent out with articles by FSA writers. When Stryker has a particularly outstanding set he often calls on editors whom he knows personally.
About 175 newspapers and magazines have used FSA photographs in the past two years, from the Saturday Evening Post to the Walnut Ridge (Ark.) Times-Dispatch. The New York Times is a constant user of the pictures; its Sunday magazine was once so impressed by a series on Gee's Bend, Ala., that a writer was sent there to do a story to go with the pictures. Most of the big metropolitan dailies have used FSA photographs, and the list of national magazines include Survey Graphic, Collier's, Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, McCall's and Current History.
Farm Security pictures have been particularly successful as illustrations for such books as Herman Nixon's "Forty Acres and Steel Mules"—a study of the rural economy of the South; Dorothea Lange's and Paul S. Taylor's "An American Exodus," and Edwin Rosskam's "Washington, Nerve Center." FSA pictures received a unique tribute when Archibald MacLeish wrote "Land of the Free." The book has a photograph facing each page of the poem-most of them FSA-and, as MacLeish noted: "The original purpose had been to write some sort of text to which these photographs might serve as commentary. But so great was the stubborn inward livingness of these vivid American documents that the result was a reversal of that plan."
The 1939 U.S. Camera Annual devoted a special section to FSA photographs. The veteran photographer Edward Steichen introduced them as an "outstanding achievement." The pictures were selected from the 1938 International Photographic Exhibition in New York. Here FSA tested public reaction by providing slips for comments. Nine out of ten were favorable; the crowd, largely made up of amateur photographers, forgot about camera technique in their interest in the subject matter. A demand that something be done about such conditions was repeated again and again. The most varied lessons were read into the photographs; they were called Nazi and communist propaganda; some said they proved the need for birth control; others that immigration should be stopped.
Exhibits are the logical outgrowth of Tugwell's original idea of using photographs to reach the public directly. They vary widely according to the purpose for which they are to be shown. Those of pure pictorial interest for the Cleveland Museum or New York's Museum of Modern Art, for instance, were made up of outstanding photographs. Sets are planned for economics and sociology classes—they have been used at Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Oklahoma. Another type of exhibit is for those who are interested in the camera as an esthetic medium.
A number of libraries have used loan exhibits. The New York Public Library has hundreds of FSA photographs in its great picture collection which people borrow as they do books. From them an expert picked out photographs for a World's Fair exhibit on mental hygiene. Once a Catholic charity and a birth control organization, each unknown to the other, picked the identical picture to illustrate their literature.
The only complete set of FSA prints is in Stryker's office. Considering the value of the collection, Stryker would like to have complete sets in the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, and regional collections placed in libraries all over the country.
Propaganda?
ATTACKS ON FARM SECURITY PHOTOGRAPHY HAVE CENTERED around charges that it is one-sided propaganda for the New Deal. These came to a head in the summer of 1936 when the famous skull pictures made FSA an issue in the Presidential campaign. There was a serious drought that summer and the pictures were distributed by a picture syndicate with a caption indicating that the skull came from a drought-stricken steer. The opposition press, to its joy, found that the same skull was shown against two different backgrounds, one of grass, the other parched earth.
It was explained that the photographer had moved the skull about ten feet to get it against a contrasting background and that the caption had apparently been written by the syndicate which took the print from the files, for the original title made no mention of drought. But all explanations were ignored. The skull had been moved, and was therefore a movable prop. This made it a fake picture, proving incontrovertibly that the Resettlement Administration (as it was then called) was a center for false propaganda and by inference, that RA itself and the whole New Deal were fakes.
There undoubtedly are points in the FSA photographic program open to legitimate dispute. How far, for example, should a government agency go in using publicity—whether pictures or text—to further its own policies? A line must be drawn somewhere between no publicity at all—which would make those in office unable to show the public what they are doing and why—and the propaganda of a totalitarian state. It seems as if government sponsored publicity which is accurate, and which tells about policies and problems rather than individuals and parties, is not only harmless but desirable. Certainly FSA photographs come well within this category.
Farm Security's influence on governmental photography in general is growing steadily. The staff is now doing many assignments for other agencies which realize the value of photographs as a means of telling the public about their work. At the same time bureaus which are overhauling their photographic sections, or starting new ones, are constantly asking Stryker's assistance.
While it is always hazardous to write of the future of any federal activity dependent upon the uncertain tides of public opinion as reflected in Congress, we need not look into the future to find a notable record of achievement. Farm Security has gathered the finest collection of pictures of rural America in existence. It has brought home to millions the tragedy of our rural lower third. It has made a permanent impress on federal photographic methods. And it has vividly demonstrated the value of the camera as an instrument of government.