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Looking at the New Deal: Official Photography of FDR's America
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13917 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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2 / 1988 |
2,036 Words |
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Lloyd Eby
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The Great Depression witnessed an enormous growth in the popularity of photography. These were the years when mass popular culture shifted its primary orientation from the written to the audiovisual. Famous picture magazines such as Life and Look were created, rapidly finding large audiences; and motion pictures as well expanded greatly. Despite the depressed economy, Americans embraced photography. So many people looked at pictures that James Agee declared that the camera is "the central instrument of our time."
A vast and varied legacy of photographic images from that period is available to us. In fact, for most people this period is probably best remembered in images: President Franklin Roosevelt and members of his New Deal administrations, dust storms, breadlines, migrant farmers, and unemployed workers. These memorable pictures include the work of famous photographers from Life such as Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt, and of Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Rothstein.
Photographic Records
Although the photographic work of the Farm Security Administration is the most widely known and studied, many agencies of the federal government produced or sponsored documentary photography during the New Deal. When Life was being developed in New York, a picture researcher might report to her colleagues that nearly all government agencies were producing photographic records of their activities, many of a quality to rival Bourke-White's work.
A charge often made, both then and now, was that publicity for the New Deal was tantamount to propaganda. Defenders of New Deal documentation argued that the work of these agencies, especially those dealing with relief measures instituted to cope with crises, would be useless unless publicized.
Last July, an exhibition of photographs titled Official Images: New Deal Photography opened at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and ran through January 1988. The exhibit results from an attempt to study the vast accumulation of New Deal photography produced by government agencies. The organizers of the study quickly realized that a selection process was necessary. Representative samples of work from five New Deal agencies were chosen: the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the National Youth Administration (NYA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
As one might suspect, the photographs in this collection vary widely in quality and tone, as do those from the different agencies. All are black and white, and with the exception of some from the WPA, can be said to fit within the documentary tradition. Many photographs in the exhibition strive simply to document what exists, to objectively report existing conditions. But there is also work from members of the Photo League, an offshoot of the Film and Photo League, which originated in New York in 1930 as a branch of the communist Party's Workers' International Relief. The emphasis of the Photo League's work was essentially to support the party line by depicting scenes of poverty and social injustice, carrying out the political and social agenda of the Communist Party. The exhibit includes both kinds of work. Many of the photographs fit
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