history of the photographic project by farm security administration during the Great Depression

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WALKER EVANS , DOROTHEAN LANGE , GORDON PARKS ,…:

HISTORY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT

BY FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

(1935-1944)

By Séverine GROSJEAN

Background and Causes of the Great Depression The 1920s "boom" enriched only a fraction of the American people. Earnings for farmers and industrial workers stagnated or fell. While this represented lower production costs for companies, it also precluded growth in consumer demand. Thus, by the mid 1920s the ability of most Americans to purchase new automobiles, new houses and other durable goods was beginning to weaken.

This weakening demand was masked, however, by the "great bull market" in stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. The ever-growing price for stocks was, in part, the result of greater wealth concentration within the investor class. Eventually the Wall Street stock exchange began to take on a dangerous aura of invincibility, leading investors to ignore less optimistic indicators in the economy. Over-investment and speculating (gambling) in stocks further inflated their prices, contributing to the illusion of a robust economy.

The crucial point came in the 1920s when banks began to loan money to stock-buyers since stocks were the hottest commodity in the marketplace. Banks allowed Wall Street investors to use the stocks themselves as collateral. If the stocks dropped in value, and investors could not repay the banks, the banks would be left holding near-worthless collateral. Banks would then go broke, pulling productive businesses down with them as they called in loans and foreclosed mortgages in a desperate attempt to stay afloat.

But that doomsday scenario was laughed off by analysts and politicians who argued the U.S. stock market had entered a "New Era" where stock values and prices would always go up.

That, of course, did not happen. Stock prices were seriously over-priced (when measured in the actual productivity of the companies they represented) making a market "correction" inevitable. In October 1929 the New York Stock Exchange's house of cards collapsed in the greatest market crash seen up to that time. Students are often surprised to learn that the stock market crash itself did not cause the rest of the economy to collapse. But, because American banks had loaned so heavily for stock purchases, falling stock prices began endangering local banks whose stock-buying borrowers began defaulting on their loans.

Bank Failures Turn the Stock Market Crisis into an Economy-wide Crisis Banks are the pumping stations or hearts of the capitalist organism. Not only do banks circulate money, they create new money through the making of loans. Bank-created credit represents the most elastic element in the supply of money. As hundreds then thousands of banks failed between 1929 and 1933, the economy's credit (and, thus, money) supply began to dry up. Also, as banks went down, they often took local businesses with them as they called in business loans in a desperate effort to stay afloat. All of this rippled outward in everwidening circles of bankruptcies, job lay-offs and curtailed consumption.

The Government's Response: Hoover President Herbert Hoover resisted calls for government intervention on behalf of individuals.

He reiterated his belief that if left alone the economy would right itself and argued that direct government assistance to individuals would weaken the moral fiber of the American people.

Hoover further believed that during hard times the government should adopt austerity measures, that is, cut spending even further. Forced by Congress to intervene, Hoover did so

reluctantly, concerned about both unbalancing the federal budget, and, even more importantly, violating his laissez-faire principles. Hoover's efforts consisted of spending to stabilize the business community, believing that returning prosperity would eventually "trickle down" to the poor majority. The poor majority proved unwilling to wait. Branded by his many detractors as cold and uncaring, Hoover was easily defeated in the presidential election of 1932 by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Government's Response: Roosevelt Roosevelt remained vague on the campaign trail, promising only that under his presidency government would act decisively to end the Depression. Once in office, FDR said yes to almost every plan put forward by advisors and the Congress said yes to almost every program proposed by the president. In the frantically-paced first few months of his administration, Congress passed scores of new legislation at the president's request. Historians tend to categorize these efforts as either measures for "relief" (short-term programs designed to alleviate immediate suffering), "recovery" (long-term programs to strengthen the economy back to its pre-crash level), or, "reform" (permanent structures meant to prevent future depressions). Another way of understanding FDR's Depression-fighting efforts is to analyze the politics of the New Deal. Generally speaking, the overall aim of the New Deal was essentially conservative. The New Deal sought to save capitalism and the fundamental institutions of American society from the disaster of the Great Depression. Within that framework, however, significant differences between New Deal programs existed. The "first" New Deal (1933-35) tended toward a continuation of "trickle down" policies, albeit betterfunded and executed more creatively. Even in the early first New Deal, exceptional programs pointed toward the "second" New Deal's tendency toward "Keynesian" economic policies of revitalizing a mass-consumption based economy by revitalizing the masses ability to consume.

Keynes' theory English economist John Maynard Keynes sought both to explain why depressions occurred and what might be done to prevent them. Simply put, he thought government should use its massive financial power (taxing and spending) as a sort of ballast to stabilize the economy.

Depressions, then, should be attacked with increased government spending at the bottom of the income pyramid. This position is the opposite of "trickle down." Keynesian economists call this "counter-cyclical demand management," believing that the government's massive financial impact can be used as a counterweight to current market forces. . Yet, as your text points out, Roosevelt never fully subscribed to Keynes' counterintuitive argument that government's should spend more during hard times. Roosevelt was a faint-hearted Keynesian, at best.

The "Two" New Deals, 1933-1940s: The "First" New Deal (1933-35) aimed at restoring the economy from the top down The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), passed in 1933, accepted the long-held premise that low farm prices resulted from overproduction. Thus, the government sought to stimulate increased farm prices by paying farmers to produce less. While the original AAA was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, a new act correcting for the Court's concerns was passed in 1935. Critics pointed out the irony of reducing food production in a society

where children already went hungry. Of course, those children's hunger did not represent demand in the marketplace. Indeed there were agricultural surpluses; as usual, the problem of the American farm was demand and distribution, not supply. "Acreage allotment" (the backbone of the crop reduction program) helped the largest and best capitalized farmers. It did little for smaller farmers and led to the eviction and homelessness of tenants and sharecroppers whose landlords hardly needed their services under a system that paid them to grow less. Further, it failed to address the fundamental problem of the Depression: weak consumer demand due to falling wages and unemployment. In the long run the effect of the AAA was beneficial to moderate to large operators.

The 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) set up the New Deal's fundamental strategy of centralized planning as a means of combating the Depression. Industrial sectors were encouraged to avoid "cutthroat competition" (selling below cost to attract dwindling customers and drive weaker competitors out of business) which may have been good for individual businesses in the short-run, but resulted in increased unemployment and an even smaller customer pool in the long-run. The government temporarily suspended enforcement of anti-monopoly laws and sponsored what amounted to price-fixing as an emergency measure. Similar efforts were made to stabilize wages within industries as well. Again, the basic problem left unanswered was overall weak consumer demand. The NIRA did address this in a limited way with the Public Works Administration which funded various public employment schemes; however, the number of jobs created by the PWA were miniscule compared to the number of jobless workers.

The "First" New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) reflected the future liberal methods of the "Second" New Deal. The TVA (1933) provided millions of dollars to transform the economies of seven depressed, rural Southern states along the Tennessee River.

The program included dam-building, electric power-generation, flood and erosion control. It provided relatively high-wage jobs in construction in a region the president called "the nation's number one economic problem." Critics saw creeping socialism in this venture; liberals saw it as a successful example of government solving social and economic problems.

The Politics of Right and Left push and pull FDR toward the Left The right-wing of American politics convinced Roosevelt he had nothing to lose on that end of the spectrum. Chief among his critics on the right was the Liberty League, a speaker's bureau funded by the Du Pont family and other business interests. The League leadership sought to fuse a partnership between the segregationist governor of Georgia Eugene Talmadge and other conservative leaders to create a grassroots opposition to the New Deal.

Liberty League speakers toured the country accusing Roosevelt of instituting creeping socialism.

Right-wing radio personality Father Charles Coughlin denounced recipients of government assistance and claimed the New Deal led the country toward a Communist dictatorship. He suggested Nazi Germany would prove to be America's correct model and blamed the Depression on a Jewish conspiracy. At the height of his popularity millions of Americans listened to his radio sermons each week.

The Liberty League convinced Roosevelt that he had lost any hope of support from the business right and Coughlin's popularity convinced him that people must be suffering indeed

to listen to such rhetoric. In a sense, both the Liberty League and Coughlin (for different reasons) pushed FDR further to the left.

Roosevelt was pulled toward the left by both the traditional Left (The Socialist Party of America) and the unconventional left (Dr. Francis Townshend and Sen. Huey P. Long of Louisiana). In 1932 the Socialists' presidential candidate Norman Thomas had tripled his 1928 showing as hard times rejuvenated the Socialist critique of the system. Nobody thought Thomas posed an electoral threat to FDR; the president was sensitive, however, to the Socialists' rising popularity.

Dr. Francis Townsend, a California physician, argued in favor of a federally-funded old-age pension as a means of ending the Depression. He argued that turning the nation's elderly population into robust consumers would solve the underlying problem of weak demand. Dr. Townsend's clubs began springing up across the country as his message of care for the elderly meshed with people's desire for a rapid end to the Depression. Note the "Townsend Clubs of America" banner in the photograph.

The colorful senator from Louisiana, Huey P. Long, joined Roosevelt's critics on the left with his "Share Our Wealth" plan. Long proposed a guaranteed household income for each American family paid for by high taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Long's rising popularity (before his assassination in 1935) further demonstrated to FDR the discontent of the people.

Convinced that Americans were suffering more than he had realized and believing he had already forfeited the support of the business right, FDR headed left in the "second" New Deal.

The "second" New Deal (1935-40s) aimed at restoring the economy from the bottom up The "second" New Deal attempted to end the Depression by spending at the bottom of the economy where government funds attempted to turn non-consumers into consumers again.

Many of the programs lasted only until World War II while others became permanent fixtures in American life. Here are three to illustrate the central thrust of the second New Deal. The Works Progress Administration was a huge federal jobs program that sought to hire unemployed breadwinners for the purpose strengthening their family's well-being as well as boosting consumer demand. The jobs varied but consisted of mainly of construction of public roads, buildings and parks. Over the course of its life (1935-43) over eight million Americans worked on WPA projects. This was "counter-cyclical demand management" on a huge scale.

Responding in part to "Townsendites," the 1935 Social Security Act set up a modest workerfunded but federally-guaranteed pension system. Not on the princely scale Townsend had advocated, nevertheless, Social Security did act as a safety net for older workers, promote increased consumer demand and earned a place as a fixture on the American political and social landscape.

Finally, another significant component of the "second" New Deal was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Usually called the Wagner Act after its sponsor, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, this law attempted to prevent employers' use of intimidation and coercion in breaking up unions. It set up the National Labor Relations Board to guarantee the right of collective bargaining for American workers.

The results were immediately discernable: the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations whose auto worker and coal miner units soon saw their wages increase significantly. Again, higher wages among

the masses of the working class is an example of the "second" New Deal's attempt to restore the economy from the bottom up.

Farm Security Administration (FSA) The FSA stressed "rural rehabilitation" efforts to improve the lifestyle of sharecroppers, tenants, very poor landowning farmers, and a program to purchase submarginal land owned by poor farmers and resettle them in group farms on land more suitable for efficient farming.

Critics, including the Farm Bureau, strongly opposed the FSA as an experiment in collectivizing agriculture — that is, in bringing farmers together to work on large government-owned farms using modern techniques under the supervision of experts. After the Conservative coalition took control of Congress it transformed the FSA into a program to help poor farmers buy land, and that program continues to operate in the 21st century as the Farmers Home Administration.

The projects that were combined in 1935 to form the RA started in 1933 as an assortment of programs tried out by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. The RA was headed by Rexford Tugwell, an economic advisor to President Roosevelt. However, Tugwell's goal moving 650,000 people into 100,000,000 acres (400,000 km2) of exhausted, worn-out land was unpopular among the majority in Congress.This goal seemed socialistic to some and threatened to deprive influential farm owners of their tenant workforce. The RA was thus left with only enough resources to relocate a few thousand people from 9 million acres (36,000 km2) and build several greenbelt cities, which planners admired as models for a cooperative future that never arrived.

The main focus of the RA was to now build relief camps in California for migratory workers, especially refugees from the drought-struck Dust Bowl of the Southwest. This move was resisted by a large share of Californians, who did not want destitute migrants to settle in their midst. The RA managed to construct ninety-five camps that gave migrants unaccustomed clean quarters with running water and other amenities, but the 75,000 people who had the benefit of these camps were a small share of those in need and could only stay temporarily.

After facing enormous criticism for his poor management of the RA, Tugwell resigned in 1936.On January 1, 1937, with hopes of making the RA more effective, the Resettlement Administration was transferred to the Department of Agriculture through executive order 7530.

On July 22, 1937, Congress passed the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act. This law authorized a modest credit program to assist tenant farmers to purchase land, and it was the culmination of a long effort to secure legislation for their benefit. Following the passage of theBankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, Congress passed the Farm Security Act into law. The Farm Security Act officially transformed the Resettlement Administration into the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA expanded through funds given by the BankheadJones Farm Tenant Act

One of the activities performed by the RA and FSA was the buying out of small farms that were not economically viable, and the setting up of 34 subsistence homestead communities, in which groups of farmers would live together under the guidance of government experts and work a common area. They were not allowed to purchase their farms for fear that they would fall back into inefficient practices not guided by RA and FSA experts.

The Dust Bowl in the Great Plains displaced thousands of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and laborers, many of whom (known as "Okies" or "Arkies") moved on to California. The FSA operated camps for them, such as Weedpatch Camp as depicted in The Grapes of Wrath.

The RA and the FSA gave educational aid to 455,000 farm families during the period 19361943. In June, 1936, Roosevelt wrote: "You are right about the farmers who suffer through their own fault... I wish you would have a talk with Tugwell about what he is doing to educate this type of farmer to become self-sustaining. During the past year his organization has made 104,000 farm families practically self-sustaining by supervision and education along practical lines. That is a pretty good record!"

The FSA's primary mission was not to aid farm production or prices. Roosevelt's agricultural policy had, in fact, been to try to decrease agricultural production to increase prices. However, when production was discouraged, the tenant farmers and small holders suffered most by not being able to ship enough to market to pay rents. Many renters wanted money to buy farms, but the Agriculture Department realized there already were too many farmers, and did not have a program for farm purchases. Instead they used education to help the poor stretch their money further. Congress however demanded that the FSA help tenant farmers purchase farms, and purchase loans of $191 million were made, which were eventually repaid. A much larger program was $778 million in loans (at effective rates of about 1% interest) to 950,000 tenant farmers. The goal was to make the farmer more efficient so the loans were used for new machinery, trucks, or animals, or to repay old debts. At all times the borrower was closely advised by a government agent. Family needs were on the agenda, as the FSA set up a health insurance program and taught farm wives how to cook and raise children. Upward of a third of the amount was never repaid, as the tenants moved to much better opportunities in the cities.

The FSA resettlement communities appear in the literature as efforts to ameliorate the wretched condition of southern sharecroppers and tenants. However, those evicted to make way for the new settlers are virtually invisible in the historic record. The resettlement projects were part of larger efforts to modernize rural America. "Modernization" is a complex process whereby a relatively specific set of assumptions and behaviors make other assumptions and behaviors "wrong," both morally and pragmatically. The removal of former tenants and their replacement by FSA clients in the lower Mississippi alluvial plain—the Delta—reveals core elements of New Deal modernizing policies. The key concepts that guided the FSA's tenant removals were: the definition of rural poverty as rooted in the problem of tenancy; the belief that economic success entailed particular cultural practices and social forms; and the commitment by those with political power to gain local support. These assumptions undergirded acceptance of racial segregation and the criteria used to select new settlers.

Alternatives could only become visible through political or legal action—capacities sharecroppers seldom had. However, in succeeding decades, these modernizing assumptions created conditions for Delta African Americans on resettlement projects to challenge white supremacy.

Photography program The RA and FSA are well known for the influence of their photography program, 1935-1944.

Photographers and writers were hired to report and document the plight of poor farmers. The Information Division of the FSA was responsible for providing educational materials and press information to the public. Under Roy Stryker, the Information Division of the FSA adopted a goal of "introducing America to Americans." Many of the most famous Depressionera photographers were fostered by the FSA project. Walker Evans,Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks were three of the most famous FSA alumni. The FSA was also cited in Gordon Parks' autobiographical novel, "A Choice of Weapons."

Eleven photographers would come to work on this project (listed in order in which they were hired): Arthur Rothestein, Theo Jung, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and John Collier.

These eleven photographers all played a significant role, not only in producing images for this project, but also in molding the resulting images in the final project through conversations held between the group members. Although the New Deal Cabinet under estimated the photographers ability to produce images that breathed a humanistic social visual catalyst found in novels, theatrical productions and music of the time, these images are now regarded as a “national treasure” in the United States; which is why this project is regarded as a work of art.

Together with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (not a government project) and documentary prose (for example Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), the FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the US. Many of the images appeared in popular magazines. The photographers were under instruction from Washington as to what overall impression the New Deal wanted to portray. Stryker's agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among tenant cotton farmers, and the very poor conditions among migrant farm workers; above all he was committed to social reform through New Deal intervention in people's lives.

Stryker demanded photographs that "related people to the land and vice versa" because these photographs reinforced the RA's position that poverty could be controlled by "changing land practices." Though Stryker did not dictate to his photographers how they should compose the shots, he did send them lists of desirable themes, for example, "church," "court day," "barns."

Stryker sought photographs of migratory workers that would tell a story about how they lived day-to-day. He asked Dorothea Lange to emphasize cooking, sleeping, praying and socializing. RA-FSA made 250,000 images of rural poverty. Fewer than half of those images survive and are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.

The Library has placed all 164,000 developed negatives online. From these some 77,000

different finished photographic prints were originally made for the press, plus 644 color images from 1600 negatives After the war started and there were millions of unfilled factory jobs in the cities, there was no need for FSA. In late 1942 Roosevelt moved the housing programs to the National Housing Agency, and in 1943, Congress greatly reduced FSA's activities. The photographic unit was subsumed by the Office of War Information for one year then disbanded. Finally in 1946 all the social reformers had left and FSA was replaced by a new agency, the Farmers Home Administration, which had the goal of helping finance farm purchases by tenants—and especially by war veterans—with no personal oversight by experts. It became part of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty in the 1960s, with a greatly expanded budget to facilitate loans to low-income rural families and cooperatives, injecting $4.2 billion into rural America.

Tugwell chose Roy Emerson Stryker to head a Special Photographic Section (SPS). Stryler continued to lead the effort when the RA was merged into the FSA (1937). Its purpose was to document rural conditions and to promote the programs of the RA/FSA.

Roy Emerson Stryker

"The Farm Security Administration (FSA) is the most famous incarnation of a more general movement of crystallization of the documentary power during the 1930s, in fact, it is from this point that arises, in photography and film the idea of a documentary genre, equipped with a theory, a coherent aesthetic and history, and are retrospectively in the two media, a genealogy and figures of teachers”

The SPS photographers during the 8-years the SPS functioned, not only recorded the plight of Americans during the Great Depression and in the process captured some of the most poignant photos of the era. They captured images of Americans, American culture, and American landscape. The SPS created a collection of 77,000 black-and-white documentary still photographs. SPS photographers beginning in 1939 began working in color, creating 644 color images. The SPS's documentary project continued for 1-year after the unit moved to the Office of War Information (1942). The result is a remarkable set of photographs of great historical significance. The images provide a invaluable visual record of Americans at home, at work, and at play, with an emphasis on rural and small-town life and the adverse effects of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and farm mechanization. Some of the most famous images portray Americans ho were displaced from farms and migrated West or to industrial cities in search of work. The final period captured imsages of America's mobilization for World War II.

Images of the Unemployed in New Deal The Great Depression represented a new moment for government involvement in many facets of American life including a national photography project. The government-sponsored photography project documenting the experiences of Americans during these years of economic crisis existed from 1935 through 1942. The project was housed in various government departments' including the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and the Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) spanning the years of 1935 through 1942. This project generated a collection of 270,000 still photographs and negatives that are housed at the Library of Congress. About a dozen photographers worked under Roy Stryker's leadership to create these pictures which have come to represent the quintessential picture of life during the Great Depression. These images became important pieces of political propaganda by the New Deal administration to delineate the scope of the crisis, justify the need for large-scale public spending, and document the successes of the government program.

There are multiple ways to approach analyzing the FSA photographs. While most historians have focused on the dynamics between Stryker and the individual photographers examining the group project versus individual agency, other historians have focused on the manner in which particular groups were represented, such as African-Americans and women. Both women and African-Americans made up large numbers of one of the most important social protest movements of the Great Depression -- the unemployed workers movement. During the Depression, so many people were not able to find work that the unemployed transitioned in the public eye from being a disaffected, alienated people to a part of the community that deserved public support. This is indicated by the widespread support for increased funding for relief and government work programs. This transition in public perception led to the emergence of very different images of the unemployed: while the government continued to focus on images of individuals downtrodden and disaffected by society, some images of the unemployed actively organizing for higher pay, more respectful treatment, and equal status in society began to surface While the vast majority of FSA images of the unemployed portray them as passive, listless, and in need of assistance, there is a small body of FSA pictures showing the unemployed engaged in organizing through the national organization of the unemployed, the Workers Alliance of America. While there are only eleven images of the Workers Alliance, these few images provide a glimpse of a national, powerful movement that impacted the lives of the unemployed. For too long, the experience of the unemployed during the Great Depression has been viewed solely from the perspective of the New Deal reformers and the solutions they offered.

Photographers of FSA

Walker EVANS

Walker Evans is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His elegant, crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications have inspired several generations of artists, from Helen Levitt and Robert Frank to Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. His principal subject was the vernacular—the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés advertisements ,simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making.

Born in 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, Evans dabbled with painting as a child, collected picture postcards, and made snapshots of his family and friends with a small Kodak camera. After a year at Williams College, he quit school and moved to New York City, finding work in bookstores and at the New York Public Library, where he could freely indulge his passion for T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and E. E. Cummings, as well as Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert. In 1927, after a year in Paris polishing his French and writing short stories and nonfiction essays, Evans returned to New York intent on becoming a writer.

However, he also took up the camera and gradually redirected his aesthetic impulses to bring the strategies of literature—lyricism, irony, incisive description, and narrative structure into the medium of photography.

Most of Evans' early photographs reveal the influence of European modernism, specifically its formalism and emphasis on dynamic graphic structures. But he gradually moved away from this highly aestheticized style to develop his own evocative but more reticent notions of realism, of the spectator's role, and of the poetic resonance of ordinary subjects. The Depression years of 1935–36 were ones of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In June 1935, he accepted a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an "information specialist" in the Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration, a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture.

Under the direction of Roy Stryker, the RA/FSA photographers (Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee, among others) were assigned to document small-town life and to demonstrate how the federal government was attempting to improve the lot of rural communities during the Depression. Evans, however, worked with little concern for the ideological agenda or the suggested itineraries and instead answered a personal need to distill the essence of American life from the simple and the ordinary. His photographs of roadside architecture, rural churches small-town barbers and cemeteries reveal a deep respect for the neglected traditions of the common man and secured his reputation as America's preeminent documentarian. From their first appearance in magazines and books in the late 1930s, these direct, iconic images entered the public's collective consciousness and are now deeply embedded in the nation's shared visual history of the Depression .

In the summer of 1936, Evans took a leave of absence from the Resettlement Administration to travel to the South with his friend, the writer James Agee, who had been assigned to write an article on tenant farmers by Fortune magazine; Evans was to be the photographer.

Although the magazine ultimately rejected Agee's long text about three families in Alabama, what in time emerged from the collaboration was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a lyric journey to the limits of direct observation. Its 500 pages of words and pictures is a volatile mix of documentary description and intensely subjective, even autobiographical writing, which endures as one of the seminal achievements of twentieth-century American letters. Evans' photographs for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are stunningly honest representations of the faces bedrooms, and clothing of individual farmers living on a dry hillside seventeen miles north of Greensboro, Alabama. As a series, they seem to have elucidated the whole tragedy of the Great Depression; individually, they are intimate, transcendent, and enigmatic. For many, they are the apogee of Evans' career in photography.

Between 1934 and 1965, Evans contributed more than 400 photographs to 45 articles published in Fortune magazine. He worked at the luxe magazine as Special Photographic Editor from 1945 to 1965 and not only conceived of the portfolios, executed the photographs,

and designed the page layouts, but also wrote the accompanying texts. His topics were executed with both black-and-white and color materials and included railroad company insignias, common tools, old summer resort hotels, and views of America from the train window. Using the standard journalistic picture-story format, Evans combined his interest in words and pictures and created a multidisciplinary narrative of unusually high quality.

Classics of a neglected genre, these self-assigned essays were Evans mĂŠtier for twenty years.

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Floyd and Lucille Burroughs, Hale County, Alabamal, 1936

Cuban Family , 1933

Tenant farmer family. Hale County, Alabama. 1936.

Dorothea LANGE

Dorothea Lange grew up in a middle class family in New Jersey. Her father, Heinrich Nutzhorn, worked as a lawyer, but also held several respected positions in local businesses, politics and the church, while her mother Johanna managed the household. Both parents were proponents of education and culture, and exposed both Dorothea and her brother Martin to literature and the creative arts.

At the age of seven, Dorothea contracted polio, which left her with a weakened right leg and foot. Always conscious of its effects, she once said that, "[polio] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me". Her parents divorced five years later; Dorothea never forgave her father, whom she blamed for ending the marriage. She eventually dropped his surname, instead taking her mother's maiden name for her own.

Without Heinrich, the family moved in with Johanna's mother, Sophie, a seamstress with an artistic touch. Although this arrangement was not ideal for Dorothea, who had a mutually antagonistic relationship with her grandmother, Sophie's love of "fine things" and artistic sensibility left its mark on the young girl.

During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange’s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Dorothea Lange's images of Depression-era America made her one of the most acclaimed documentary photographers of the twentieth century. She is remembered above all for revealing the plight of sharecroppers, displaced farmers and migrant workers in the 1930s,

and her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California(1936), has become an icon of the period. Since much of this work was carried out for a government body, the Farm Security Administration, it has been an unusual test case of American art being commissioned explicitly to drive government policy. After the Depression she went on to enjoy an illustrious career in photo-journalism during its hey-day, working for leading magazines such as Fortune and Life, and traveling widely throughout Asia, Latin America, and Egypt. She was instrumental in assembling the "Family of Man" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959, a renowned celebration of struggling post-war humanity.

Many of Lange's documentary photographs borrow techniques from the lexicon of modernism - dramatic angles and dynamic compositions - to produce startling and often jarring images of her subjects. They never overpower the subjects themselves, but instead subtly direct the viewer to a fresh appreciation of the individual's plight.

Lange's mature work proved that works of art and documents are not mutually exclusive, and that they can combine to produce beautiful, moving, and campaigning images. Her use of innovative techniques also proved that modernist art need not only convey the private feelings of the artist, but could also be put in the services of popular journalism.

Lange's work, not only in the Depression but also in the post-war years, is characteristic of a lost age when a broad swath of the mass media was profoundly concerned with social issues.

She saw herself firstly as a journalist and secondly as an artist, and she worked with a burning desire to effect social change by informing the public of suffering far away.

Dorothea Lange is an inspiring example of the opportunities that lay open to strong, independent women photographers in the modern era. Her greatest achievements lie in the photographs she took during the Depression. They made an enormous impact on how millions of ordinary Americans understood the plight of the poor in their country, and they have inspired generations of campaigning photographers ever since. But her work after the 1930s also deserves note, not least her involvement with establishing the Aperture Foundation and magazine. Several awards have been set up in her name, including the Lange-Taylor prize for excellence in documentary studies and the Lange Fellowship for documentary photography.

Her archives have been preserved near her hometown at the Oakland Museum of California.

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 Probably the most famous of Lange's photographs, the description she wrote of her encounter with Florence Owens Thompson reveals that it left a deep impression on her. "I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tyres from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her

The White Angel Breadline, 1933

One of Lange's better-known photographs, she often cited this particular scene when speaking about her breakthrough into documentary photography. "The discrepancy between what I was working on in the printing frames and what was going on in the streets was more than I could assimilate". Drawn to the lines of people waiting for worker's compensation or food relief, the image of this elderly man waiting for food at the soup kitchen embodies the depressed mood of the times. The camera focuses on the man's hat and face, which show an exploration of texture through comparison of the rough material and wrinkles of the hat, as well as his weathered skin; her unconventional use of the fence in the foreground to lend dynamism to the scene is also characteristic of use of modernist techniques.

Plantation overseer and his field hands, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1936, Lange was an ardent activist and felt strongly about racism. In this composition, the white man with his foot resting on the car seems to be proudly showing off his belongings, including the four black men in the background. The positioning of the men so conveniently fits into Lange's social commentary as to be almost comical, echoing what is ridiculous in the very concept of racial discrimination between whites and blacks. This separation is illustrated in the contrast between dark hats and jackets of the workers, and the light clothing of the overseer.

Migrant family walking on road, pulling belongings in carts and wagons. Pittsburg County, Oklahoma. June 1938.

Theodor JUNG Theodor Jung was born May 29, 1906 in Austria. He left in 1912 with his grandmother to join his parents in the United States. In the 1920’s he studied book design and the humanities in Chicago and was a graphic designer for the Chicago Times. After losing his position in 1932 he returned to Vienna in 1933. While in Vienna he attended lectures in lithography and became acquainted with the Viennese method of pictorial statistics. In 1934 he was hired by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to draft statistical maps, pictorial graphs and charts of unemployment statistics. In 1935 he began work in an educational unit of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration doing visual graphics and designing pamphlets. Then he showed Roy Stryker some of his photographic work and was hired to be a photographer and a graphic designer for publications and exhibits. He took about 200 photographs in Maryland, Ohio and Indiana, but he did not find his place on Stryker’s team of photographers and left in 1936. In 1937 he served as photographer for the Consumers Council, another government agency, and as art director for the Consumers' Guide. From 1940 to 1943 he illustrated books for the War Food Administration. Later in life he worked in advertising agencies, as well as a book designer for several university presses. In 1960 he settled in San Francisco and worked for the San Francisco Public Library and later as a book illustrator and designer in the publications department of Stanford University. He died in California in 1986.

Child of rehabilitation client, Jackson County, Ohio, 1936

Part of a family of ten that has been on relief for 18 months, Brown County, Indiana, 1935

Rehabilitation client looking over farm implements, Jackson, Ohio, 1936

Louise ROSSKAM

Louise Rosskam (1910-2003) is one of the elusive pioneers of what has been called the golden age of documentary photography. Louise's story provides rare insight into the delicate balance women of her generation had to maintain between the domestic roles for which they were trained and the working world in which they labored. She produced meaningful images but opted to define her professional life largely in terms of her husband, Edwin (1903-1985).

Working with him for nearly four decades, Louise photographed for newspapers, magazines, government agencies, corporations, political parties and service projects.

Leah Louise Rosenbaum was born in 1910 to a prosperous, assimilated Hungarian Jewish family in Philadelphia, but she herself never participated in organized religion. She worked her way through the University of Pennsylvania after her family lost its money during the Great Depression. She majored in science, one of the few courses then open to women. She encountered difficulty obtaining work as a microbiologist because of her gender and her religious background. A self-described rebel, Louise joined leftist circles in Greenwich Village and the burgeoning practice of socially concerned photography to which Edwin Rosskam introduced her. Louise adopted the documentary impulse of the era but recognized its limitations to bring about social change.

The Rosskams married in 1936 and began their life in photography in the rotogravure section of the Philadelphia Record. The newspaper would hire only Edwin so he listed Louise's wages as "gas and oil" in his expense account. Restless after a year, in November 1937 the Rosskams tried an assignment for the one-year old Life magazine. They went to the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico to cover the trial of a Puerto Rican nationalist who had led an independence movement that erupted into The Ponce Massacre. Their story was dropped but on their short visit, they committed themselves to return to address humanitarian situations they observed there.

In 1938 the Rosskams began creating documentary picture books, a popular New Deal phenomenon, which coincided with the shift from modernist art photography to socially concerned photography. The Rosskams produced San Francisco: West Coast Metropolis (1939). Although Edwin acknowledged Louise for doing "all of the dirty work," only his name appears on the title pages of that and their next book. For Washington Nerve Center (1939), they relied heavily on images from the Farm Security Administration (FSA). During their research, they came to know Roy Stryker, director of the project.

In 1939 when Stryker asked Edwin to reorganize the FSA file, the Rosskams welcomed the steady income. Hearing Stryker brief his staff photographers enabled Louise to see the "unseeable" and to confront harsh realities in her own backyard near N Street S.W. in Washington, D.C. For instance, her photographs of a mock wedding sponsored by a settlement house document that only white children could participate in the cultural events designed to teach etiquette and proper behavior to the lower classes and recent immigrants.

Edwin's job security allowed Louise to freelance. She made custom photo books about the children of wealthy families and portraits of business and government leaders, some of which appeared in The New York Times. Her portrayal of notable figures for the "Interesting People" section of American Magazine stands out. She recalled, "I developed a technique of using three flash bulbs for a portrait, which froze the faces. They were horrible. But [the magazine editors] loved them."

Seeking to balance her uniquely urban experience, Rosskam ventured to New England in July 1940 to record Vermont's towns and countryside. Stryker commandeered these and subsequent photos for the FSA file. Photos of her Washington neighborhood (in color, using film provided to FSA/OWI photographers by Kodak) include Shulman's corner store, one of the few places where races could mix.

Rosskam deepened her racial education by participating in creating Richard Wright's and Edwin Rosskam's 1941 photo book Twelve Million Black Voices, a history of black experience in the United States. Louise helped search the FSA file for relevant photographs, and, like Edwin, defied the racial prejudices of the day by working with a black professional man in the segregated southern city Washington, D.C. After the United States entered World War II in December 1942, Louise and Edwin prepared a Victory Garden series in May 1943, showing Americans growing their own vegetables because farmers had gone off to war.

In autumn 1943, the Rosskams joined Stryker at Standard Oil Company of New Jersey to tell the human story of oil in America. They felt uncomfortable working for a corporation but the opportunity to travel, the freedom on their assignments, and the generous salaries they earned seduced them. An added incentive was that Louise was on the payroll with the status of photographer, equal to her husband.

{Children on row house steps, Washington, D.C., ca. 1942}

House in Washington, D.C., ca. 1942

Like other FSA photographers, particularly the women, Louise Rosskam had no professional training in the craft. Before taking up the camera she put in long hours as production assistant to her husband, Edwin Rosskam, who had studied art and taken up photography in the Paris of the 1920s. Although her daughter would later say she submerged her own creative energies in service to his career, she believed her partnership with him was balanced and mutually beneficial. During her few years with the FSA she was in fact the more creative of the two since his FSA job was as editor and hers as photographer. Her main assignments for FSA were in Vermont and Puerto Rico as well as these from Washington DC. In them, she showed skill in both composition and handling of light in the making of highly effective black and white and color images. Particularly drawn to shots that included children, she successfully avoided the clichĂŠs of that genre when shooting them.

She also had a knack for revealing subtle interactions among her human subjects. She seems to reveal subtle tensions as people of different races appear careful to ignore each others' existence. She said she empathised strongly with the difficulties faced by poor slum-dwellers during those transition years from Depression to war economy. In a 1965 interview Rosskam said that taking the DC photographs was a very emotional experience for her. She said she'd known abstractly about poverty and the collective sufferings of the urban underclass, but never spoken with people who lived in places like the row houses and alley dwellings of DC's south-west quadrant; she found, in her camera work, that the inhabitants of the city's slum neighborhoods became real to her and she discovered that her previous understanding of the lives they led had been a superficial one. She said the experience "became part of her" — something "completely different" that she couldn't turn her back on and that she felt she had to express, creatively, with her camera. She said "when I got a camera into my hands, I know that I wanted to take a nicely balanced picture, with a theme, you know, but I wanted people to understand what that woman holding her child, without enough to eat, felt." (Interview with Edwin and Louise Rosskam conducted by Richard Doud at their home in Roosevelt, New Jersey, August 3, 1965)

Children in street, N and Union Streets S.W., Washington, D.C., ca. 1941

Ben SHAHN

Ben Shahn was born in Kaunus, Lithuania in 1898. He emigrated to New York with his family in 1906. He became a lithographer's apprentice after completing his schooling. He later attended both New York University and the National Academy of Design from 1917 to 1921.

In the 1920s Shahn became part of the social realism movement. Social Realism is a term used to describe the works of American artists during the Depression era who were devoted to depicting the social troubles of the suffering urban lower class: urban decay, labor strikes, and poverty. His early work was concerned with political issues of the time, while his later work portrayed the loneliness of the city dweller. Text and lettering formed an integral part of his designs and his work was often inspired by news reports. After working in lithography until 1930, his style crystallized in a series of 23 paintings concerning the Sacco-Vanzetti trial.

Shahn came to prominence in the 1930s as with "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti". Shahn dealt consistently with social and political themes. He developed a strong and brilliant sense of graphic design revealed in numerous posters. His painting Vacant Lot (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.) exhibits a poetic realism, whereas his more abstract works are characterized by terse, incisive lines and a lyric ic intensity of color. The Blind Botanist (Wichita Art Mus.) is characteristic of his abstractions. Shahn's murals include series for the Bronx Central Annex Post Office, New York City.

From 1933 to 1938 he worked as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration, producing masterful images of impoverished rural areas and their inhabitants. Shahn used photographs throughout his career for both composition and content. The photographer position at the FSA was a dream job for Shahn because it provided him the opportunity to travel though Depression-era America taking pictures. He later used those photographs for his paintings years later. Critics in his time felt that using photographs for paintings diminished the value of a painting. However, Shahn's work became the most popular artist of his age. His work was on the cover of Time and well as the Museum of Modern Art. Shahn has been described as a man of uncompromising beliefs and an artist who spoke to the world. Shahn continuously adopted new themes and mediums to define the human condition of his time. Active until the end of his career, Shahn was also a distinguished lecturer, teacher, and writer.

Children of a Rehabilitation client, Arkansas, oct.1935 His image of two young boys are shown as a result of the midwest and it's conditions during the 1930s. In his documentary style, Ben Shahn depicts these two young boys as happy and relaxed, but also filthy. They are in ratty dirty clothing and are covered in dirt from head to toe. They seem content sitting on a wooden porch, but from a person looking at this photograph, even during this time, you see that these families aren't getting the help they really need.

Street scene, New Orleans, Louisiana, October 1935

Crittenden County, Arkansas; May 1936;

John COLLIER

John Collier, Jr. was born in 1913, the youngest son of Lucy Wood Collier and John Collier, Sr. His father was a social activist who later served as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1933 to 1945 and, because of this work, the family maintained ties to the area around Taos, New Mexico. In the 1930s, John Collier, Jr. established a home in this area. In 1943, he married Mary Elizabeth Trumbull, who became a photographer herself and an important partner in his field projects.

In 1941 to 1943, Collier worked as a photographer with the Farm Securities Administration and the Office of War Information under Roy Stryker and documented many areas around the eastern U.S and northern New Mexico.

Other documentary projects in the New Mexico region included the community of Cebolla in 1950, Truchas in 1952, Pe単asco and Picuris in the late 1950s, and many photographs taken on the Navajo Reservation from 1938-1972.

James Drigger shows his family how to put fresh water into FSA (Farm Security Administration) wire-floored brooder Coffee County Alabama

Councilman and family on the stoop of their house, FSA agricultural workers' camp. Bridgeton, New Jersey. 1942

Aroostook County, Maine, 1942

Bryant Friend and his family in their home, vicinity of Richwood, West Virginia, 1942

Sheldon DICK

Sheldon Dick (1906–1950) was an American publisher, literary agent, photographer, and filmmaker. He was a member of a wealthy and well-connected industrialist family, and was able to support himself while funding a series of literary and artistic endeavors. He published a book by poet Edgar Lee Masters, and made a documentary about mining that has been of interest to scholars. Dick is best known for the photographs he took on behalf of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, and for the violent circumstances of his death.

Dick's wealth allowed him to provide his own funding, and gave him an independence the other photographers lacked. Stryker attempted to provide some guidance for the kind of photographs he was looking for, writing to Dick, "It is terribly important that you in some way try to show the town against this background of waste piles and coal tipples. In other words, it is a coal town and your pictures must tell it." Instead, many of Dick's photographs are interiors, bars, and images of ordinary life. Critic Collen McDannel has pointed out that, particularly in regard to his treatment of religion, Dick's work is different from most of the FSA file. Because of his composition of images of the poor surrounded by religious items and by ordinary household objects (objects not in themselves indicating poverty), Dick's photographs are less politically clear than those of the other FSA photographers. His composition "transgresses common assumptions about men and religion and therefore appears to be less 'documentary.'"

Dick worked relatively briefly for the FSA, in 1937 and 1938. He supported himself, submitting his photographs for payment of one dollar a year, but Stryker soon terminated his work anyway. In the 1965 interview, Stryker says, "I went through [his albums of prints] twice, the pictures were lousy, just plain lousy [. . .] It didn't work out. He tried two or three other things for us and it didn't work." During the period of his association, however, he travelled as widely and submitted as many photographs as the full-time employees. Because Dick was not a full-time employee of the FSA, his travels are not well documented, but they can be inferred from the photographs he took. Some of the greatest concentrations of surviving images come from a few documentable trips over the two years of Dick's work:

Ann ROSENER

Ann Rosener was born Nov. 25, 1914 in San Francisco, California .

When Rosener graduated from the all-female Smith College in 1935, she had become an independent thinker. After college, Ann lived at home and was registered to vote as a Democrat although her parents had always been Republicans. Her obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle described her as a liberal and a lover of poetry and photography and graphic design Rosener photographed for the Farm Security Administration from approximately June 1941 until about June 1943, by which time its name had changed to the Office of War Information, to reflect America's entrance into World War II. Her thirty-one assignments took her around Washington, DC, and close-in Maryland, as well as to Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and California. Her work fell into three broad categories: women working outside the home; women practicing home economics in their own homes and providing health and nutrition services; and people overcoming social barriers to work together for the good of the country.

One theme showed women and others filling essential jobs formerly reserved for able-bodied men who were in the armed forces. Rosener showed women learning aviation science from a nun; former actresses producing aircraft motors; former professional baseball players building ships; and people crippled by polio manufacturing small machine parts. She photographed young girls operating lathes and drills, producing gas masks and flare guns, working as riveters, and assembling B-24E bombers. Young women also repaired cars at filling stations, harvested and canned asparagus, operated farms, drove buses and armored cars; served as radio broadcasters; and worked as mechanics on locomotives.

People descended from immigrants from Axis countries worked on assembly lines producing tanks. Even young children were shown doing their parts to help the war effort by attending day care centers established at the plants where their mothers worked.

A second theme instructed women in "making do" on the homefront so that more resources could be allocated to the war. They were instructed in "conservation of durable goods"-vacuuming refrigerator coils and defrosting freezers regularly to reduce electricity use,

remaking worn out adult clothing to fit children, walking rather than driving to run errands, and salvaging cooking grease to sell for bomb production. Her photographs show women selling cans of meat grease they salvaged from cooking, for 4 cents per pound for dark and 5 cents for light grease. Her pictures accompanied an article "Grease for Uncle Sam" in the August 16, 1942 Los Angeles Times. The article said, "From each 10 pounds of kitchen grease saved a pound of glycerin will be made. From that pound of glycerin ammunitions plants make nearly two and one-half pounds of nitroglycerine, the destructive giant which blasts battleships, tanks, and plane . . . . Save your grease for your country."

Other photographs show a female home economist telling a group of housewives how to cook nutritious meals despite wartime food rationing. A headline for the photo read, "Proper Nutrition Means Earlier Victory." Housewives learned how to "extend" rations with unusual cuts of meat and make gingerbread without sugar which was heavily rationed. On December 4, 1942, Rosener's photographs of braised stuffed hearts accompanied an article titled "Meat Alternates, Extenders Help Voluntary Rationing and Budget-Balance," in the Christian Science Monitor.

And, of course, there was the Victory Garden push for civilians to grow vegetables for home use so agribusiness produce could feed the troops.

August 1942. "Testing small diameter, high-speed twist drills, these women employed by Republic Drill & Tool, Chicago, roll the drills down a slight incline to determine regularity of diameter. It's a job requiring patience and finger dexterity, and these young women possess those definite feminine propensities for just such work."

July 1942. Back at the Melrose Park Buick plant near Chicago.

"Production of aircraft engines. Reconditioning used spark plugs for use in testing airplane motors, Mighnon Gunn operates this small testing machine with speed and precision although she was new to the job two months ago. A former domestic worker, this young woman is now a willing and efficient war worker, one of many women who are relieving labor shortages in war industries throughout the country."

Jack DELANO

Ukrainian-born American documentary photographer, who emigrated as a child with his parents to Philadelphia, where he studied the violin and viola. Travelling in Europe in the early 1930s while at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he bought a camera to record his visit. After his return, the Works Progress Administration Federal Arts Program sponsored his photographic documentation of bootleg miners extracting coal from closed Pennsylvania anthracite mines; when Paul Strand saw Delano's resulting exhibition he introduced him to Roy Stryker, who hired him for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project in 1940; Delano later followed Stryker to the Office of War Information (OWI). Among his bestknown FSA-OWI photographs are his 1943 documentation of the Atcheson, Topeka & Santa Fe wartime rail service between Chicago and Los Angeles.

Jack Delano's gorgeous color images from the 1940s remind us of the day when railroads dominated the American landscape -- and the American consciousness. The gigantic locomotives, the play of light on steel rails and the huge roundhouses were all elements that spurred the imagination and presented a subject of infinite possibilities for a photographer.

The railroads had bound the country together and opened the West. Chicago was the hub, especially the Chicago and Northwestern Railway Company's Proviso yard.

Working for the U.S. Farm Security Administration, he traveled across America photographing the effects of the Depression on American life. At the time, the railroads meant freedom and they seduced thousands of unemployed men -- and some women -- to ride the rails. They hitched rides on freight trains and hid in empty cars or slept on top of them, always on the alert for the railroad cops. In the depths of the Depression, their primary goal was to get "somewhere else" and find a job.

Delano was originally one of those job seekers himself when he proposed a photographic project to document the mining operations and working conditions of the Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania-area, coal mines. He sent samples of his photographs and applied for a job at the FSA's Photography program, which was headed by the charismatic Roy Stryker and was part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1933 New Deal -- a program aimed at creating jobs for some of America's millions of unemployed.

At the recommendation of the photographer Marion Post Wolcott, Stryker hired the young Delano on the condition that he had his own car and a driver's license. At a salary of $2,300 a year, Delano -- along with Wolcott, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, Dorothea Lange and others -- helped produce what is probably the greatest photographic record of American life ever made. Surprisingly a large number of these images were shot in color with the newly available Kodachrome transparency film. Delano was one of the FSA photographers who shot a good deal of his work in color, both as Kodachrome 35mm slides and medium format transparencies In 1946 Delano and his wife returned to Puerto Rico, where they had gone on an FSA assignment in 1941. Much of his later photography testifies to his love for the island and its people. In addition to running Puerto Rican Educational Television he taught music and made films

Jack Delano: Farm Security Administration borrower, vicinity of Frederiksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands. 1941.

In early December 1941, Jack Delano, sitting in the back seat of a "single-engine, clothcovered biplane," landed at San Juan airport, in the United States Virgin Islands, ready to begin an assignment for the federal government's Farm Security Administration [FSA]. The Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor, and the nation was at war. Everything was about to change; everybody knew it. Everything, that is, except the photos that Delano made during his 10 days in the islands. Despite the coming of war and despite the exotic location, they look just like the photos that he and other FSA photographers had been making on the mainland for past several years. As powerful, richly evocative, and beautiful as these documentary photographs undoubtedly are, there's little about them that's specific to their time and place. Not even the color film was new.

Delano's assignment was two-fold. To make pictures that would accompany the governor's report to Congress and to document the efforts of the FSA to assist poor farmers. (The United States had purchased the Virgin Islands, a former Danish possession, in 1917.) It was the sort of thing that the agency had been doing ever since it was created in 1935.

The FSA photographers understood that a large part of their job was to create images that would build popular support for the agency's work. That required, among other things, getting the public to identify, to some degree, with the people it was helping. Not surprisingly, the photographers made many portraits.

Jack Delano: Farm Security Administration borrower, vicinity of Frederiksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands. 1941.

Kodachrome color slide film (which was introduced in 1935 and has only recently been discontinued) had been part of the FSA photographers' tool kit for about three years. The new film had done little to change the photographers' styles. Delano's color photos, for instance, often look like hand-tinted versions of those he made in black and white.

Jack Delano: Farm Security Administration borrower cultivating his sugar cane field, vicinity of Frederiksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands. He lives in one of the homestead houses. 1941.

Color or black and white, images of back-breaking labor were a standard part of the FSA repertoire.

Jack Delano: Cultivating sugar cane on the Virgin Islands Company land, vicinity of Bethlehem, Saint Croix. 1941.

Photos of people, usually African-Americans and usually in the South, doing field labor in gangs are well represented in the FSA archive. Here in the Virgin Islands, the crop may have been sugar, rather than cotton, but the resemblance to the South is more than coincidental.

The Virgin Islands, like the American South, had been a society that was based on the labor of African slaves and their descendants. Sugar was king, and slaves generated great wealth for their Danish masters. When slavery ended, in 1859, the slaves received nothing but freedom, just as in the US. Without access to land and without compensation for their years of unpaid labor -- that is, without the means to become truly free and independent -- most found themselves forced to go back to work for former slave owners. As sharecroppers and labor tenants, they found themselves trapped in cycles of poverty.

Jack Delano: The main shopping street, Christiansted, Saint Croix, Virgin Islands. 1941.

Russell LEE

(July 21, 1903 - August 28, 1986) Russell Werner Lee was born in Ottawa, Illinois on July 21, 1903. He attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana and graduated from Lehigh University in 1925 with a degree in engineering.

Lee began his career as a chemical engineer but grew dissatisfied after four years in manufacturing. Encouraged by his first wife, artist Doris Emrick, Lee began to paint. The Lees left the Midwest for San Francisco, where Doris wanted to study. They arrived just before the 1929 crash of the stock market and the onset of the Depression and immediately became engaged in the thriving art community there. From San Francisco, the Lees next moved to the New York art colony of Woodstock, where they lived in the summers from 1931 to 1936, spending their winters in New York City. In 1935 Lee began to experiment with a camera as an aid to his painting and soon gave up painting in favor of photography. He and Doris went to Europe, where she studied art and he traveled, observing life in Eastern Europe, Germany, and the Soviet Union.

In 1935 Lee began to photograph miners and record conditions in Pennsylvania coalmines.

His growing interest in social issues and his affinity for photography as a means of recording social conditions brought him in contact with other visual artists, among them Pare Lorentz and Ben Shahn, whose work he admired. He heard that Shahn was involved with the documentation program of the Historic Division of the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration, and decided to seek a job there. His first assignment for Roy Stryker was to photograph the Jersey Homesteads housing project in 1936. When Carl Mydans left the agency, Stryker offered Lee a full-time job.

Russell Lee's photographic work continues to be associated with the documentary tradition and the work of the Farm Security Administration under the direction of Roy Stryker. As part of the team that also included Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans, Lee's primary task was to document rural communities with the goal of making urban Americans aware of the plight of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and migrant workers stricken by drought

and the Great Depression. Stryker assigned Lee to cover the Midwest and the West Coast, where he typically stayed on the road much longer than expected. Lee made some of his better-known early photographs in rural Iowa in 1936. He traveled throughout Texas and New Mexico between 1939 and 1940. Lee and his first wife grew apart during this time and divorced in 1938. During the 1940's, Lee's distinctive work appeared in hundreds of newspapers and popular journals including Life, Look, Fortune, U.S. Camera, and Survey Graphic.

Shortly after the U.S. entered Word War II, the Historical Division transferred to the jurisdiction of the Office of War Information. Lee left the FSA group and joined the Air Transport Command as a captain in January of 1943, assigned to take aerial surveillance photographs as well as documenting local conditions on the ground. When the war ended, Russell Lee resigned his commission and in 1947 he and his second wife Jean Smith moved to Austin, Texas. From 1965 to 1973 he taught photography at the University of Texas.

Although Lee often traveled as a free-lance photographer on assignment for magazines, corporations, the federal government, and the University, Austin remained his home and Texas a major focus of his work until his death in 1986.

June 1939. "Mother and child, agricultural day laborer family encamped near Spiro. Sequoyah County, Oklahoma."

1941. "Free coffee served at the picnic grounds on the Fourth of July at Vale, Oregon."

October 1937. "Family of Joe Kramer, farmer near Williston, North Dakota."

Carl MYDANS

Born May 20, 1907, in Boston, MA Carl Mydans spent 40 years with Life magazine, and delivered some of the most potent images of American triumph in World War II in just one phase of his long career. Mydans snapped the iconic moment when General Douglas MacArthur purposefully strode ashore in the Philippines in 1945, and also captured the signing of Japan's surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, among other scenes. But he also photographed the war from the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier or sailor. "Resourceful and unruffled, Mr. Mydans sent back pictures of combat that even now define how we remember World War II, Korea, and other conflicts," noted New York Times obituary writer Andy Grundberg.

After he graduated in 1930, he found work as a reporter for American Banker .

In 1935, Mydans was hired as a photographer with a U.S. federal agency called the Resettlement Administration; it later became the Farm Security Administration. He traveled throughout New England and the South, documenting the end of a rural-based economy, and gained a measure of renown for his images of bedraggled Arkansas farmers and their families.

It was the Great Depression, and the poorest of America's poor were devastated by the economic downturn. "One picture, of a Tennessee family living in a hut built on an abandoned truck chassis, portrays the misery of the times," noted Mydans' Times of London obituary, "as starkly as any photographs by his more celebrated contemporaries."

After a more than a year with the Farm Security Administration, Mydans was hired by Life magazine just before its debut issue hit newsstands in late 1936. He was only the fifth photographer on its staff, joining an impressive roster that included Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White. For one of his first assignments, he was sent to a Texas town, Freer, to document the heady oil-boom atmosphere there. In 1938, Mydans married Shelley Smith, a Life staff writer whose father had established the journalism program at Stanford University.

The pair would spent the remainder of their marriage working side by side.

At the onset of World War II, Life sent Mydans to shoot the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. He later roamed over to the Pacific, where he covered the Sino-Japanese War, but in the Philippines capital of Manila he and his wife were captured by incoming Japanese troops in January of 1942. They were held captive for almost two years—first in Manila, then Shanghai—and were released in a prisoner-exchange agreement. After a brief respite in New York, both Mydans and his wife returned to the combat zone, this time in Europe as the war wound to a close.

Back in the Pacific theater in mid-1945, Mydans shot the famous image of General MacArthur striding ashore. The legendary officer had declared, when the Japanese came in 1942, "I shall return," and Mydans' photograph of the formidable general immortalized that claim for posterity. Some asserted that it must have been staged, but Mydans resolutely defended the photograph as entirely spontaneous, though he did admit that MacArthur was savvy about public-relations opportunities. The general had appeared in Mydans' other memorable image from that assignment, watching with other top U.S. brass as a Japanese delegation signed the official documents of surrender on an early September day in 1945. "No one I have ever known in public life had a better understanding of the drama and power of a picture," the Guardian 's Christopher Reed quoted Mydans as saying about MacArthur.

Despite his two years in captivity, Mydans bore no ill will toward the Asian nation, and accepted an assignment to head Time-Life's Tokyo bureau with his wife. Time-Life was the publisher of Time, Life and other top magazines, which Mydans continued to provide with an array of visual stories. In 1948, he just happened to be in the city of Fukui when a massive earthquake struck; some of his shots were taken on the street while buildings were collapsing around him.

Cafe in Pikesville, Tennessee, 1936

Brick carrier at model community planned by the Suburban Division of the U.S. Resettlement Administration, Greenbelt, Maryland, 1936

Gordon PARKS

Born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, Gordon Parks was a self-taught artist who became the first African-American photographer for Life and Vogue magazines. He also pursued movie directing and screenwriting, working at the helm of the films The Learning Tree, based on a novel he wrote, and Shaft. Parks has published several memoirs and retrospectives as well, including A Choice of Weapons.

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas. His father, Jackson Parks, was a vegetable farmer, and the family lived modestly.

Parks faced aggressive discrimination as a child. He attended a segregated elementary school and was not allowed to participate in activities at his high school because of his race. The teachers actively discouraged African-American students from seeking higher education.

After the death of his mother, Sarah, when he was 14, Parks left home. He lived with relatives for a short time before setting off on his own, taking whatever odd jobs he could find.

Parks purchased his first camera at the age of 25 after viewing photographs of migrant workers in a magazine. His early fashion photographs caught the attention of Marva Louis, wife of the boxing champion Joe Louis, who encouraged Parks to move to a larger city. Parks and his wife, Sally, relocated to Chicago in 1940.

Parks began to explore subjects beyond portraits and fashion photographs in Chicago. He became interested in the low-income black neighborhoods of Chicago's South Side. In 1941, Parks won a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration for his images of the inner city. Parks created some of his most enduring photographs during this fellowship, including "American Gothic, Washington, D.C.," picturing a member of the FSA cleaning crew in front of an American flag.

After the FSA disbanded, Parks continued to take photographs for the Office of War Information and the Standard Oil Photography Project. He also became a freelance photographer for Vogue. Parks worked for Vogue for a number of years, developing a distinctive style that emphasized the look of models and garments in motion, rather than in static poses.

Relocating to Harlem, Parks continued to document city images and characters while working in the fashion industry. His 1948 photographic essay on a Harlem gang leader won Parks a position as a staff photographer for LIFE magazine, the nation's highest-circulation photographic publication. Parks held this position for 20 years, producing photographs on subjects including fashion, sports and entertainment as well as poverty and racial segregation.

He was also took portraits of African-American leaders, including Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Muhammad Ali. Parks launched a writing career during this period, beginning with his 1962 autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree. He would publish a number of books throughout his lifetime, including a memoir, several works of fiction and volumes on photographic technique.

Parks’ early FSA photograph of Ella Watson who worked at the FSA building. Parks continued to document Watson and her family extensively.

Children with Doll (Ella Watson's Grandchildren), 1942

Athur ROTHSTEIN

Arthur Rothstein arrived in the Dust Bowl in April of 1936. He was 21 years old, the son of Jewish immigrants, born and raised in New York City. Fresh from Columbia University, Rothstein had been the first photographer hired by Roy Stryker, his former professor, at the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency that, from 1935 to 1936, relocated struggling families to communities planned by the federal government. The photography unit, later part of the Farm Security Administration, documented for the public not only the multitude of problems the nation was facing, but what the government was doing about them.

Rothstein—who learned how to drive a car in order to take the job—had been working for Stryker less than a year when he arrived in Boise City, Oklahoma. Fourteen miles south, at the homestead of Art Coble in rural Cimarron County, he shot the most famous photograph of his career. "I was about to get into my car when I turned to wave to [Coble and his two sons]," Rothstein later remembered. "And I looked and saw this man bending into the wind, with one of the boys in front of him and another one behind him, and great swirls of sand all around, which made the sky and the earth become one. And I said, 'What a picture this is!' and I just picked up my camera and went 'click.' One photograph, one shot, one negative." The image Rothstein captured at the Coble farm was soon widely reprinted across the country, touching emotional chords with everyone who saw it, becoming the iconic picture of the Dust Bowl and one of the most widely reproduced photographs of the 20th century.

During his five years with the FSA, Rothstein shot some of the most significant photographs ever taken of rural and small-town America. He went on to a successful commercial career as the Director of Photography at Look and Parade magazines.

Basque Sheepherder, Dangberg Ranch, Douglas County NV, 1940

Rothstein’s work for the FSA earned him $1,620 a year, with an allowance of 2 cents per mile and $5 a day for food and lodging (Rothstein 1986, 36). While on the job, Rothstein carried with him only what he needed.

“I had a sleeping bag in my car and an ax to chop down trees that got in my way. The back roads weren’t like those we have today. I had a shovel to dig myself out of snow or mud, a water bag, and a Coleman stove to cook things on. I was pretty self-sufficient.”

-Arthur Rothstein, Documentary Photography, 1937) During the five years that he spent working in this division for Stryker, Rothstein took around 80,000 images, many of them later becoming some of the most iconic images of the Great Depression. As he worked on producing these images over his five-year career at the FSA, Rothstein kept in mind that the documentary work that he was doing had “the power to move men’s minds,” (Rothstein 1986, 33). He used his documentary work as a way to teach others about life; how people live, work, and play, the social structures that people are a part of, and the environments in which they live in. As Rothstein said of documentary photography in his 1986 book entitled Documentary Photography,“The aim is to move people to action, to change or prevent a situation because it may be wrong or damaging, or to support or encourage one because it is beneficial,” (Rothstein 1986, 33).

It was with this aim in mind that Rothstein worked for the FSA. He wanted to inform people living in eastern United States of the dust storms and devastation that had hit the lives of farmers and others living in the Great Plains. He also used his work to help put soil conservation practices in place and to convince Washington to send government aide to the Great Plains.

The FSA photographs, being documentary in nature, also helped to promote photography as a respected form of art. Rothstein had an appreciation of the documentary image as “a vital, significant expression of photographic art,” (Rothstein 1986, 36). He aimed to spread this view to others through his work by being truthful, and also by evoking feeling in the viewer.

During his time working for the FSA, Rothstein “learned to be an eyewitness to events and to report in a sensitive and intelligent way the relationships of people to their environments,” (Rothstein 1986, 36).

His first assignment working for the FSA was to document the people of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and their “relocation.” Rothstein grew up living in New York City and had not traveled much prior to this assignment. His lack of travel, he felt, allowed him to start his work at the FSA with new eyes, bringing a fresh outlook with him as well, which is why he believed that his early images were so successful.

As a way to avoid being obtrusive in the lives of his subjects, he tried to spend some time with them before starting an assignment, hoping that they would be comfortable around him when it came time for him to work. Rothstein spent a week with the people of the Blue Ridge Mountains, living as they did and getting to know them before he started shooting. When he finally did pick up his camera and start working, he chose to use a small, unobtrusive 35mm Leica camera with no tripod. Having a relationship with his subjects before shooting them and using camera equipment that helped prevent his subjects from feeling as if they were being watched helped Rothstein capture some of the most iconic images of the Great Depression that are still widely recognized to this day.

One of these widely-recognized photographs is Rothstein’s 1936 image entitled Fleeing a Dust Storm. Taken in April of 1936 to document the Dust Bowl, this image shows farmer Arthur Coble and his two sons in Cimerron County, Oklahoma during a dust storm. Rothstein took this photo to show people in the East what was happening to fellow Americans and their farms because those in the East “had no contact and no sense of identity with this poor farmer walking across the dusty soil on his farm in Oklahoma-it gave him a sense of identity” (Oral History Interview with Arthur Rothstein, 1964).

As it turns out though, Rothstein did have something to do with the creation of this picture, more than just being there to take it. In a 1942 interview, Rothstein described this photo as an example of “direction in a picture story,” (Curtis, 83). He thought of himself as a director, setting up in essence what was to be a recreation of a dust storm. Since photographing in the middle of a dust storm is not possible because of low visibility and it was dangerous, Rothstein had to direct his subjects in order to produce this image. He wanted to capture the impact that these storms had on the land and on the people, and was only truly able to do so at a time when there were low winds and high visibility. He asked the youngest boy pictured on the far right side of the photo to hang back and put his arms over his eyes. He asked the father and the older son to lean forward, as they would have normally done during a powerful dust storm. Rothstein was reenacting what he would have seen otherwise, if taking a photo during one of the powerful storms was possible. Despite the direction that Rothstein put into this particular image, it still stands as an informative picture representative of the time. People still look at it as being representative because he wasn’t making up a science that never existed.

He was, in this case, simply reenacting a real-life scene.

Farmer and sons in dust storm, Oklahoma, 1936.

The fine dirt lifted by the dust storms and blown by the winds scraped some fields to hardpan and created dunes wherever there were eddies in the wind. Oklahoma Panhandle, 1936.

A car is chased by a "black blizzard" in the Texas Panhandle, March 1936

A young boy covers his mouth during a dust storm on farm. Cimarron County, Oklahoma.

April 1936

Woman and child looking through window in house. Oswego, New York. December 1939

John VACHON

From 1936 to 1943, John Vachon traveled across America as part of the Farm Security Administration photography project, documenting the desperate world of the Great Depression and also the efforts at resistance—from strikes to stoic determination. This collection, the first to feature Vachon's work, offers a stirring and elegant record of this extraordinary photographer's vision and of America's land and people as the country moved from the depths of the Depression to the dramatic mobilization for World War II. Vachon's portraits of white and black Americans are among the most affecting that FSA photographers produced; and his portrayals of the American landscape, from rural scenes to small towns and urban centers, present a remarkable visual account of these pivotal years, in a style that is transitional from Walker Evans to Robert Frank.

Vachon nurtured a lifelong ambition to be a writer, and the intimate and revealing letters he wrote from the field to his wife back home reflect vividly on American conditions, on movies and jazz, on landscape, and on his job fulfilling the directives from Washington to capture the heart of America. Together, these letters and photographs, along with journal entries and other writings by Vachon, constitute a multifaceted biography of this remarkable photographer and a unique look at the years he captured in such unforgettable images.

A migrant woman and small child. Oskaloosa, Kansas. October 1938.

Migrant man looking up at billboard. Dubuque, Iowa. April 1940.

Farmer inspecting soil next to planter pulled by horses in field. Jasper County, Iowa. May 1940

Marion POST WOLCOTT

On June 7, 1910, Marion was born to Walter and Marion "Nan" Hoyt Post in Montclair, N.J. .Wolcott attended lectures about photography in New York City at the Photo League which provided instruction in film and photography to reflect the daily lives of ordinary American workers."Impressed by Wolcott's work there, Paul Strand and Ralph Steiner invited her to join a group of young photographers who met at Steiner's apartment for informal discussions. She developed close friendships with members of the Group Theatre, a small, reality-based drama company begun in New York in 1931. Wrapped in blankets in winter, she commuted in her drafty car between Croton-on-Hudson and the couches of her actors friends on weekends.

They became the subjects of her first published photographs, in Stage Magazine.

In 1936 Wolcott moved back to New York City to become a freelance photographer but jobs were difficult to find. She placed photographs in the prestigious Survey Graphic, PM (a shortlived 1940s New York left-wing daily newspaper) and Stage Magazine and aggressively pedaled story ideas to Parents, Vogue, Woman Today, and Building America. She completed and was paid for a Fortune assignment (topic now unknown), but those photographs were never published. Ed Stanley, wire photo chief for the Associated Press, sent assignments her way, as well.

Wolcott also documented the living conditions of the people in the countryside.

Wolcott was soon bored with her women's beat on the newspaper. Ralph Steiner then showed her portfolio to Roy Stryker, the head of the photography division of the Farm Security Administration, based in Washington, D.C. With recommendations from Steiner, Strand and Ed Stanley, Stryker immediately contacted her for an interview. He hired her on the spot and gave her the first full time FSA appointment offered to a woman. Dorothea Lange had been on staff since 1935, but she worked only part-time and produced far fewer photographs for the agency.

Wolcott's social contacts helped her gain access to juke joints and the freedom to venture into African American neighborhoods and other places she would not have been able to go without introductions and escorts. Her photographs document the benefits of government subsidies to farmers and depict racial interactions and extremes of the country's rich and poor but she also convinced Stryker of the need to include coverage of the upper and middle classes in the Historical Section file.

In April or May 1941, Marion Post met Lee Wolcott, assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace. Lee was a Brown University graduate and a widower with two small children.

They fell passionately in love and married on June 6. Marion Wolcott attempted to continue her career as well as raise her husband's children but, with war rationing of foods, cars, tires, and gasoline, and women shifting from traditional low-wage housekeeping positions to highpaid war work, that plan proved impossible, especially now that she covered the Western United States.

On September 19, 1941, Stryker sent Wolcott an eight-page letter thanking her for some fragrant sagebrush she had sent him from out West and giving her assignments that called for extended time on the road. She annotated the letter with comments belittling the significance of the subjects to be photographed and complaining that she had to complete work by John Vachon, another FSA photographer. She then mailed Stryker's letter to her husband Lee whose reply declared that he [Stryker] "should be fired immediately." Lee's reply also underscored Wolcott's sense of being overworked and underappreciated. Lee ordered Stryker to have his staff re-label Marion Post's photographs to include her married name, an exercise that took many hours to complete at the expense of other projects and caused further ill will.

Wolcott was forced to choose between husband and boss, between traditional gender expectations and a demanding job.

Eager for a sense of belonging to a network of family and friends in the face of the coming war, she left the FSA. She had two children of her own with Lee and helped him operate a "back to nature" farm he bought in Virginia.

Wolcott never photographed professionally again but did not stop making photographs. She gave away portraits of her neighbors and images of farming in rural Virginia. From 1954 until 1959, the Wolcotts lived in Colorado and New Mexico. While Lee worked for the State Department from 1959 to 1968, the family lived in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Egypt. Just prior to a forced evacuation from Egypt during the Seven Days War in 1967, Wolcott destroyed nearly all of her remaining personal archive to save it from capture.

Wolcott and Lee then settled in California, where Wolcott documented the counter-culture.

One of Wolcott's contributions to photojournalism was to maintain the superior quality of her photographs while under the duress of working in socially difficult environments. She is recognized for her independent spirit, hard work, her dedication to social ideals, and her insightful photographic portrait of American life. She showed women that such a life was possible but not easy. She also contributed one hundred-twenty photographs to the color portrait of the United States made when Kodak gave samples of its newly released Kodachrome film to the FSA for experimentation.

Children on porch, leaning on railing. Pursglove, West Virginia. September 1938.

Coal Miner's Child Carrying Home Kerosene, to be used in Oil Lamps. Scott's Run, W.Va., 1939

Jitterbugging in a Jukejoint. Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939

Coal Miner and Child. W.Va., 1938

After a Blizzard at Night, Woodstock, Vermont, 1940

SOURCES : http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/dustbowl/photos/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/ www.arthurrothsteinarchive.com/fsa-years.html www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm Paul Hendrickson, Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott.

New York: Knopf, 1992, 40. Linda Wolcott Moore. "Marion Post Wolcott: A Biographical Sketch.

Pierre Borhan, Dorothea Lange, le cœur et les raisons d’une photographe, éditions du Seuil, 2002 ; http://artandsocialissues.cmaohio.org/web-content/pages/econ_delano.html http://www.shorpy.com/ American Photographers of the Great Depression. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. http://www.iub.edu/~iuam/online_modules/fsa/fsaartists.html "Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943", Denver Post PLog, July 26, 2010.

The Gordon Parks Foundation arthurrothsteinarchive.com Nationally-known research project to track down descendants of people photographed by John Vachon and other Farm Security Administration photographers