John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

"Re-viewing Documentary: The Photographic Life of Louise Rosskam," a Talk by Laura Katzman

I'm delighted to announce that my friend, Laura Katzman, will be coming to the University of Virginia, tomorrow, December 1st, to talk about Re-viewing Documentary:  The Photographic Life of Louise Rosskam, the wonderful new book that she's co-authored with Beverly W. Brannan.

Laura's talk is scheduled for 6:30 in the evening, in 160 Campbell Hall, in School of Architecture.  (Click here for a map.)  The event is free and open to the public.

 

Louise Rosskam:  Car in front of Shulman's Market on N at Union St. S.W., Washington, D.C., c. 1941.  [Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection.  Click on either photo to see a much larger version.]

Re-viewing Documentary is the companion volume to the exhibition of the same name that's currently at the American University Museum, in Washington, D.C.  It examines the work of Louise Rosskam, an elusive pioneer of the golden age of American documentary photography.  Often in collaboration with her better-known husband, Edwin, Rosskam photographed for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, the U.S. Treasury Department, the Standard Oil Company, the Office of Information for Puerto Rico, and the New Jersey Department of Education, from the 1930s to the '70s.

Re-viewing Documentary is the first study to assess Louise Rosskam's contributions to the larger field of social reform photography.  It addresses the boundaries that she crossed in negotiating her role in a profession in which women were still a distinct minority.  Laura and Beverly reveal how Rosskam embraced the documentary impulse of the age, broadened the mass media uses of documentary, and even recognized the mode's limitations.  The book also highlights the extraordinary photographs she and Edwin created in Puerto Rico as it developed from an impoverished U.S. possession to an industrialized commonwealth.  Along the way, the Rosskams helped expand the perimeters -- geographic and ideological -- of U.S. documentary practice.

 

I'm really looking forward to Laura's talk.  Early reviews of the book have been terrific.

For instance, Tom Rankin of the Center for Documentary Studies, at Duke University, says "For years, Louise Rosskam's important contribution to the formative years of American documentary expression went virtually unrecognized.  With the fine work of Laura Katzman and Beverly Brannan, we can at last see and understand the profound depth and beauty of Rosskam's work.  Her own story, revealed so eloquently through this compelling book, is a powerful reminder of the lasting resonance of the documentary artist.  This book-like the photographer herself-is a true gem."

Bonnie Yochelson, author of Berenice Abbott: Changing New York and Esther Bubley: On Assignment, writes that "We can be grateful to Laura Katzman and Beverly Brannan for their thorough study of Louise Rosskam, which gives her a deserved place on the roster of notable twentieth-century documentary photographers.  In unraveling the mystery of Rosskam's previous obscurity, the authors illuminate an American culture very different from our own."

 

Louise Rosskam:  Laundry, barbershop and store, Washington, D.C.[?], c. 1941.

Laura's talk is sponsored by the University of Virginia's departments of history and art history.  I hope to see many of you there.

 

Memorial Day, 1943: Esther Bubley, Photographer

Esther Bubley is one of my favorite photographers.  (I've written about her, here and here.)  On Memorial Day, 1943, she was all of 22 years old and working for Roy Stryker's legendary documentary project, which had recently moved to the Office of War Information [OWI] from the Farm Security Administration [FSA].

 

 

Esther Bubley:  Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. Boy scout color bearer listening to the Memorial Day ceremony.  1943.  (All photos are from the FSA/OWI collection at the Library of Congress.  Click on any image to see much larger versions.)

I don't know whether Stryker told Bubley to visit Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day or whether she went on her own.  On the one hand, it was exactly the event that the OWI was created to document; on the other, it was the sort of assignment that occured naturally to Bubley.  Either way, the photos, with their concentration on people and faces, a very much Bubley's. 

 

 

Esther Bubley:  Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. American Legion color bearer at the Memorial Day services in the amphitheater.  1943.

Many of the photos that Bubley made for Stryker were shot in and around Washington, D.C., for at least a couple of very good reasons.  First, Bubley didn't drive and had to rely on public transportation to get around.  In fact, her best known out-of-town assignment documents cross-country bus travel.  Second, during the war, Washington was a boom town, with tens of thousands of people pouring in from all over the country.  There was a lot to photograph. 

 

 

Esther Bubley:  Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia. Decorating a soldier's grave in one of the Negro sections on Memorial Day.  1943.

Bubley was no ironist, but she had an eye for life's incongruities (and, more importantly, an eye for injustice).  Here, as always, she's pointing, not shouting, showing us women are honoring men who had died fighting for a country that deemed them second-class citizens.

Easter Sunday in Black Chicago, 1941: Russell Lee, Edwin Rosskam, & the Farm Security Administration

This is one of my favorite photos.  I love the kids, the clothes, the car, and the moment.  It's April 1941, Easter Sunday, and the five poised black boys are as much in control of the situation as is the photographer, a white man named Russell Lee.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Negro boys on Easter morning.  Southside, Chicago, Illinois.  1941.  (Photos are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection at the Library of Congress.  Click directly on any image to see a larger version.)

At the time, Lee was working for the Farm Security Administration's [FSA] epic documentary photography project.  Although most FSA photography was related to the agency's efforts to improve the lot of impoverished farmers and farm workers, by the early 1940s, it had turned some of its attention to America's cities.

The five boys are representative of Chicago's diverse African-American community, in which poverty and prosperity existed side-by-side.  While most black Chicagoans were poor (many were migrants from the South, fleeing racism and searching for economic opportunity), the city was also home to a self-confident black middle class.  You can see some of that confidence in Lee's photo.

 

 

Edwin Rosskam:  Adolescent boys [sic] dressed up for the Easter parade, Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

On that April day, there was another FSA photographer, in Chicago, working on the same assignment -- Edwin Rosskam.  In fact, the project was his idea.

Rosskam had been powerfully moved by Richard Wright's Native Son, which had been published in 1940.  The novel, which was set in Chicago, was an angry indictment of the corrosive effects of American racism.  Despite (or maybe because of) its anger, the book had been a literary sensation.  Rosskam, the FSA's photo editor as well as a photographer, had initiated a collaboration between Wright and the documentary project -- FSA photos and a text by Wright would describe the condition of black America.  The result was 12 Million Black Voices, which appeared later in the year.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Part of the processional of an Episcopal Church, South Side of Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

In the end, only a few of the 420 photos that Lee and Rosskam made in Chicago, over the course of two or three weeks, appeared in 12 Million Black Voices.  The book looked at the African-American community nationwide, rather than in just one city.  Those 420 photos remain, however, remarkable documents from a particular time and place.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Girls waiting for Episcopal Church to end so they can see the processional, South Side of Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

Rosskam and Lee spent a good part of the chilly, gray Easter morning at an Episcopal church, probably drawn by the theatricality of its procession.  Many white viewers (and perhaps the two photographers, as well) would have also been surprised by the very existence of a prosperous black middle class and, in particular, one made up of sober, but stylish Episcopalians.

 

 

Edwin Rosskam:  Crowd outside of fashionable Negro church after Easter Sunday service, Black Belt, Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

I haven't been able to identify the church.  If anyone knows anything about it, please leave a comment or send me a note.  (You can email me by clicking on the link in the upper right hand corner of this page.)

Note, 8 January 2011:  A couple of days ago, I received a note from Ed Doxy, letting me know that the church is St. Edmund's Episcopal.  The photos were made at the church's original location at 57th and Indiana, not long before it moved to its present home at 61st and Michigan.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Peddlers on Easter morning on Garfield Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

Most black Chicagoans weren't middle class, as Lee and Rosskam knew quite well.  They may have spent part of their Easter with middle-class boys and Episcopalians, but their photos remind us that while some people were in church, others were trying to earn a living.

* * *

I've drawn much of the information in this post from Nicholas Natanson's remarkable book, The Black Image in the New Deal:  The Politics of FSA Photography.

Baseball! Opening Day with the FSA

One of the enduring myths about the Farm Security Administration [FSA] is that its photographers only made gloomy pictures of poor people.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Despite that fact that the FSA was a Depression-era federal agency that brought aid to the poor, its photographers -- under the leadership of Roy Stryker --  made plenty of photos of happy poor people, too.  Sometimes they were playing baseball.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Baseball game at recess, San Augustine grade school, San Augustine, Texas.  1939.  (All photos are from the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information collection, at the Library of Congress.  Click on any image to see a much larger version.)

I thought that it would be great to celebrate major league baseball's Opening Day with some photos of grassroots baseball from 70 years ago, a time when the game was indisputably America's past-time.  (Captions are the originals.)

 

 

Philip Bonn:  Keysville, Virginia.  Randolph Henry High School.  Baseball during gym period.  1943.

 

 

Marjory Collins:  Washington, D.C.  Players in an amateur baseball game between the employees' recreation association and a team recruited from garage workers.  1942.

 

 

Dorothea Lange:  Near mountain home, northern Arkansas, on U.S. 62. Farmers' baseball game in the country. From this area many have gone to California to work in agriculture.  1938.

 

 

Marion Post Wolcott: Atlanta, Georgia.  Watching a baseball game.  1939. 

 

  

Dorothea Lange:  Fourth of July, near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Rural filling stations become community centers and general loafing grounds.  The men in the baseball suits are on a local team which will play a game nearby.  They are called the Cedargrove Team.  1939.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Migratory laborers like to play baseball. Here is one of them in a catchers uniform at the Agua Fria Migratory Labor Camp, Arizona.  1940.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Spectators watch the baseball game on the fourth of July at Vale, Oregon.  1941.

 

 

Roger Smith:  Negro Marines prepare for action.  Breaking a tradition of 167 years, the U.S. Marine Corps started enlisting Negroes on June 1, 1942.  The first class of 1,200 Negro volunteers began their training three months later as members of the 51st Composite Defense Battalion at Montford Point, a section of the 200 square mile Marine Base, Camp Lejeune, at New River, North Carolina.  Evidence of the lack of racial friction may be seen in the sports program at the camp.  On the baseball team Negro enlistees and white non-com officers are teammates.  Camp Lejeune has its own baseball league, with the Montford Point team a strong contender for championship honors.  1943.

 

 

Russell Lee:  Night baseball, Marshall, Texas.  1939.  (Remember, you can click on the photos to see much larger versions.)

 

Carl Mydans & the Alley Dwellers of Washington, D.C., 1935

My mother was still in high school, when Carl Mydans photographed her neighborhood -- Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C.  At the time, Mydans was attached to the federal government's Resettlement Administration [RA] and was there to investigate conditions in the city's slums.  Talented and ambitious, he would soon leave the RA, join the staff of Life magazine, and go on to become one of the best known photojournalists of the twentieth century.

Mydans wasn't looking for families like my mother's.  Although her parents had fallen on hard times, like so many other people during the Great Depression, they remained proud of their respectability and fiercely determined to see that their children attained the middle-class status that had been snatched out of their grasp.  They believed that education and hard work were the keys to success, and, sure enough, they were just that for all of their children.  But there was another reason for Mydans to ignore my mother's family.  They lived on a street, not in an alley. 

 

 

Carl Mydans:  No caption.  [Caption to similar photograph, taken at same time, from a slightly different position:  Typical slum area.  Note dome of Capitol, Washington, D.C.  1935.]  All of the photos in this post are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection, at the Library of Congress.  Click directly on any of the images to see larger versions.

Washington's alleys and the people who lived in them had been a matter of public concern for at least two generations.  Outsiders, especially middle- and upper-class outsiders, saw alleys as little more than incubators of crime and disease.  The alleys and their residents seemed especially threatening because they were dispersed throughout the city's central neighborhoods, even the wealthy ones.  Periodically, the city's great and good tried to so something about them.  Just a year before Mydan's visit to Capitol Hill, Congress, which had the final say in governing Washington, passed the Alley Dwelling Act, hoping to eradicate criminality and infection by razing the people's homes and providing new housing somewhere else.  Like all previous efforts, it failed.

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Slums near the Capitol, Washington, D.C.  With the Capitol clearly in view, these houses exist under the most unsanitary conditions; outside privies, no inside water supply and overcrowded conditions.  1935.

In truth, Washington needed both the alley dwellings and the people who lived in them.  The homes were built as working-class housing, in the nineteenth century, and working class housing they remained.  For the working poor, there were few alternatives.

Mydans seems to have understood that the reasons for the poverty that he found in the alleys had more to do with social injustice and inequality than with whatever personal failings alley dwellers may have possessed.  This is apparent in both his framing and his captions.  In many of the photos in this series, he has included the Capitol's dome in his composition and has drawn attention to it with his words.  The message wasn't subtle, but it was right on target:  The nation has failed to honor its promises of justice, equality, and opportunity.  (Sadly, this particular framing quickly became a photographic cliche.)

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Backyard of colored home near Capitol, Washington, D.C.  1935.

Most of Mydans subjects are African-American, and the conditions in which they live are clearly rough.

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Slum backyard water supply, Washington, D.C.  Backyard typical to a group of houses very close to the House office building, showing only available water supply.  1935.

But there is no sense of condescension in Mydan's photos, no hint that he wants to blame the victims for their misery.  In fact, several of the photos give viewers a sense of the hard work that it takes to keep body and soul together.

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Alleyway inhabited by black and white near the Capitol, Washington, D.C.  1935.

Contrary to modern expectations, the alley dwellings and the Capitol Hill neighborhood, as a whole, were racially mixed.  Black alleys and streets alternated with white.  Very occasionally, blacks and whites lived side-by-side.

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Slum children at play, Washington, D.C.  Children in their backyard near the Capitol.  This area inhabited by both black and white.  1935.

Saying that the area was racially mixed is not the same as saying that it was racially integrated.  Friendships and neighborliness, even among children, rarely crossed racial lines.

Washington, D.C., was a southern city, with a distinctly southern pattern of race relations.  Schools, parks, and hospitals were segregated.  African-Americans knew that salesmen and sales women at Garfinkle's and other downtown department stores would not wait on them, that downtown theaters would not let them in, and that downtown restaurants would not serve them.  Black job applicants faced overt discrimination in both the private sector and in the federal government, the city's largest employer.  (In the mid-'30s, 90% of blacks employed by the federal government were in janitorial positions.)

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Negro backyard near Capitol, Washington, D.C.  Negro children have just discovered the cameraman and are concerned at his presence.  1935.

Clearly, there was little reason for these black children to trust the intentions of a white man with a camera (as Mydans had the grace to recognize).

My mother grew up on a street of black families (Heckman Street, now gentrified and renamed Duddington Place) that was surrounded by streets of white ones.  Her youngest brother, my Uncle Teddy, doesn't remember any racial tensions in the neighborhood, but he also doesn't remember anything that could be called inter-racial friendship.  Children went to school and played separately.  Adults socialized separately and rarely held similar jobs.  On Capitol Hill, as in the rest of the city, blacks and white lived in separate and unequal worlds.

 

 

Carl Mydans:  No caption.  [Near Capitol Building, Washington, D.C., 1935.]  Remember, you can click on any of the photos to see larger versions.

Constance McLaughlin Green called her 1967 account of race relations in Washington The Secret City.  In doing so, she was calling attention to the ways in which African-Americans had created a parallel universe that whites knew almost nothing about, with its own churches, schools, a university, social clubs, civic organizations, banks, insurance companies, theaters, and restaurants.

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Front yard and playground, Washington, D.C.  1935.  [Hey!  There's a weird black circle in that photo.  Sure is.  Somebody punched a hole the negative.  See below.]

Mydans' photos show viewers only thin slice of the "secret city."  Exploring the black universe was not, after all, what the RA asked him to do.  Still, I can only regret that Mydans didn't notice, during his time on Capitol Hill, that people like my mother's family were also worthy of his attention.  (The "secret city" was, however, the heart and soul of the photographic studio that Addison Scurlock opened in 1904.  For much of the twentieth century, he and his sons photographed daily life and extraordinary occasions, ordinary people and luminaries in black Washington.  Much of the Scurlock archive is available online from the Smithsonian Institution.)

It's worth mentioning that a few years after Mydans photographed my mother's neighborhood, photographers working for the Farm Security Administration [FSA], the successor to the RA in which he had been employed, produced a comprehensive study of Chicago's "secret city."  You can read about a 2003 exhibition that showcased the work, here (opens a PDF file).

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Outside water supply, Washington, D.C.  Only source of water supply winter and summer for many houses in slum areas.  In some places drainage is so poor that surplus water backs up in huge puddles.  1935.

And what of the alley dwellers themselves?  In his ground-breaking study, Alley Life in Washington, James Borchert refuted the slurs that were so often hurled at them.  Instead, he found that in the face of "the most dehumanizing experiences" alley residents "were able to maintain stability through their primary groups of family, kinship, neighborhood, community, and religion...."  They managed "to create meaningful worlds that permitted both survival and a sense of identity and belonging."

 

 

Carl Mydans:  Slum section near the Capitol, Washington, D.C.  1935.

The photos that Mydans made during his brief foray into the alleys of Capitol Hill can't hope to supply the sort of detailed understanding that Borchert's book provides.  But they can provide a starting place, as Borchert himself knew very well.  Photographs, he wrote, were "a crucial source" in his research, and many of the best were Mydans'.

* * *

A note on the black hole:  In the early years of the RA/FSA documentary project, Roy Stryker, the director, punched holes in some, not all, of the 35mm negatives that he thought were unworthy of being printed and circulated.   (Larger format negatives were simply labeled as "killed.")  Not surprisingly, the practice outraged his photographers.  They protested, and he soon stopped.