John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

Funky Friday & Convergences 7, Together Again for the First Time: Margaret Bourke-White, Marion Post Wolcott & Louis Jordan

Funky Fridays make me happy.  It's a chance to show off music (and other funky stuff) that puts a glide in my stride and a dip in my hip.  (By the way, if you're here for the tunes, skip all my talking and scroll down to the videos.)

Convergences make me happy, too.  This is a series of blog posts where I talk about two photographs -- by well known photographers -- that echo each other.

Today's post has two origins.  First, I'm just finishing two long articles about the photos that Margaret Bourke-White made in South Africa, in 1949-50, on assignment for Life magazine.  The second starting poing is Maurice Berger's wonderful post on the New York Times Lens Blog about the photos that Gordon Parks made for Life's 1956 series of articles on segregation in the South.  Berger made me ask -- did Bourke-White also work on the segregation series?  You bet she did.  Her photos are terrific.  One's from a juke joint -- and that's the point of this post.

 

Margaret Bourke-White:  In "Harlem Cafe" Negroes dance to a jukebox.  The city operates a more sedate club for Negro teen-agers, but juke joints get more business.  Life, 17 September 1956.  [Click on either photo to see a larger version.]

Fifteen of Bourke-White's photos appear in the article, "The Background of Segregation, Part III:  The Voices of the White South."  (The work of other photographers is used as well.)  They're surprising on all sorts of levels.  First, they're in color.  Throughout her long career, Bourke-White preferred and is best remember for black and white photography.  Second, she used small cameras -- a Rollei TLR and a 35mm camera of unknown make.  Once again, throughout her career she was known for using bulky large-format cameras.  Third, the small cameras allowed her to create photos have a loose, unmannered feel that's very different from her usual meticulous style.

I'll write a blog post about these photos next week.  For now, it's enough to say that the photo above, made in a South Carolina juke joint, instantly brought to mind a much more famous photo from another juke joint in the South.

 

Marion Post Wolcott:  Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, Saturday evening, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi.  November 1939.  Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Marion Post Wolcott made this photo while she was working for Roy Stryker's epic Farm Security Administration [FSA] documentary project of the 1930s and '40s.  She was on her first assignment in the South, and she hated the place.  In his book about FSA photography, Nicholas Natanson says that she wrote to Stryker complaining about "small-minded local officials, about a stifling cultural environment, about racism and sexism, even about 'polite reform women... with their unrealistic and sentimental way of handling [problems]....  After a whole day of that crap and listening to them playing Jesus I could just plain puke!'"

Wolcott was young, white, and liberal.  I imagine that shooting in the juke joint was something of a relief.  Those small-minded local officials weren't particularly happy about the idea of a pretty white woman spending time with Negroes, of course, so they sent along a cop as her escort.  She made a glorious picture nevertheless.

Well, all this hanging out in juke joints made me want to hear some juke joint music.  Who better than the great Louis Jordan?  Nobody, actually.

 

 

Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, "Five Guys Named Moe."

That was so much fun, let's hear another.

 

 

Louis Jordan and the Tympany Five, "Saturday Night Fish Fry."

If Louis and the boys sound like they're playing rock & roll...  Well, yes.  The roots of rock & roll lie in the rhythm & blues that was played in the juke joints of the South.

* * *

Some readers might argue Bourke-White's and Wolcott's photos (and the Jordan videos as well) reproduce and reinforce old stereotypes about the special affinity that African Americans have for music and dance.  In addition, the joyful expressions on the faces of the main subjects can be seen to undercut condemnations of segregation and racial discrimination.  After all, if the purported victims are so happy, how bad can things really be?

Seen in isolation, the photos do lend themselves to that reading.  But Bourke-White's picture needs to be seen in the context in which it was published -- the Life story on segregation.  Taken together, the 14 other photos that she contributed to the article give a much more rounded view of black life.  At least one of them pointedly underscores racial injustice and inequality.  (Follow the link above to see the story.)

Update, 13 August 2012:  I now think that I was wrong about the message that Bourke-White's photo sent, when it was published in 1956.  In the context of the article, it did tend to reinforce negative stereotypes about African-Americans.  You can read more about this, here.

In the same way, Wolcott's photo should be read in the context of the thousands of photos that she made for the FSA, many hundreds of which included African Americans.  All portray blacks with dignity (as does the one above, in fact).  One of her most iconic photos directly addresses the injustice of segregation.

As for Louis Jordan...  The man was a signifyin' fool.

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.)

 

Farmworkers in Florida & Modern Day Slavery

The Modern Day Slavery Museum, a mobile exhibition that's been organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers [CIW], rolled into Charlottesville, yesterday.  Its mission is to educate the public about the brutal conditions that farmworkers in Florida endure and to encourage the people to do something about it.

"Slavery" probably sounds like an overstatement, but it's accurate.  Farmworkers are too often held against their will by threats and violence.  Since 1997, the federal government has prosecuted seven farm labor servitude cases in Florida, which led to the freeing of over 1,000 workers.  Slavery is the extreme, but, as Senator Bernie Sanders has said, poverty and powerlessness mean that "the norm is disaster."

The museum has been traveling the country.  Here's a video about, from the Naples (Florida) Daily News, about an earlier stop on the tour.

   What can be done?  The CIW has played an major role in investigating abuses in Florida, which one federal official has called "ground zero for modern slavery."  Six of the seven federal prosecutions, since 1997, have relied partly on evidence that the CIW uncovered.  In addition, the Coalition is asking people to insist that restaurants and grocery stores pay attention to the conditions on the farms that grow the food that they purchase.  This "Fair Food" campaign has persuaded Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King, Whole Foods, and Subway to do business only agricultural suppliers that respect workers' rights.

This is terrific news, but it's only a start.  What's needed is for all the players in the food industry to sign on.  For instance, Kroger and Giant, the two largest supermarket chains in this area, have yet to accept any responsibility for the wages and working conditions of the people who grow the food that they sell.  Anyone can help by sending letters to Kroger or Giant, asking them to take measures that would ensure fair wages and dignity for the farmworkers.  You can find examples of the Kroger letter, here, and the Giant letter, here.

   The museum, as you might expect, takes a historical look at the problem.  The kind of abuses that exist today stretch far back into time -- to nineteenth-century slavery, of course, but also to Depression-era farm labor.  At the exhibit, I was struck by the way that you can see evidence of the poverty and powerlessness that the CIW talks about in photos made by Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers, in the 1930s.

Arthur Rothstein: Picking beans. Belle Glade, Florida.  1937.  (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress.  Click directly on either of the photos to see larger versions.)

I admire the FSA photographers and have written quite a bit about them.  They were important both for the power and beauty of the photos that they made and for the impact that they had on public opinion.  It's sad to say, however, that the conditions under which farm workers labor haven't changed nearly enough.

Take a look, for instance, at this important set of photos by Shiho Fukada.  The similarity to FSA photographs from over 70 years ago stops me in my tracks.  And reminds me to send those letters to Kroger and Giant.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Vegetable workers, migrants, waiting after work to be paid. Near Homestead, Florida.  1939.

Review: "Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression"

In the 1930s and '40s, photographers employed by the federal government's now-legendary Farm Security Administration [FSA] created the most significant and, perhaps, most beautiful of all American photo archives.  The FSA's Historical Unit, which was established to document and promote the Roosevelt administration's New Deal policies, far transcended its narrow political purpose.  The unit employed some of the most important photographers of the twentieth century -- Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Russell Lee, among others -- and, as recent research has shown, their boss, Roy Stryker, gave them the latitude to pursue their own visions.  Not surprisingly, more has been written about the FSA than any other episode in the history of photography.

 

Cover photo, Marion Post Wolcott:  Beggers on main street corner.  Montgomery, Alabama.  1939.

I can't actually prove that last assertion, but I'll be willing to buy a drink for the person who shows that I'm wrong.  There are at least 29 books in my university's library about FSA photography, and that's not counting biographies and monographs about individual FSA photographers.  Any final tally would be at least twice than number.  Seemingly, no aspect of the FSA photo project has been left unexamined.  The books look at the structure of FSA photo essays, the ideology of the FSA and the New Deal, FSA photography and religion, FSA photography and race, FSA photography and the American Dream, plus FSA photography in states from Virginia to Colorado.  (I own five books on Dorothea Lange alone.)

Can the world possibly need yet another book on the FSA?  Yes.  That book would be Rich Remsberg's Hard Luck Blues:  Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression.  And I wish that I'd written it.  It's that good.

Russell Lee: Negro musicians playing accordion and washboard in automobile. Near New Iberia, Louisiana.  1938.  (All but one of the photographs in this review appear in Hard Luck Blues.  They're from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection at the Library of Congress.  Having been made by photographers employed by the United States government, they are not eligible for copyright protection.  Click directly on any of the photos to see larger versions.)

Hard Luck Blues justifies its existence in a couple of ways.  First, most of the more than 200 photos are beautiful, a real joy to see.  Lange, Shahn, and Lee are well represented, as are the Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, John Vachon, and Arthur Rothstein, wonderful photographers all.  Many of the photos have rarely, if ever, been published and will be new to anyone who hasn't spent hours rummaging through the FSA archives.

Second, the collection is, as Remsberg says, "almost certainly the best visual documentation of vernacular musical performance," during the Depression years.  It was a critical time in American music history.  An older world of street musicians, barn dances, and community concert bands was vanishing, as was the last generation of musicians "to learn [their art] without sound recording."

 

Jack Delano:  Fiddler (Mr. Ed. Lorkin [sic]) for the square dances at the World's Fair at Tunbridge, Vermont.  1941.

Remsberg's introductions to the various chapters (the book is divided geographically) are brief and to the point.  He's a master of knowing how to give enough information to allow the viewer to see the photos in their historical context, but not so much that the pictures are buried by words.

For instance, Remsberg tells us that Ed Larkin (above) was a Vermont farmer who had been fiddling since the 1880s.  At the time that Jack Delano photographed him, he was a leading figure in the revival of "the New England contra dance tradition," making him something of a forerunner of the folk revival of the '50s and '60s.  To this day, the Ed Larkin Contra Dancers are "still active in Vermont."

Ben Shahn:  Doped singer, "Love oh, love, oh keerless love," Scott's Run, West Virginia.  Relief investigator reported a number of dope cases at Scott's Run.  1935.

Street musicians are a well known phenomenon of the era.  But had it not been for the FSA photographers, there would be little visual documentation of the people who were actively creating the nation's musical culture.  Some preserved distinctive regional styles, while others, the itinerants, brought new musical ideas to once isolated areas.

Ben Shahn:  Scott's Run, West Virginia.  1935.

The photos not only show us the musicians themselves; they also tell us something about the social context within which they lived and worked.  (The full set of Shahn's photos from Scott's Run, West Virginia, two of which can be seen above, reinforces what musicologists already know -- that black and white musicians learned a great deal from each other.)

John Collier:  Local band leader leads with "An Old Southern Melody" and everybody cheered.  Home guard passes through Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama.  1941.

Remsberg's definition of "roots" is broad enough to encompass concert bands, which is a good thing, since they show up in the FSA archive with great regularity.  In 2010, it's difficult to imagine a time when "commercial, military, and community bands" were popular, "prestigious and commercially successful."  That popularity was fading, in the '30s, but had by no means disappeared, especially in small towns, where many Americans still lived.

Russell Lee:  Acrobat and audience at Spanish-American traveling show.  Penasco, New Mexico.  1940.

A set of Russell Lee photographs, showing the musicians, acrobats, and clowns who were members of at Macia Brothers "traveling show" is one of the book's unexpected pleasures.  Like many of the book's photos, they will be extremely valuable for anyone trying to understand the popular culture of particular communities during the Depression.

Jack Delano:  A prisoner dancing while another plays the guitar at a prison camp.  Greene County, Georgia.  1941.

Remsberg's texts are short, as I've mentioned.  But the research is deep, and he knows when to use it to greatest effect.  The story behind the photo above, for instance, is a troubling mix of institutional racism and personal ambition.   Delano tells the tale in his memoirs, and Remsberg quotes it at some length.   A guard had ordered the prisoners to "dance for the photographer."  Delano remembered that

I was so nervous and excited by the opportunity to get these pictures that I blocked out my personal feelings.  I had only one thought in mind:  I must not fail to get these pictures!  ...It was only afterward, relaxing back in my hotel room, that the realization of what I had witnessed came upon me.  ...How humiliating it must have been for those men to be obliged to perform for me, as if they were trained animals!

 

Not incidentally, Remsberg is able to identify the guitar player as "the great Piedmont-style musician Buddy Moss, nearing the end of his six-year prison term...."

 

Russell Lee:  Entertainers at Negro tavern.  Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

Chicago gets a chapter unto itself.  And why not?  Lee, Delano, and Edwin Rosskam, another FSA photographer, spent a considerable amount of time in the city, largely to document African American community.  Despite the segregation and high unemployment that blacks endured, they had created a flourishing cultural life for themselves and sustained an influential cluster of professional musicians.

Singer and guitarist Lonnie Johnson (above, on the right) was "an enormously popular" entertainer and "an innovative guitarist."  Singing with him is either Dan Dixon or Andrew Harris, both of whom were members of his trio.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, Saturday evening, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi.  1939.

Many of the best -- and best known -- photos in the book were made in the South.  That's no surprise, really.  As Remsberg says, the South has long been "high-yield territory" for folklorists, musicologists, and photographers.

Marion Post Wolcott's photo of dancers in a Clarksdale, Mississippi, juke joint is probably the most famous of all the FSA photos that involve music and musicians.  It's not in the book, perhaps because of its popularity.  It's been endlessly reproduced and is one of the photos that the public most often asks to have reprinted.  None of that detracts from its considerable charms.  Not only is it visually stunning, but it's also a powerful reminder that the Depression was not just about suffering.  It was also about people determined to keep their communities and their cultures alive and to live with joy and dignity.  The FSA photographers were aware of their era's complexity, and, as artists, they captured it in the photos that they made.

There's little in Hard Luck Blues to complain about.  Some of the photos are poorly reproduced -- flat and lacking any visual punch.  The book's publishers, the University of Illinois Press and the Library of Congress, haven't done these important photos justice.

Occasionally I wanted more context than Remsberg was willing to provide. 

Dorothea Lange:  Camp talent provides music for dancing at Shafter camp for migrants.  Halloween party, Shafter, California.  1938.

I was especially disappointed with his failure to discuss "blackface" entertainment, which shows up several times in the book's photos.  In this hangover from nineteenth-century minstrelsy, white performers darkened their faces with makeup and mimicked what they imagined were African American performance styles.  The result was either crude or sophisticated racial satire, depending on the skill and temperament of the performer.  Blackface was still acceptable in polite white society, in the '30s and '40s, but faded rapidly after World War II, under pressure from the growing civil rights movement.  The book's photos of grinning white adults (above) and slightly bewildered white children (below) in blackface makeup demand some discussion.

Marion Post Wolcott: Second and third grade children being made up for their Negro song and dance at May Day-Health Day festivities.  Ashwood Plantations, South Carolina.  1939.

Quibbles aside, Hard Luck Blues is an important book.  Anyone who is interested in photography or music will want a copy.  Anyone seriously engaged in the study of the history of photography or the history of popular music will need a copy.

And, thanks to those fabulous photographers, it's a delight to behold.

How Photography Lies, Even When It's Telling the Truth: FSA Photography & the Great Depression

Think about the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and images like the one below will spring into your head -- a photograph of a homeless mother and her children who appear to have nothing to cling to but their clothes, their car, and each other.  It seems to sum up the desperate reality of people caught in the worst economic catastrophe of the twentieth century.

Like so many of the images made by photographers working on the federal government's monumental Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information documentary project, it feels utterly real, perfectly iconic.

Dorothea Lange:  Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California.  1939.

It turns out, however, that Dorothea Lange made several photographs of this young mother and her children on that day in 1939.

Here's another one, the last in the series.  This photo is not iconic.  It never was and probably never will be.  In fact, it feels false.  The child's face is freshly scrubbed, and both mother and child are smiling.  It makes us wonder what's going on.  

Dorothea Lange:  Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California.  1939.

Lange, brilliant artist and documentarian that she was, fills us in.

The explanation is in the "General Caption" that she wrote to accompany the series of photos:

The car is parked outside the Employment Office.  The family have arrived, before opening of the potato season.  They have been on the road for one month--have sick baby.

...Father washed the baby’s face with edge of blanket dampened from canteen, for the photographs.

Well, there it is.  The father washed his child's face.  He manipulated reality, and Lange let him do it.  Together they've created a lie.  Pretty simple.

In fact, it's a little too simple.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Dude at rodeo. Ashland, Montana.  1941.

There's no doubt that the second photo feels wrong.  The problem isn't with the photo, however.  It's with us.

Consider the photograph directly above.  It feels right.  We expect this evidently wealthy young woman -- we can't help but notice the expensive cowboy duds, the new boots, and that lovely Buick Special Deluxe -- to have a grin on her face.  After all, the photo speaks in the language of commercial advertising as much as it does in the language of documentary photography.  In that language, people who are wealthy, young, and pretty are happy.  And they show it.

The opposite is also true.  We know that the Depression was a time of great suffering, and we expect people mired in such miserable circumstances to show their unhappiness.

That's partly because none of us under 70 experienced the Depression first-hand.  We didn't see it.  Much of the visual information that we have to go on comes from the FSA/OWI photographs that are endlessly reproduced in books, especially history textbooks, magazines, newspapers, documentary films, blogs, and even on postage stamps.

United States Postal Service first-class stamp, issued in 1998.  [The photograph is by Dorothea Lange.  The original caption reads:  Destitute pea pickers in California.  Mother of seven children.  Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.  February or March, 1936.  The woman's name was Florence Thompson.]

Most of the FSA/OWI images that we've seen have emphasized the suffering and impoverishment that accompanied the Depression.  The photographers made plenty of those kinds of photos.  After all, they had been hired to produce images that would support the Roosevelt administration's efforts to bring aid to those who needed it most.  They were all, with the probable exception of Walker Evans, personally committed to the cause.

Ben Shahn:  One of few remaining inhabitants of Zinc, Arkansas.  1935.

Of course, we wouldn't have seen these images of the Depression if editors, then, (and historians and documentary makers, now) hadn't chosen to publish them.  Like the FSA/OWI photographers, their goal has been illustrate the trauma that people endured.

So, most of the photos that we've seen from the Depression confirm our expectations about how suffering people are supposed to look.

The problem is not that the images we conjure up about the Depression are wrong.  It's that they're woefully -- and misleadingly -- incomplete.

Russell Lee:  Negro cabaret. Chicago, Illinois.  1941.  (You can click directly in this image, and most of the others, to see larger versions.)

This isn't a new observation.  Over twenty years ago, Lawrence Levine made the point that people are never simply defined by their suffering, even in the worst of circumstances.  "One of the more elusive and difficult historical truths," he wrote...

...is that even in the midst of disaster life goes on and human beings find ways not merely of adapting to the forces that buffet them but often of rising above their circumstances and participating actively in the shaping of their lives.  ...To say these things is not to minimize the importance of... persecution [or] economic travail.  It is simply to assert that human beings are not wholly molded by their immediate experiences....*

 

Jack Delano:  Dancing to the music of Red Sounders and his band at the Club DeLisa. Chicago, Illinois. 1942.

The FSA/OWI photographers understood this perfectly well.  They were living through the era, after all, and they saw it in all its complexity and vitality.

They were especially aware of the nation's rich musical culture.  And ot the people who were creating it.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, Saturday evening, outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. 1939.

This is one of Marion Post Wolcott's best known photos.  It's fabulous both for its beauty and for what it shows us about the refusal of the human spirit to allow neither poverty nor oppression to crush it.

This isn't the only photo that Wolcott made in a Clarksdale, Mississippi, juke joint.

Marion Post Wolcott:  Negroes jitterbugging in a juke joint on Saturday afternoon.  Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta.  1939.

This one is at least as interesting as the first, mainly due to the presence of the white policeman.  What's he doing there?  My guess is that he wanted to keep an eye on the beautiful young white women with a camera, who insisted on spending time with black people.

 

Jack Delano:  Fiddler (Mr. Ed. Lorkin [Larkin]) for the square dances at the World's Fair at Tunbridge, Vermont. 1941.

The FSA/OWI archive is, in fact, surprisingly full of people having a good time.  And they're often making music or listening to it.

Ben Shahn:  Doped singer, Love oh, love, oh keerless love, Scotts Run, West Virginia. Relief investigator reported a number of dope cases at Scotts Run.  1935.

"Doped?"  High on marijuana, I'd guess.  It was a common enough recreational drug at the time.

Russell Lee:  Negro musicians playing accordion and washboard in automobile. Near New Iberia, Louisiana.  1938.

The FSA/OWI photographers were drawn to musicians (as photographers have always been).

Russell Lee:  Specialty number of orchestra at the National Rice Festival. Crowley, Louisiana.  1938.

And, why not?  Musicians make terrific subjects.  (A decade and a half later, young men would be doing with electric guitars what this guy is doing with his string bass.  And they'd call it rock 'n' roll.)

Russell Lee:  Saturday night in a saloon. Craigville, Minnesota.  1937.

There are also a surprising number of photos in the FSA/OWI archives of people having a drink.  Or three.

 

Russell Lee: Lumberjack with bandaged head after being beaten up and "rolled" in a saloon on Saturday night in Craigsville, Minnesota.  1937.

Same photographer.  Same saloon.  Same Saturday night in Craigsville.  Russell Lee wasn't given to romanticizing things.

Arthur Rothstein:  Girls in beer parlor adjoining dance hall. Marshalltown, Iowa.  1940.

You get the sense, however, that most people didn't go out drinking looking for a fight.  They were looking for something else.

Esther Bubley.  Washington, D.C.  April 1943.

Bubley’s notes read:  "Girl who has picked up two soldiers since coming into the Sea Grill alone. They are drinking beer and exchanging life histories."

Russell Lee:  Sound effects man of orchestra at Savoy Ball Room. Chicago, Illinois.  1941.

If we force ourself to stop for a moment and think about the '30s and '40s, we'll realize that we do know what they photographers knew and what Levine wants us to remember.

While these were indeed the years of the Great Depression, it was also the Big Band Era and the Golden Age of Hollywood, phrases that call quite different images to mind.

With that thought in mind, I'll close with one of my favorite FSA/OWI photos, if only because of the name stenciled on the case.

Update, 18 March 2010:  Rick Scully made a very interesting comment on this post.  He says, among other things...

I wanted to let you know the gentleman in the photo playing the fiddle is Ed Larkin (not Lorkin) and to this day the Ed Larkin Contra Dancers still perform in and around Tunbridge, and always at the Tunbridge Fair which will occur this September for the 139th year!

* * *

*  Lawrence W. Levine, "The Historian and the Icon:  Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s," in Carl Fleischhauer and Beverley W. Brannan, eds., Documenting America, 1935-1943.

Note:  The photos in this post by Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Russell Lee, and Esther Bubley are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, at the Library of Congress.  Photographs in this collection were taken by photographers working for the United States government and are not eligible for copyright protection.