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.

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.)

 

Gordon Parks at the Fulton Fish Market, New York, 1943

It's hard to overestimate the importance of Gordon Parks in the history of American photography.  This isn't just because for over two decades ('40s, '50s, and into the '60s) he was the only African-American working within the mainstream of the photographic profession.  It's also because of the extraordinarily beautiful and challenging photos that he made as a photojournalist, documentarian, and fashion photographer.  Parks did much more than make pictures, of course.  He was also a fine writer (his autobiographical novel, The Learning Tree, has an honored place in the American literary canon); a successful filmmaker (his movie Shaft is the mutha of all blaxploitation films); and a pretty fair composer.

In January 1942, when he arrived in Washington, DC, to join Roy Stryker's epic Farm Security Administration [FSA] documentary project, he was none of these things.  He married (with two kids), nearly 30, almost broke, and had been a serious photographer for only three years.  On the other hand, few people could have matched his ambition, talent, and capacity for hard work.

 

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York.  Dock stevedores at the Fulton fish market sending up baskets of fish from the holds of the boats to the docks where it is bought, stored in barrels and packed in ice for delivery to wholesalers.  1943.  (All the photographs in this entry are from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information [FSA/OWI] Collection at the Library of Congress.  Click directly on any of the images to see larger versions.)

In a 1964 interview, Parks admitted that he didn't have much to offer the FSA as a photographer.  He was there to learn, and he and Stryker, his new boss, both knew it:  "I think that I was sort of a noble experiment for Roy."

If that was the case, it wasn't simply because Parks was the first and only African-American photographer on the FSA staff.  Stryker had often taken chances with aspiring photographers, and they had always paid off.  Many that Stryker had hired (or was to hire) -- Russell Lee, Esther Bubley, Arthur Rothstein -- were inexperienced but eager.  They were experiments that turned out well.  Though not a photographer himself, Stryker was as much a teacher as he was a manager.  Parks was, in this sense, yet another student in his finishing school for photographers.

(It is true, however, that Stryker, fearing the reaction of southern members of Congress to the hiring of a black man, had been reluctant to take Parks on and was cajoled into it by representatives of the liberal Rosenwald Fund, which funded Parks's appointment.)

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York.  Fulton fish market street scene.  1943.

Parks's work for Stryker at the FSA and, after late 1942, the Office of War Information [OWI] was highly uneven, ranging from the sublime to the merely competent.  That's no surprise, really.  In his book Half Past Autumn, Parks called his stay at the FSA/OWI his "apprenticeship."

One of the first photos that he made at the FSA became one of his most famous:  his portrait of Ella Watson, a charwoman in a government office building, which was part of a superb series documenting Watson's life and her struggle to raise her grandchildren.

In contrast, the photos that he made at New York's Fulton Fish Market, in the spring of 1943, show him as the apprentice that he was.

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York.  Fulton fish market dock stevedores unloading and weighing fish in the early morning.  1943.

None of his Fulton photos rise to the standard his best FSA/OWI work.  He didn't include any of them in Half Past Autumn, a career retrospective, even though the book contains nearly 50 pages of photos from his FSA/OWI years.  In fact, these photos have rarely been published at all.  (I've seen them in none of the magazines of the period, and, of the many books about Parks and about the FSA, I've found them only in Gilles Mora and Beverly W. Brannan's FSA:  The American Vision.)

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York.  Ice which is used to store fish on boats that bring their catches into Fulton fish market.  1943.

The Fulton photos came out of an assignment to document aspects of the American fishing trade, part of a government study of the food industry.  The country was at war, and Parks and Stryker were now part of the OWI, an agency with a mission to support the war effort, not social reform.  The days of investigating nation's social ills were over.

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York.  Fulton fish market hooker.  1943.

While none of the photos from Fulton are brilliant, many are strong.  Some, such as those at the beginning of this post, capture the market's energy and movement.

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York.  Dock stevedore at the Fulton fish market holding giant lobster claws.  1943.

Characteristically of Parks, there are several engaging portraits, some leavened with humor.

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York. Many of the Fulton fish market men are in the armed forces.  1943.

The war was never far from anyone's mind, and Parks made sure to reinforce that simple truth.  (If you click on the photo, you'll see a larger version and be able to read the names of the Fulton Fish Market men who were serving in the armed forces.)

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York.  Barrels of fish on the docks at Fulton fish market ready to be shipped to retailers.  1943.

It's tempting to try to find something in the Fulton series that anticipates Parks's stylistic signature.  Tempting, but futile, I think -- largely because it's hard to identify a stylistic signature in his protean body of work beyond, perhaps, an affinity for portraiture.  It's hard to imagine keywords or a catch phrase that can sum up his style, as we can for his contemporaries Henri Cartier-Bresson (elegant geometry), Walker Evans (Protestant austerity, artful artlessness), and Roy DeCarava (intimacy, murky depths).

Gordon Parks:  New York, New York.  Shipping fish by horse-drawn vehicle from Fulton fish market.  1943.

We can see, however, Parks developing his skills at producing a photo-essay.  At Life magazine, during the '50s and '60s (where he was once again the first and only black photographer) he became one of the great masters of the form.  (See, for instance, the still important 1963 story that he both wrote and photographed about what were then called the Black Muslims.)

Unknown photographer:  Gordon Parks, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographer, standing in office with Helen Wool seated at desk.  Ca. 1943.

We should understand the Fulton Fish Market series for what it is, the skillfully executed project of an apprentice.  That's very likely the way that Parks saw it. "I wish," he said in 1964, looking back at his time at the FSA/OWI, "...I stayed there longer and gotten there earlier."

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N.B.:  Because the photos in this entry were made by photographers employed by the United States government, they are not eligible for copyright protection.

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.