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.

Comments

[duckrabbit]

WOW.

This is an incredible post John.

Isn't it part of the big myth, that the money equals happiness?

[ciara]

fascinating post - so relevant even today

[Rick Scully]

Great post. Thanks for sharing. I found the post because I use Google to send me what it finds on "Tunbridge, Vermont" which is where I live. 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 (http://tunbridgefair.com), which will occur this September for the 139th year!

[John Edwin Mason]

@Ciara

You're right. Similar issues face photographers and viewers today.

As you know, A terrific conversation has been bubbling along on A Developing Story http://www.adevelopingstory.org/, a website that showcases and photography and multi-media projects from and about the developing world.

A couple of days ago, David Campbell was wondering why the western media relentlessly relies on stereotypes of war, disease, and disaster in its coverage of Africa http://www.adevelopingstory.org/2010/visualizing-%E2%80%98africa%E2%80%99-from-the-lone-child-to-the-middle-classes.

It's time, he says, for "the photographic visualization of Africa to offer something different."

Campbell's not denying that Africa has problems that demand our attention. He's making the point that Africa is much more than the sum of its catastrophes. He's calling for a broader, more inclusive vision of Africa--for photography that incorporates an Africa that's largely invisible in the western media.

He mentions Joan Bardeletti’s work on middle-class Africans, which shows "people, places, institutions and cultural events that are modern, well-resourced and more than a little familiar to the European eye."

[John Edwin Mason]

@Rick

Thanks very much for the information. I've updated the post.

[Christine Nesbitt Hills]

"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."

I don't believe there is an absolute truth, we all construct our own versions of reality. And this is so clearly shown with documentary photography. A photograph can't stand alone without text to anchor the meaning, it requires the context of other pictures to communicate more clearly for social change. Different audiences make different meanings from images, meaning making is a contested ground, and meanings change over time.

Why is the father wrong to wash his child's face? Maybe there are images of the father wiping the child's face? To want to play a role in how he is represented in Lange's pictures? Why should photographers guard the power of representation? Representation can be shared with the subject, as Lange's image of the clean child shows. Well done to Lange for photographing this image, and explaining why this child is now clean.

There are a handful of images that survive in popular memory out of the 270 000 images made during the FSA days. I think it's more useful to question the context of how the well known images are used and for what purpose they communicate than to question Lange's integrity as a photographer. W.Eugene Smith noted "a profession is not intrinsically honest, but the people who practice the profession can be."

[John Edwin Mason]

@Christine

If you read what I have to say in this post, you'll see that you're agreeing with me.

[Christine Nesbitt Hills]

I didn't think the point of contributing to this discussion was one of agreement or disagreement, I prefer to rather see it as reflexive engagement. I'm considering citing your post in a dissertation I am writing around documentary photography as a tool of social change. I'd like to request your permission, please. And a question to clarify: who is the audience you refer, the "we"? Is the "we" bound to a geographic location or time as an audience of these photographs?

[John Edwin Mason]

@Christine

"And a question to clarify: who is the audience you refer, the "we"?"

"We" are the typical viewers of these photos, in the past and in the present. "We" are almost always more affluent than the subjects.

In the '30s and '40s, that was Roy Stryker's plan. As the head of the FSA/OWI documentary project, he believed that his mission was, most importantly, to generate support for the Roosevelt administration's New Deal projects among the middle and upper classes. He and his photographers were self-consciously addressing an affluent audience. That doesn't mean, of course, that only these sorts of people saw the photos.

In the present, the "we" in my post remains people of means. They are the people who are most likely to encounter the FSA/OWI photos in a systematic way. They are also the audience that is targeted by most--not all--contemporary documentary photography. Once again, other kinds of people will see the photos.

I also use "we" to indicate that, because of my class position, I am much more likely to be the audience (or author) of a documentary project than its subject.

[Bridgett]

I cannot get that picture, that baby's smile, out of my mind. For me, that photo hits me in a way that the one right above it of yet another tired young mother with her dirty sick baby in the Depression just doesn't. This one shows the poor, the homeless, as people who care, as people who try, while the one above just looks hopeless. I think viewers, even now, but especially then, would have to get fatigued by the first kind of image. The bottom image makes me want to go down to the employment office and give her husband a job.