Influence of the Photographic project of the Farm Security Administration on the perception and understanding of the Great Depression
(Revised version of the paper originally published in Academia as part of a research conducted by the author at Purdue University)
Introduction
The Visual arts as a means of communicating society's problems and using audiovisual resources to humanize statistics and maximizing the mobilization of society.
The photographic documentary presents facts, illustrates events and information, and generates public opinion and political response.
This essay will demonstrate how photographic images serve as a mechanism for documenting social phenomena and as a means of humanizing and mobilizing society. Images, especially those of a portrait nature, foster empathy as an initial step for effective change.
Analysis of Humanities
To address this topic, we have to undertake research work and consolidate in the following areas:
Social events of significant impact in America that have been the subject of photographic documentation.
The Pioneers of documentary photography in America.
The work of the Farm Security Administration as a promoter of photographic documentation of phenomena related to agriculture and food and the Great Depression of the 1930s in America.
To better understand the direct impact of this depression on the population, in Figure 1, the percentage of unemployment is presented. The pick achieved during this challenging period is unprecedented (Tapia Granados & Diez Roux, 2009).
Figure 1 Unemployment rate in the US
The impact of the Great Depression is so profound, and the angles are so many that, to produce a coherent and meaningful work, we need to limit the topic of study, considering the following premises:
Focus on the Great Depression of the 1930s in America, specifically its effects on agriculture, forced migration, and peasants.
In the area of the photographic documentary, concentrate on the work contracted by the Farm Security Administration.
More specifically, the photographic work to be studied will be that of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, as well as their analytical texts.
Critical analysis of the situation and recommendations
As stated by (Gordon, 2006),, Dorothea Lange was a Photographer and, at the same time, Agricultural Sociologist. To a startling degree, popular understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s derives from visual images; among them, Dorothea Lange's are the most influential. Her photographs live in the subconscious of virtually anyone in the United States who has any concept of that economic disaster. Her pictures exerted great force in their own time, helping shape the 1930s and 1940s Popular Front representational and artistic sensibility because the Farm Security Administration (FSA), her employer, distributed the photographs aggressively through the mass media (Bradley, 2013).
Figure 2 Robert J. Doherty, "Dorothea Lange"” 1934
The Farm Security Administration had the vision to use the photographic image to capture not only the facts but also other aspects that the dramatic situation of the Great Depression made evident, as explained by (McDannell, 2004) photographers like Evans and Lange were “Picturing Faith” as a critical component of the resiliency spirit that helped to overcome the enormous circumstances.
More than sixty years after its photographers ceased roaming the country with their cameras, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documentary project remains something of an enigma. Scholars have framed the vast FSA file as an instrument of New Deal propaganda, a collection for posterity, a tool for social justice, and as photographic art.
Figure 3 Dorothea Lange, “Towards Los Angeles,” 1937 (FABIAN, 2014)
Another critical aspect of the study can be found in evaluating the advances in the photographic field that the Great Depression drove.
Figure 4 Dorothea Lange, "Migrant mother" 1936
As in other complicated situations, such as the second world war, space exploration, etc., circumstances make science and technology rise to the occasion. This also happened with the arts, and the Great Depression was no exception.
In “A staggering revolution: a cultural history of thirties photography” (Raeburn, 2006). They analyze the crucial innovations, technical and aesthetic, that had to be invented to capture the Great Depression conditions adequately. It was evident that the direct record of reality was not only not enough, but it was not significant enough for the sought purposes. Stages had to be developed, but these stagings had to be authentic, but they had to look genuine and, without disguising their stagging character, they had to be built to generate the desired emotions.
The objective and direct record should give way to using the symbolic resource and the staging strategy. A family posed so that their condition was correctly captured and understood. A farmer posed for a portrait because Walker Evans could generate an interpellation relationship with the viewer.
Figure 5 Walker Evans, “Sharecropper’s family, Hale County, Alabama,” 1936
During the 1930s, the world of photography was unsettled, exciting, and boisterous. John Raeburn's A Staggering Revolution recreates the era's energy by surveying photography's rich variety of innovation, exploring its leading figures' aesthetic and cultural achievements, and mapping the paths their pictures blazed the public's imagination (Gonzalez, 2016).
Figure 6 Walker Evans, “Alabama Tenant Farmer’s Wife,” 1936 (Hornbeck, 2020)
While other thirties photography studies have concentrated on the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documentary work, no previous book has considered it alongside so many of the decade's other important photographic projects (Stevens & Fogel, 2001).
Personal Reflection
In this section, I will reflect on the process I followed in my research, what was good, the opportunities for improvement and the impact of this research, and the final work on my understanding of the phenomenon I selected and my future research.
Critical analysis of process challenges: what would you do differently?
Perhaps the first thing I learned is that a subject, even if you think you have mastered it and will be simple, always requires a thorough review and constant questioning. It is a common fault I have when I believe that I have reached a significant understanding of an issue. My critical thinking level drops, and I begin to accept the conclusions I previously reached, sometimes denying the new realities presented to me.
In this research's specific case, it was challenging for me to assimilate and incorporate the analysis presented by (Gordon, 2006) on Dorothea Lange's work's social character. She had always appreciated it from a purely documentary and, to some extent, an artistic perspective. Accepting what Gordon's book presents with such force, Lange was moved by fundamental social motivations that her work could be described as activism, which was not easy for me.
I confess that I was tempted several times to exclude that work from my references. It would have been easier for me, but I appealed to what should be research work, the openness to the initial premises, and our hypotheses not being maintained, and we had to review or even discard them.
A great lesson for future research, starting from the field of new references, started looking for different points of view and even contrary to my initial beliefs; to, starting from there, find a way to reconcile a new belief system and more solid conclusions, as presented in (Murphy, 2001) regarding the gender identity through the photographic work of the FSA.
Critical analysis of process positives: what did you do well?
One of the things that I am proud of in this work is how I integratedin Photography, which has been fundamentally aesthetic and artistic, with an academic research process.
I feel happy because that was the main objective when, despite having scientific training and a professional career in the area of project control, I decided to study a second career in Liberal studies to give more coherence to the two aspects of my life that On many occasions, he found contradictory.
I believe that I managed to carry out an investigation that, although it responded to the requirements of focusing on an essential event for humanity, providing elements of quantitative and factual analysis, I did not stop presenting the aesthetic and artistic vision, not as an accessory aspect, but as the central axis of the thesis.
The big lesson here is that when we move around our interests and reconcile the complex elements of fact with the soft aspects of emotion and art, the result tends to be more integrated, holistic, and human.
Application of critical analysis to professional/personal life
I do not see this work as the end of a path; although it is part of the final requirements to graduate, I see it instead as a window that opens to new ways of approaching and studying the field of Photography which interests me so much.
I have discovered that historical study is something that interests me and that it is not possible to do exciting studies that are only technical; that is, instead of studying the History of Photography from the technical point of view, as the history and evolution of an invention; I have seen that it is more enjoyable to use a socio-cultural approach.
With a sociocultural approach, I mean that the evolution of Photography not only responds to scientific advances. These advances are the enablers but not the drivers of progress.
The real drivers of progress are positive and negative social events, such as wars, protests, natural phenomena, and important occurrences, making Photography develop to better capture it.
On the other hand, many of the landmarks in Photography are related to important cultural and social landmarks; Its isolated study does not make sense. Its critical analysis is much more logical in how I tried to do it in this work.
Conclusion
From this study on the Influence of the Photographic project of the Farm Security Administration on the perception of the Great Depression, we can draw some clear conclusions.
First, the documentary photography developed around the Great Depression of the 1930s contributed to the understanding of the social impact and the creation of the empathy necessary to generate a response from the government to create laws that will help overcome the crisis.
Additionally, but not less importantly, the Great Depression photography created a visual standard of documentation of social phenomena that continues to be present in current photographers and news agencies.
Finally, the images produced as a testimony of the individual cases of displaced families allowed putting "faces" to the statistical figures, which, by themselves, generated more paralysis than action.
References
Bradley, M. P. (2013). American Vernaculars: The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination. Diplomatic History, 38(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dht123
FABIAN, A. (2014). Oast in Depression and war: The Photography of Everyday Life. Raritan, 34(2)(62).
Gonzalez, A. (2016). Making Photography Matter: A Viewer’s History from the Civil War to the Great Depression by Cara A. Finnegan. Journal of Southern History, 82(3), 692–693. https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2016.0191
Gordon, L. (2006). Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist. Journal of American History, 93(3), 698–727. https://doi.org/10.2307/4486410
Hornbeck, R. (2020). Dust Bowl Migrants: Identifying an Archetype. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3686015
McDannell, C. (2004). Picturing Faith : photography and the Great Depression. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Murphy, M. (2001). Picture/Story: Representing Gender in Montana Farm Security Administration Photographs. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 22(3), 93. https://doi.org/10.2307/3347243
Raeburn, J. (2006). A staggering revolution : a cultural history of thirties photography. Chicago: the University Of Illinois Press.
Stevens, R. L., & Fogel, J. A. (2001). Images of the Great Depression: A Photographic Essay. OAH Magazine of History, 16(1), 11–16. https://doi.org/10.1093/maghis/16.1.11
Tapia Granados, J. A., & Diez Roux, A. V. (2009). Life and death during the Great Depression. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(41), 17290–17295. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0904491106