Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-making, 1935-1943

Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-making, 1935-1943 PDF Author: Stuart S. Kidd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Documentary photography
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book

Book Description
While previous studies of the photographic images of the U.S. southern poor produced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) have been discussed in the context of individual photographers or the general culture of the Great Depression and the New Deal, Kidd (American history, U. of Reading, UK) situates his examination of the photographs in the institutional context of the FSA and the role played in photographic production by FSA administrator Roy Stryker. The photographs emerged, according to Kidd, from the dialogue between Stryker and his field photographers about the proper way to document disadvantaged and oppressed groups within the framework of a progressive, federal government. The resulting productions reveal "an uneasy dimension to the relationship between individual and the liberal state and its cadres" that is partly an outcome of class cleavages between photographer and subject. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-making, 1935-1943

Farm Security Administration Photography, the Rural South, and the Dynamics of Image-making, 1935-1943 PDF Author: Stuart S. Kidd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Documentary photography
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book

Book Description
While previous studies of the photographic images of the U.S. southern poor produced by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) have been discussed in the context of individual photographers or the general culture of the Great Depression and the New Deal, Kidd (American history, U. of Reading, UK) situates his examination of the photographs in the institutional context of the FSA and the role played in photographic production by FSA administrator Roy Stryker. The photographs emerged, according to Kidd, from the dialogue between Stryker and his field photographers about the proper way to document disadvantaged and oppressed groups within the framework of a progressive, federal government. The resulting productions reveal "an uneasy dimension to the relationship between individual and the liberal state and its cadres" that is partly an outcome of class cleavages between photographer and subject. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

It's All Done Gone

It's All Done Gone PDF Author: Patsy Watkins
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1682260631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book

Book Description
In 1935 a fledging government agency embarked on a project to photograph Americans hit hardest by the Great Depression. Over the next eight years, the photographers of the Farm Security Administration captured nearly a quarter-million images of tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the South, migrant workers in California, and laborers in northern industries and urban slums. Of the roughly one thousand FSA photographs taken in Arkansas, approximately two hundred have been selected for inclusion in this volume. Portraying workers picking cotton for five cents an hour, families evicted from homes for their connection with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, and the effects of flood and drought that cruelly exacerbated the impact of economic disaster, these remarkable black-and-white images from Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, and other acclaimed photographers illustrate the extreme hardships that so many Arkansans endured throughout this era. These powerful photographs continue to resonate, providing a glimpse of life in Arkansas that will captivate readers as they connect to a shared past.

A Southern Illinois Album

A Southern Illinois Album PDF Author: Herbert K. Russell
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809315895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book

Book Description
Life on the road was anything but glamorous for Farm Security Administration photographers traveling through southern Illinois in the mid-1930s. Often their most promising subjects lived at the end of the worst roads, many of which lacked bridges, drainage ditches, or gravel. Outfitted with three government-issue cameras, flashbulbs, tripods, and film-processing chemicals, their job was to help "explain America to Americans" by seeking out and photographing the one-third of the nation FDR described as "ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished." Featured in this book are more than one hundred photographs from the collection of a quarter of a million taken by FSA photographers between 1935 and 1943. These pictures capture life during the Great Depression as viewed in the coal-mining towns of Herrin, West Frankfort, and Zeigler; the river communities of Shawneetown, Cairo, and Grayville; the farming regions near McLeansboro, Newton, and Harrisburg--more than two dozen southern Illinois county seats, hamlets, and landings. Together they comprise a photographic portrait of the determination, hard work, and capacity to find ways to celebrate life exemplified by the people of southern Illinois during one of the most difficult periods of American history. FSA photographers helped to invent and popularize the "documentary style," a type of photography in which pictures and their arrangement carry much of the information in a story. Intended to document the success of a government project, these pictures survived to preserve for later generations the story of the people of southern Illinois and how they endured the difficult times of the Great Depression.

The Likes of Us

The Likes of Us PDF Author: Stuart Cohen
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 1567923402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
Housed at the Library of Congress, the archives of the Farm Security Administration constitute an essential visual record of American life from the late 1920s through the onset of the Second World War. Guided by the adroit hands and watchful eyes of the master photo editor Roy Stryker, the FSA archive includes the work of dozens of photographers, from acknowledged giants like Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange to Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee, whose names and work may be less familiar. Stryker's approach to his photographers' assignments was a bracing mix of structure and improvisation. He sent his artists across the country to shoot for a few weeks, mostly in small towns and rural areas. They worked from what Stryker called shooting scripts - laundry lists of possible subjects and situations - but were always free to explore their own perspectives on a locale, its inhabitants, and their activities. When negatives and prints arrived, Stryker would guide his artists with suggestions, advice, and sharp-eyed criticism, all designed to elicit their best work. This book collects work from nine of these trips - Evans in Louisana and Alabama, Shahn in West Virginia, Lange in California, and others - uniting them with Stryker's shooting scripts, letters, and other relevant archival documents. What emerges, beyond the images themselves, is a complex and vital overview of the FSA at work, not just the work, but how the work evolved and matured under Stryker's guidance. The book concludes with photographs of New Orleans, the only city photographed in depth by the FSA artists. Reproduced in duotone, the 175 photographs in The Likes of Us, all printed from the original negatives at the Library of Congress, offer a rare opportunity not only to see a choice selection of famous and little-known images but also to understand the working of one of the government's most original and creative pre-war initiatives.

The Bitter Years: 1935-1941

The Bitter Years: 1935-1941 PDF Author: United States. Farm Security Administration
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Documentary photography
Languages : en
Pages : 46

Get Book

Book Description


Farm Security Administration Photographs of Florida

Farm Security Administration Photographs of Florida PDF Author: Michael L. Carlebach
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813012124
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 127

Get Book

Book Description
"A first-time presentation of significant and historically important photographs showing what life was like . . . for a substantial number of people living and working in Florida during the 1930s. . . . The photographs alone make a significant contribution to scholarship."--Samuel Proctor, University of Florida "I want you to take pictures of everything you can find of what's happening to the people," Roy Emerson Stryker told the staff of the photography project of the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency. "I think you are going to find it in the faces of the people." From 1935 to 1943 FSA photographers combed the countryside, "making and disseminating images that explained America to Americans while they raised public and congressional support for Franklin D. Roosevelt's more controversial farm programs." The basic concern of the FSA was agriculture, Stryker said. "Dust, migrants, sharecroppers. Our job was to educate the city dweller to the needs of the rural population." Michael Carlebach and Eugene Provenzo, Jr., examine the work of the FSA in Florida as revealed in ninety-four images made by photographers John Collier, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Marion Post Wolcott, and Arthur Rothstein. The work of Stryker's photography unit was described many years later by Arthur Rothstein: "There was a feeling that you were in on something new and exciting, a missionary sense of dedication to this project, of making the world a better place to live in." Like the rest of the South, rural Florida was desperately poor during the depression. Per capita income in the state dropped from $510 in 1929 to $298 in 1933, and 157 banks permanently closed their doors between 1928 and 1940. Many of the FSA photographs illustrate how poor men, women, and children lived, worked, and survived during hard times. Balancing images of the impoverished are those of ordinary tourists, of the middle-class residents of small towns and villages, and of the well-to-do in cities along the southeastern coast. Together with photographs depicting soil erosion, the misuse of farmlands in northern counties, and the decline of the fishing, wood pulp, and timber industries, the Florida FSA collection offers a brilliant composite portrait of the sunshine state in the grip of the Great Depression. Michael Carlebach is associate professor in the School of Communication and director of the American Studies program at the University of Miami, as well as a widely published documentary and journalistic photographer. His most recent book is The Origins of Photojournalism in America. Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr. is a professor in the School of Education at the University of Miami and the author of many books, including Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo.

Picturing Texas

Picturing Texas PDF Author: Robert L. Reid
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
"This book focuses on some of the most famous photographs ever taken: the Farm Security Administration's images of Dust Bowl Texans. But there is much more to the FSA photographs than is commonly believed. From 1935 to 1943 - the critical years of the Great Depression and World War II - the photographers in the federal government's Farm Security Administration (and later the Office of War Information) documented America, especially Texas, in all its vast complexity. Some of the most famous names in documentary photography, including Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Arthur Rothstein, took more than five thousand photographs in Texas, more than in any other state." "In addition to the well-known pictures of rural poverty and the Dust Bowl, these remarkable artists captured a rich panorama of everyday life in Texas's rural areas, small towns, and big cities. By the time they were done, there were few areas and aspects of Texas left undocumented." "Robert L. Reid's text traces the history of the FSA and the OWI and discusses the photographers and their work. The book also presents more than two hundred magnificent duotone photographs in chapters on cotton, cattle, oil, cities and towns, recreation and leisure, the Dust Bowl, World War II, and other themes." "Readers will be moved by the vast array of images of town meetings and rodeos, down-and-out farmers and prosperous businessmen, beer joints and factories, black and brown and white."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Picturing Minnesota, 1936-1943

Picturing Minnesota, 1936-1943 PDF Author: Robert L. Reid
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
ISBN: 0873512480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
"Picturing Minnesota brings together the best of the images taken in Minnesota from the collection of photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration during the depression era and the advent of World War II. Among the photographers represented here are John Vachon, a native of St. Paul, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott. Outstanding as photographic works of art, these pictures are unique in their ability to convey the details of life in Minnesota during those years"--Publisher's description from lensculture.com.

A Kentucky Album

A Kentucky Album PDF Author: Beverly W. Brannan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

Get Book

Book Description
Sulky races at the Mercer County Fair, church suppers, sorghum making, shooting marbles in the school yard, housing tobacco, loafing at the courthouse -- here are 129 beautifully reproduced images of who we were as Kentuckians not so long ago -- during the Depression and the early years of World War II. This collection is part of the remarkable series of photos shot for the Farm Security Administration -- more than 125,000 photographs taken over a period of nine years by some of the best American photographers of the time, including Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Arthur Rothstein. To reintroduce us to that important slice of our history, Beverly Brannan and David Horvath have selected a rich sampling from among several thousand photos taken in Kentucky for the FSA. They have added an extra dimension to the images by including in their commentary excerpts from the photographers' own correspondence and field notes. Along with a lively introduction by the well-known Kentucky poet Jim Wayne Miller, the text of A Kentucky Album helps us see these photographs as art, as social history, and as an unforgettable composite of the amazing diversity of culture, history, and environment that have made Kentucky unique.

Heartland New Mexico

Heartland New Mexico PDF Author: Nancy C. Wood
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book

Book Description
Photos by Dorthea Lange and other FSA photographers whose names are less familiar. Focus is on agricultural communities, settlers fleeing the Dust Bowl, the classic Pie Town series, and various New Mexico villages. Further high-grade ore from the mine of 270,000 negatives now held by the Library of Congress. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR