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You know the immortal icons from the Great Depression. Here are the ones, closest to home, you haven't seen
By Mary Battiata
Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page W14
The hats, the hats! The hats alone are worth the price. All manner of hats on the ladies and the swells and the sporting men. There are cloches and berets, boaters and trilbys, tam o'shanters and jeweled hatpins. Life is fine on the hillside above the race meeting of the Maryland Hunt Club! See the woman prance across the foreground, swinging her walking stick above a tweedy tide of spectators as sunlight gilds the folds of her soft spring suit. See the sulky boy dressed in a velvet jacket and white collar, and the glint of a pearl bracelet on a woman's wrist. In the distance, pillowy sedans idle with headlights on, beyond white field tents with peaked tops. Field judges in top hats sit astride thoroughbreds. All the good people basking in the watery sunshine, frozen with the clarity of a Vermeer in the lens of photographer Marion Post Wolcott.
It is spring 1941, the tail end of the Great Depression that has forced millions of Americans into misery and migration. It is also seven months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which will force the United States into the war, and end the Depression once and for all. But that is in the future. The hard times are still very much around.
Except perhaps in Maryland's Worthington Valley, where, to judge by this picture, they never arrived.
And that is the quietly subversive point coiled within the pages of Long Time Coming, historian Michael Lesy's 410-picture exploration of some of the lesser-known images of the Farm Security Administration photographic archive.
The FSA pictures, as they are known, are 265,000 photographs commissioned by the Roosevelt administration, from 1935 to 1943, to provide both documentation and propaganda. Originally, the federal government sent 100 photographers out from Washington on a stipend of a few dollars a day to photograph the dire poverty and dislocation of the Depression years. The administration's aim was to build popular and political support for the array of government programs known as the New Deal.
The photos did their job, and in some ways, they have never stopped working.
The FSA pictures have exerted a powerful hold on our collective imagination. So much that it takes an act of will, as one writer has noted, to remember that people back then lived in a world of color.
A relative handful of the FSA images have been reproduced so often that they seem as familiar as a recurring dream: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," for example, brushing a strand of hair away from her pensive, sun-strained eyes; Walker Evans's hard-hit Alabama sharecroppers (prominently featured in James Agee's 1939 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.)
The photographs have also spawned an enduring aesthetic all their own, an earnest, if ersatz, Dust Bowl glamour that has permeated art and advertising ever since, shaping Hollywood films -- from "Bonnie and Clyde" to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- and the personas of latter-day Okies like playwright Sam Shepard and songwriter Gillian Welch. The FSA images have been employed to sell cars, housewares, clothing -- becoming, over time, a photographic shorthand for an idealized American character that is stoic, honest and, thus, beyond reproach.
Over the years, Lesy argues, overexposure of a relatively tiny fraction of the archive has created a deceptive nostalgia that now threatens to obscure the era it was intended to reveal.
"It's false information that there were only raggedy, broke, desperate human beings at that time, and it's equally false history that all of those human beings were good and true," Lesy says from his office at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. "At the exact moment some wretched four-legged creature of a horse is dying in the middle of a barnyard, someone else is standing gazing at a roller coaster or putting bets down for a steeplechase."
Lesy says his book is an effort to restore the archive to its breadth, to make us "look, and then look again. Think and then think again."
This kind of archival muckraking is not new for Lesy. An earlier book, Wisconsin Death Trip, successfully challenged the image of the 1890s as the "Gay Nineties," using small-town photo archives in the upper Midwest to show a culture reeling from economic recession and obsessed with death and suicide.
Lesy dove into the FSA well intent on exploring its less-frequented corners, searching for images of city life, of African American communities, of the prosperous as well as the poor. About 20 percent of the pictures in Long Time Coming, he says, are from photographic negatives that had never been printed.
Lesy looks carefully at Roy Stryker, the obscure, low-level government bureaucrat with little photographic experience who oversaw the entire project. Overwhelmed at the outset, Stryker initially insisted that photographers follow detailed shooting scripts, manifests that some photographers considered ludicrously literal: "The main theme of your pictures should be corn," he wrote to photographer Arthur Rothstein, as Rothstein headed to Iowa in 1939.
"Don't forget people on front porches, either," Stryker had counseled earlier.
But by the project's final years, Stryker himself had been transformed by exposure to the breadth of the images. He began to envision the collection as a vast sociological time capsule, a landmark portrait of America in its almost incomprehensible variety.
Considered in its entirety, Lesy says, the archive recalls the sprawling, epic poetry of Walt Whitman. "It's what Whitman talked about in all of his panoplies. It's the street, the people who walk, the people who ride, the people who shop, the people who clean, who look, who do."
Before the project ended in 1943, it had turned from documenting the Depression to recording American wartime patriotism, and the flush of wartime prosperity. It also established the careers of a handful of its best photographers, people like Gordon Parks, John Vachon and Russell Lee. Many of them would spend the rest of their professional lives doing work in the same vein, furthering a style that has come to be known as documentary photography. Their work influenced the pioneers of the next generation, photographers like Robert Frank and William Eggleston.
The archive continues to inspire surprising devotion among ordinary people as well as art directors, according to Library of Congress curator of documentary photographs Beverly Brannan. "Something about the pictures is very real. They're direct, they're not being interpreted for you. There's a lot of eye contact with the subject. The people aren't all dressed up; they appear to be making an honest statement."
Appear is the operative word. As Brannan and colleagues outline in their book about the archive, Documenting America, 1935-1943, some FSA photographers were not above manipulating subjects and setting to make a political or aesthetic point.
"The point of the book," says Lesy, "is to permit people to reexperience history, to give people these momentary epiphanies, where they do a kind of time travel, where they enter the past, with knowledge."
So look over these FSA photographs of the Washington area, in which our Technicolor present gives way to a mysterious, black-and-white past. And pay attention to the hats. Fantastic, democratic, endlessly varied hats, on middle-class ladies in tearooms; on a laborer clearing a lot for wartime construction; in the hand of a blind man with his back to the wall of McLachlen Banking Corp.; on the mysterious woman docked like a warship at a shady park bench, looking out for something or someone as her hand takes the measure of her companion's thigh; and the elegant black number clamped to the beetle brow of a stubble-faced gent lost in thought on a crowded downtown street.
See the hats. And under each brim, something even more remarkable; the level and unselfconscious gaze of a time long gone, when television had yet to commandeer the living room and our relationship with the all-seeing eye of the camera was still new.
Mary Battiata is a Magazine staff writer.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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You know the immortal icons from the Great Depression. Here are the ones, closest to home, you haven't seen
By Mary Battiata
Sunday, December 15, 2002; Page W14
The hats, the hats! The hats alone are worth the price. All manner of hats on the ladies and the swells and the sporting men. There are cloches and berets, boaters and trilbys, tam o'shanters and jeweled hatpins. Life is fine on the hillside above the race meeting of the Maryland Hunt Club! See the woman prance across the foreground, swinging her walking stick above a tweedy tide of spectators as sunlight gilds the folds of her soft spring suit. See the sulky boy dressed in a velvet jacket and white collar, and the glint of a pearl bracelet on a woman's wrist. In the distance, pillowy sedans idle with headlights on, beyond white field tents with peaked tops. Field judges in top hats sit astride thoroughbreds. All the good people basking in the watery sunshine, frozen with the clarity of a Vermeer in the lens of photographer Marion Post Wolcott.
It is spring 1941, the tail end of the Great Depression that has forced millions of Americans into misery and migration. It is also seven months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which will force the United States into the war, and end the Depression once and for all. But that is in the future. The hard times are still very much around.
Except perhaps in Maryland's Worthington Valley, where, to judge by this picture, they never arrived.
And that is the quietly subversive point coiled within the pages of Long Time Coming, historian Michael Lesy's 410-picture exploration of some of the lesser-known images of the Farm Security Administration photographic archive.
The FSA pictures, as they are known, are 265,000 photographs commissioned by the Roosevelt administration, from 1935 to 1943, to provide both documentation and propaganda. Originally, the federal government sent 100 photographers out from Washington on a stipend of a few dollars a day to photograph the dire poverty and dislocation of the Depression years. The administration's aim was to build popular and political support for the array of government programs known as the New Deal.
The photos did their job, and in some ways, they have never stopped working.
The FSA pictures have exerted a powerful hold on our collective imagination. So much that it takes an act of will, as one writer has noted, to remember that people back then lived in a world of color.
A relative handful of the FSA images have been reproduced so often that they seem as familiar as a recurring dream: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," for example, brushing a strand of hair away from her pensive, sun-strained eyes; Walker Evans's hard-hit Alabama sharecroppers (prominently featured in James Agee's 1939 book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.)
The photographs have also spawned an enduring aesthetic all their own, an earnest, if ersatz, Dust Bowl glamour that has permeated art and advertising ever since, shaping Hollywood films -- from "Bonnie and Clyde" to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- and the personas of latter-day Okies like playwright Sam Shepard and songwriter Gillian Welch. The FSA images have been employed to sell cars, housewares, clothing -- becoming, over time, a photographic shorthand for an idealized American character that is stoic, honest and, thus, beyond reproach.
Over the years, Lesy argues, overexposure of a relatively tiny fraction of the archive has created a deceptive nostalgia that now threatens to obscure the era it was intended to reveal.
"It's false information that there were only raggedy, broke, desperate human beings at that time, and it's equally false history that all of those human beings were good and true," Lesy says from his office at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. "At the exact moment some wretched four-legged creature of a horse is dying in the middle of a barnyard, someone else is standing gazing at a roller coaster or putting bets down for a steeplechase."
Lesy says his book is an effort to restore the archive to its breadth, to make us "look, and then look again. Think and then think again."
This kind of archival muckraking is not new for Lesy. An earlier book, Wisconsin Death Trip, successfully challenged the image of the 1890s as the "Gay Nineties," using small-town photo archives in the upper Midwest to show a culture reeling from economic recession and obsessed with death and suicide.
Lesy dove into the FSA well intent on exploring its less-frequented corners, searching for images of city life, of African American communities, of the prosperous as well as the poor. About 20 percent of the pictures in Long Time Coming, he says, are from photographic negatives that had never been printed.
Lesy looks carefully at Roy Stryker, the obscure, low-level government bureaucrat with little photographic experience who oversaw the entire project. Overwhelmed at the outset, Stryker initially insisted that photographers follow detailed shooting scripts, manifests that some photographers considered ludicrously literal: "The main theme of your pictures should be corn," he wrote to photographer Arthur Rothstein, as Rothstein headed to Iowa in 1939.
"Don't forget people on front porches, either," Stryker had counseled earlier.
But by the project's final years, Stryker himself had been transformed by exposure to the breadth of the images. He began to envision the collection as a vast sociological time capsule, a landmark portrait of America in its almost incomprehensible variety.
Considered in its entirety, Lesy says, the archive recalls the sprawling, epic poetry of Walt Whitman. "It's what Whitman talked about in all of his panoplies. It's the street, the people who walk, the people who ride, the people who shop, the people who clean, who look, who do."
Before the project ended in 1943, it had turned from documenting the Depression to recording American wartime patriotism, and the flush of wartime prosperity. It also established the careers of a handful of its best photographers, people like Gordon Parks, John Vachon and Russell Lee. Many of them would spend the rest of their professional lives doing work in the same vein, furthering a style that has come to be known as documentary photography. Their work influenced the pioneers of the next generation, photographers like Robert Frank and William Eggleston.
The archive continues to inspire surprising devotion among ordinary people as well as art directors, according to Library of Congress curator of documentary photographs Beverly Brannan. "Something about the pictures is very real. They're direct, they're not being interpreted for you. There's a lot of eye contact with the subject. The people aren't all dressed up; they appear to be making an honest statement."
Appear is the operative word. As Brannan and colleagues outline in their book about the archive, Documenting America, 1935-1943, some FSA photographers were not above manipulating subjects and setting to make a political or aesthetic point.
"The point of the book," says Lesy, "is to permit people to reexperience history, to give people these momentary epiphanies, where they do a kind of time travel, where they enter the past, with knowledge."
So look over these FSA photographs of the Washington area, in which our Technicolor present gives way to a mysterious, black-and-white past. And pay attention to the hats. Fantastic, democratic, endlessly varied hats, on middle-class ladies in tearooms; on a laborer clearing a lot for wartime construction; in the hand of a blind man with his back to the wall of McLachlen Banking Corp.; on the mysterious woman docked like a warship at a shady park bench, looking out for something or someone as her hand takes the measure of her companion's thigh; and the elegant black number clamped to the beetle brow of a stubble-faced gent lost in thought on a crowded downtown street.
See the hats. And under each brim, something even more remarkable; the level and unselfconscious gaze of a time long gone, when television had yet to commandeer the living room and our relationship with the all-seeing eye of the camera was still new.
Mary Battiata is a Magazine staff writer.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
selection of Show invitations
of Chris Keeley's exhibits
CHRIS KEELEY
junkie java quiz
super cool links
Chris keeley's resume
secret surrealist society artwork
dead friends
newest sss art
Chris keeley's art galleries
rationalize,minimize and denial statements
the Intervention Organization
five and ten press - consulting iconoclast
Chris Keeley's Social Documentary Photography
activism
Art links
Big brother
Blinded by Science
Darkside / Gothic
Dharma Road
G E E K
Maul
Music
Pirate
radio
W E I R D O
What's Mailart
Mailart List
Scanner Links
Drugs
Photographs
Art
Out of the Dark
Art
In to the Light
Art
Collage DaDa
Art
Send me email!
Return to Intervention Organization