An Alternate View: The Great Depression in Color
The FSA in Color
While the overwhelming majority of the work done by FSA photographers was shot in black and white, a small but significant archive was done in color. Over 1600 photographs from FSA and OWI photographers exist. Most of this work remained hidden in the Library of Congress archives until discovered by Sally Stein in her research on color photography. Her dissertation on the bifurcation of photographic means of expression between black and white and color details the work done in color photography of this period and is an invaluable resource for those wishing to understand and interpret the origins of color photography in American cultural expression. The color archive offers a small but important window into American life prior to World War II.
Aesthetic Barriers to Color Photography 
Among the most fundamental barriers to color photography as an aesthetic vehicle for FSA work was in the poverty of the subject themselves. One simple reason for the inconsistency between the proliferation of color in consumer goods in the 1930's and the stark imagery of depression era photographers lies in the economic and demographic conditions of these photographic subjects even before the Depression. The most rural areas of the country did not experience the consumer boom that brought brightly colored cars and appliances into the home. These areas remained monochromatic in their consumer sensibilities long after their urban counterparts. Color FSA photographs highlight the uses of color imagery as a tool of commercial communication while the rest of the landscape remained fixed in grayscale.
Uses of color photography were also shaped by the training and background of the FSA photographers, whose views of photojournalism had been shaped in the era following the first World War. The focus and intent of journalistic photographers of this era was often to portray a world stripped of joy and filled with hardship, the struggle for survival, hunger, and disease. Commercial communication had turned to color photography to reflect abundance, choice, and the richness of the “mass commodification of pleasure”(p. 191 Stein). Documentary photographers seemed to see color as another commercial fad or trend that would be of little lasting import. Color could implicated as another tool of corporate greed, to be eyed suspiciously. A nice trick of the light, perhaps, but more a gimmick than a serious means of communication or expression for a serious photographer.
Political Barriers to Color Photography
Resistance to color photography in FSA work came in the political arena as well. Politicians opposed to New Deal programs were wary of the work being done by Stryker’s crew and viewed it as an effort to create propaganda with taxpayer dollars. The use of color methods in printing for early FSA report was seen as excessively showy, even when it was limited to a few illustrations. Government publications of this period were typically text heavy, black and white affairs that focused on names and numbers. Stryker’s attempts to provide visual support to the documents was notable, and at times aroused suspicion among political enemies of New Deal policies. Early in the FSA history Senator Arthur Vandenburg of Michigan, an opponent of most relief programs referred to the first FSA report as “a triumph in typography, with all its magnificent color work and all its artistic maps and illustrations. In fact, I have never seen finer salesmanship or propoganda in all my life"(Stein p 229). This theme was echoed in newspapers of the day, with the Washington Post weighing in that “trick typography and splashing colors have no place in public reports.” Add to this the increased cost for color reproduction in printing, and color was viewed as an extravagant process used to trick the public into buying what the government was selling, much the way advertisers used color. Color images were seen as excessive in cost, and overly extravagant in their rhetorical flourish.
Galleries and FSA work
In addition to news and periodicals, which were the FSA's most popular outlet for photographs, Stryker found an market for FSA photography in the art world. He launched an exhibit that placed seventy black and white FSA photos as a group essay in Grand Central Station in 1938. The displays were so popular, the Museum of Modern Art circulated the display as a traveling exhibit. Exhibition in galleries required museum quality reproductions and oversized prints, items that were not technically perfected until the early 1940's. Making large format color display prints from color transparencies was simply not possible during the 1930's, so color photographs could not go on display in these venues. Further, there was a great deal of prejudice in the art world at this time against color photography as art, the technique still seen as one reserved for the commercial sphere. Black and white photography seemed better suited to the “bluntness, directness, grim truths, and bitter realities” depicted in the lives of their subjects than “showy” color photographs. This was especially important to the art world, whose critical analysis of the photographs as a form of expression set a higher bar than in commercial publications. Artistic intent in this realm was not only recognized, but required. The images of poverty, displacement, hunger and disease were re-enforced by stripped down, stark images. The medium echoed the message.
Slide Shows and Color Photographs
There was one arena in which color photography could be used convincingly. The phenomena of public slide show and filmstrip exhibits, which seem quaint today, were actually a popular means of artistic expression. Featuring scenes of sunsets and exotic locales, the shows whetted the public appetite for exotic yet realistic imagery. While there was limited ability to enlarge prints for display exhibitions, slide presentations offered an ability to exhibit in large format and take advantage of public fascination with the emerging technology offered by Kodachrome. Further, the emergence of color in the motion picture industry had an impact on the use of color film in still photography. Color in motion pictures, spurred by the advent of technicolor and color epics like Gone with the Wind(1939) and The Wizard of Oz(1939) built a public appetite for color. Stryker was able to capitalize on this emerging fascination through slide exhibits of color and black and white photographs. The ephemeral nature of these presentations helps to explain the relative paucity of work done on these types of exhibits and their slide into obscurity.
Color fails to establish a foothold in the FSA
Stryker himself was critical of the impact color could have on the work done by the FSA. Technical challenges with color reproduction limited their viability in many outlets. Color imagery had clearly come to be associated with commercial applications, cheesecake pictures, and treatment of opulent subject matter, which hardly coincided with his vision of the work to be conducted by the FSA. As Kodachrome became available, he provided limited guidance and few resources for color photographic work to be done, though it would be unfair to say he was opposed to color photography at the FSA in principle. Photographers including Russell Lee, Jack Delano and Marion Post Wolcott shot rolls of Kodachrome alongside their black and white work. Nevertheless, Stryker was unable to succeed in ever having a color FSA photograph published, and the body of work of the FSA in color sat undisturbed in an archive for nearly 40 years. Outside of the FSA, archives such as the Cushman archive at the University of Indiana offer a window into a different world than depicted by the FSA images.
1930's Photos from the Cushman Archive
The War and Color Photography
The FSA evolved in 1941 into the Office of War information, whose mission was to document the efforts of Americans as they prepared for and sustained the war effort on the homefront. The work done by the OWI includes a number of compelling color photographs of the American way of life. Just as Stryker had been adept at selling Americans on the New Deal by highlighting the need for relief, he became adept at selling Americans on the need to protect a way of life by projecting the virtues of American society. These virtues, as characterized by the OWI, included our freedom and our ability to project that image of power throughout the world. Color images of this period feature the richness of American life, our ability to come together in a time of crisis, and projections of technical and material superiority. In many ways, the virtues being sold were the opposite of the gloomy message of the FSA, and a color photography was a part of the effort to keep the country unified during wartime.
