Roy Stryker
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The successor to the similarly designed Resettlement Administration,
the Farm Security Administration was formed by an act of congress in
1937. One of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's most famous and important New
Deal programs, the FSA strove to help struggling farmers endure the
Great Depression. Through loans and assistance with relocation, the RA
and the FSA aided thousands of farmers devastated by the ebbing demand
for their goods and the dust storms that ravaged the Midwest. Also one
of the New Deal's more controversial programs, the RA needed support to
continue to receive its rather large amount of government funding. In
order to do this the RA, and later the FSA, organized a historical
section to create--and promote--a record of the devastation the
depression had wrought on average Americans and the benefits FSA
projects bestowed on needy farmers. In 1935 RA chief Rexford Tugwell
lured Roy Stryker, who had worked with him in Columbia's economics
department, to Washington to head the new Historical Section. Upon
arriving in the nation's capital, Stryker asked Tugwell what he wanted
him to do. "Show the city people what it's like to live on the farm,"
Tugwell responded (qtd. Anderson 4).
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Portrait of Walker Evans, photo by Edwin Locke. |
Portrait of Arthur Rothstein.
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Through Stryker's vision and an
amazingly talented array of photographers which included Dorothea
Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Russell
Lee, Gordon Parks, and Marion Post Wolcott, "a cultural document the
likes of which we may never see again" was produced (Anderson 3).
Watkins calls the collection "a pictorial archive that in technical
quality, artistic merit, and overall comprehensiveness is unequaled
anywhere" (7).
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Although Stryker often remarked that he and the FSA photographers
retained no comprehensive design, the project they pursued had from its
start several goals: to illustrate the extent of economic disaster
caused by the depression and to show how programs of the FSA and like
organizations had benefited the struggling Americans. As the project
developed and broadened in scope, Stryker would strive to establish a
complete record of rural America and in so doing make Americans
everywhere more familiar with themselves and their country.
Furthermore, Stryker thrived in a part of his job arguably more
important than having the pictures taken--distributing the photos to
the masses. Robert J. Doherty remarks that "one of the elements of the
Stryker genius was this ability to get his material to the proper
audience" (qtd. in Anderson 9). Mainly through the new and wildly
popular picture magazines such as Life, Look, and
Fortune, Stryker ensured that nowhere could Americans be
shielded from the images of despair and hope that he circulated across
the nation. In the early years of his reign Stryker enjoyed almost
complete control over which images the public would see, picking the
ones he liked and even going so far as to destroy the ones he thought
failed to represent his ideals (Brannan & Fleischhauer 338-339). His
ideals he rarely articulated but the best photos he believed framed
"dignity versus despair," capturing the farmer that needed and
furthermore would succeed with it (qtd. in Brannan & Fleischhauer
36).
As T.H. Watkins argues, the photographers themselves were little
removed from the project's intrinsic pressures: "Ostensibly dedicated
to the purest documentary goals, [they] were hardly unaware that their
work was designed both to sell the need for the New Deal's programs and
to celebrate their successes; decisions about what to photograph and to
picture it inescapably were influenced at least subliminally by the
imperative of their mission" (11). The group that Ansel Adams tabbed "a
bunch of sociologists with cameras" snapped away all across the
country. Shahn saw his mission as presenting "the ordinary in an
extraordinary manner," a quest for "'the real thing,'" the true and
enduring American values (qtd. in Brannan & Fleishhauer 65).
Boasting all the tools of art and technology, some of histories finest
photographers used the techniques of documentary photography to find
what they saw as "the real thing."
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Works Cited and
Suggested Reading
Maintained by Pat Brady
Last Modified: May 10, 1999
