FSA Photo of the Week

Here we go:

FSA Photo of the.. random time interval

Here's a portrait:

FSA Photo of the week

This might actually be a pretty well known photograph. It's certainly a kind of photograph that's very well known:

FSA Photo of the Week

Something a little more timeless?

FSA Photo of the Week

I may as well just define a week to be 8 days long.

FSA Photo of the week

Here ya go:

FSA photo of the week

Here it is, a day late:

FSA Photo of the Week

Here it is:

FSA Photo of the Week

Here we go:

FSA Photo of the Week

FSA Photo of the week

FSA Photo of the Week

This is actually OWI, almost certainly:

FSA Photo of the Week

Commentary after the cut.

The FSA File

The FSA/OWI photo archive is online. This is one of the more important photographic artifacts in the world. It holds the raw material of what was to a large extent one man's vision of several narratives regarding the USA, in the late 1930s and 1940s. It belongs to citizens of the USA, it is large (about 165,000 images), it is diverse, it is lightly edited, and it contains a large number of superb images.

You can find it here.

The Resettlement Agency (RA) was more or less the brainchild of its director, Rexford Tugwell, an economist from Columbia University and an adviser to the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. The RA's role, in broad strokes, was to help farmers in difficulty. The original conception of the photographic unit of the RA was to document the plight of those farmers, as well as the results of the aid rendered. Roy Stryker, who had worked with Tugwell at Columbia, was brought in to lead the unit of photographers. He continued to do so as the unit went through several agency changes, first to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and then to the Office of War Information (OWI), employing various photographers along the way including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Stryker and his unit, despite the widely varied agency missions, were driven by the same ideas of documentary photography throughout.

Stryker seems to have been a propagandist at heart. While working for Tugwell at Columbia, he had responsibility for selecting illustrations for a book. He re-tasked existing images, supplying them with new captions, ignoring the original context. The images still served, in the sense of illustrating well (we assume), and there was arguably a truth to this work. However, the "truth" of the image, if any, in the new context was not the truth of the context in which the photograph was taken.

This approach informs the archive throughout. Any photograph was surely taken in a real place, with a real context. There is an underlying truth, there. Nonetheless, a photograph ultimately stands alone, it is fundamentally removed in time and space from that original context. It could as well illustrate something else. A photograph of a factory owner in working clothes, demonstrating usage of a machine, could as well illustrate as essay on the plight of the worker. And why shouldn't it?

Stryker seems to have always had a narrative in mind when directing his photographers, and often provided them with written shooting scripts, instructions for how best to serve the narrative he had in mind. Initially the narrative was of hard-pressed farmers in drought conditions, being helped out by Generous New Deal programs. Later, he wanted to document an idealized (and arguably completely fictional) notion of small town life in the USA. When his unit was folded in to the Office of War Information (OWI) the unit worked to portray the strength of the USA as it built for war, the clearest case of propaganda work.

So, the archive is propaganda, and must be viewed in that light. One might argue that it was propagandizing an essentially true situation, and that it is irrelevant to consider whether any particular photograph is literally true. The proper answer here is murky. Is the underlying narrative true, that the photographs illustrated? This is another question entirely, and the answer here is also is not clear to me.

So, the archive certainly raises questions, often without clear answers. Regardless, it contains many important and wonderful images both famous and otherwise. Regardless, it should be viewed with suspicion. Regardless, it should be viewed. Regardless, it is important, the images do document something real and important in the history of the USA.

FSA Photo of the Week

I've decided to mix up the format a little and move all my commentary down after the photograph, so you can enjoy it for a little while as-is.

FSA Photo of the Week

Here is it. It's pretty snapshotty, but I've been reading Henri Cartier-Bresson lately, and I think there are some HCBish elements in play here. There's some instantaneous co-incidences of geometry (the child in front with the sack, the leaning telephone pole) and some nice repeated verticals. There's a hint of mystery (what's in the sack?) and the sense of a an event, however slight, unfolding.

The scan is nothing much, and this could without a doubt be rendered much more nicely and effectively than this scan shows. This is a nice example of how something that's basically good doesn't actually need sharpening and a full range of tones and and and. Well, it is if you accept my assertion that it's pretty good.

Mar 1939 (or Mar 1940?). Children of paper mill workers bringing home groceries in Berlin, New Hampshire, largely inhabited by French Canadians and Scandinavians. Shot by Marion Post Wolcott.

FSA Photo of the Week

Normally I spend a little time trolling the archives to find something interesting. This was literally the first thumbnail I clicked today, after my usual random clicking into the innards of the archive. Today, I was looking for something representative of the archive, in some sense, and this one certainly is. There's tons of this sort of sterile high-key/bright sunlight documentary stuff in the FSA/OWI archive, intended purely to illustrate "here are some of the things that are here."

On the one hand this is a pure and simple picture of a parking lot. The wires across the top of the frame make it, though, somehow. Echoing the line of the bus tires? Negative space above and below, well handled. There's a simple graphical feel to the whole thing. I like it more each time I look at it.

Oct, 1940. Line of school buses in back of Anderson consolidated school. Caswell County, North Carolina. Shot by Marion Post Wolcott.

FSA Photo of the Week

I skipped last week for lack of time. Maybe I'll start doing these on Wednesdays. Happy July 4th, US residents!

I like the dynamism in the man's pose, and expression. He's poised, for what, we're not sure (although obviously it's some mundane thing to do with corn). The backdrop of stacked corn is a nice texture, his clothes are great too. Possibly the legs and feet upper right screw the whole thing up, but possibly they anchor the scene in reality a bit making it clearly not staged.

William Singer, homesteader at Hightstown, New Jersey, helping to store corn for the dairy herd which is soon to be acquired by the colony. Russell Lee, Nov. 1936.

FSA Photo of the Week

Check this awesome thing out. It's like a weird little still life of the oddest things. Arguably the artist is not the photographer at all, but whoever assembled this strange tableau. The echoed oval shapes and the cross of.. whatever was used to make the frame. What IS that little box under the electrical outlet?

It's all so clean and simple. It looks like a weird art project, where these objects are placed inside a glass box exactly 1 meter on a side, and then filled with transparent plastic made with the artist's own fingernail clippings. Simultaneously, it looks like a poor family's make-do project, making what they need out of what they've got (the best definition of engineering I ever read).

This is "found object" photography, and a smashing example of it.

Crib made from scrap materials, probably on a Farm Security Administration project. Shot by Dick Sheldon, 1941.

FSA Photo of the Week

Our FSA photo of the week:

This looks like a Walker Evans quotation, I'm not sure it's deliberate though. Lots of good material in the frame, I think, and a nicely handled set of tones. Despite the relatively bright lighting I think it sells as a dimly lit space. What's interesting to me is that the apparent subject, the crock or whatever it is in the center, is really just a negative space. The subject is actually the desk-like object holding it up which is weirdly half buried in straw or hay, and which turns out to be a sewing machine. After a little while you realize that you're looking at some stuff that's been stored away someplace, but it took me a moment or two to work that out.

It's a little busy, perhaps, there might be a little too much going on in the frame, but it's all such good stuff I cannot help but like it.

Birdsboro (vicinity), Berks County, Pennsylvania. Sewing machine in the hayloft on the farm of FSA (Farm Security Administration) client Dallas E. Glass, shot by Dick Sheldon, August 1938.