PHOTOGRAPHY

The technologies of photography changed immensely in the first four decades of the twentieth century, increasing the sorts of pictures that could be taken and printed for mass distribution. Among the innovations was the portable 35-millimeter Leica, introduced in the 1920s, which permitted rapid, unobtrusive, spontaneous use. In addition, photoelectric exposure meters, which came on the market in the early 1930s and soon became standard equipment, allowed photographers to measure luminance and determine proper lens aperture (called f-stop) calibration. The annual U.S. Camera charted the modernization in photography beginning in 1935 with the best new photographic work chosen by juries chaired by photographer Edward Steichen. During the 1930s, the annual included works by Arnold Genthe, M. F. Agha, Paul Outer-bridge, Charles Sheeler, and Edward Weston. It remains the comprehensive, primary-source overview of the era's developments.

The "big picture" magazine was a further innovation that helped broaden the profession of the news photographer, photojournalist, and commercial photographer beyond the fashion and celebrity photographs by Steichen and Baron A. De Meyer that appeared in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and similar magazines, or Nickolas Muray's work for Harper's Bazaar and McCall's. Photography in advertising was in its infancy in the 1920s. J. Stirling Getchell worked for the J. Walter Thompson agency until he opened his own from in 1932. Advertising and Selling credited him in 1934 with a revolutionary use of photography and inventing tabloid layouts with work by Steichen, Anton Bruehl, and Margaret Bourke-White. Berenice Abbott, Charles Sheeler, and others contributed to a "futuristic" style of dramatized, cubistic, or manipulated image. Commercial photography became a recognized profession by 1938. Henry Luce, publisher of Time, launched Fortune in 1929 and hired the German photographer Erich Salomon, a pioneering Leica user, as staff photographer. Bourke-White rose to fame with her Leica work for Fortune, which included innovative journalistic realism and aerial photography.

When Luce began publishing the weekly Life in 1936 he developed the picture essay, a collaboration of editors, photographers, and writers who worked according to a shooting script. Luce described Life's mission as, "to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things . . . to see man's work." Bourke-White produced the photographs for Life's first cover story, which described the lives of the workers constructing Montana's Fort Peck Dam. Bourke-White also served as associate editor, believing in Luce's theory of the "mind-guided camera." Other staff photographers at Life included Alfred Eisenstaedt, Thomas D. McAvoy, and Peter Stackpole. The magazine became so popular that Luce had to print over a million copies of each issue to meet demand.

In 1937 Gardner "Mike" Cowles, Jr., and his brother John began publishing the monthly Look, which became Life's most successful competitor. Immediately popular, Look went biweekly as circulation soared to two million by 1938. By 1939, however, Look's fortunes had plunged, with circulation cut in half as more than a dozen new picture magazines appeared on newsstands. Look also lost readers because of its failure to use quality paper and printing and its poor layout design. By 1940, however, Look had gained new professional staff members and a new editor, Dan Mich, and the magazine prospered during the war years.

In addition to these commercial photographic ventures, several New Deal agencies promoted photography during the Depression. The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, for example, hired New York photographer Berenice Abbott to prepare a portrait of the metropolis, which was published as Changing New York in 1939. Abbott used as large a view camera as possible to capture the city's minute details.

In 1935, Rexford Tugwell, head of the Resettlement Administration (RA), formed a historical section within the RA to produce a "pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems." Tugwell was especially interested in recording the consequences of the Dust Bowl. He appointed Roy Emerson Stryker to head what became the Farm Security Administration's (FSA) documentary photography unit. Stryker began the project with the photographers Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, and Walker Evans. Dorothea Lange, who had documented the plight of migrant workers for the state of California, joined the FSA team, along with Paul Carter, Theodor Jung, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Arthur Siegel, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott, and later Jack Delano, John Collier, Gordon Parks, and others. Stryker assigned projects but left the choice of equipment, technique, and style to the photographers, who were directed "to speak as eloquently as possible of the thing to be said in the language of pictures." The FSA distributed the pictures free to newspapers and magazines to win support for New Deal programs and aid for the rural poor. FSA photographers amassed thousands of images, which are now held by the Library of Congress.

Steichen observed in 1938 that the FSA photography unit produced "a series of the most remarkable human documents ever rendered in pictures." These photographs "told stories and told them with [such] simple and blunt directness that they made many a citizen wince"; they conveyed "a feeling of a living experience you won't forget." In 1940, documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz described the FSA photographs as showing "group after group of wretched human beings, starkly asking for so little and wondering what they will get." Some critics, however, labeled them "subversive." Was it art, they asked, or rather sociology, journalism, history, education, or propaganda?

In many cases, writers teamed with photographers to add depth to the documentation. John Steinbeck's 1938 pamphlet about California migrant workers was illustrated with Lange's photographs, and Horace Bristol took a series of photos while traveling with Steinbeck on a research trip for The Grapes of Wrath. The writer Erskine Caldwell teamed up with Bourke-White for a book on Deep South poverty called You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). Archibald MacLeish provided a poem to accompany FSA photos in Land of the Free (1938). Lange collaborated with Paul Taylor on An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939), in which some photographs were set alongside the subject's own words. James Agee and Evans investigated the lives of southern tenant farmers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

Depression-era photographers also won acclaim as artists. From 1929 till his death in 1946, Alfred Stieglitz, the guru of American photography, presided over a gallery called An American Place in New York. Stieglitz encouraged Ansel Adams's career with a one-man show in 1936, a year after Adams's book on technique, Making a Photograph, appeared. Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Willard Van Dyke, and Weston founded Group f.64 (f.64 is a lens aperture setting that produces great detail) in California in 1932; the group was dedicated to "pure" or "straight" photography using view cameras with super-speed panchromatic film, and close control over the printing process. Lange, William Simpson, and Stackpole later joined Group f.64. Weston won the first Guggenheim Fellowship for photography in 1937; Evans received a Guggenheim in 1940; Lange, in 1941.

During the 1930s, art museums began to value photography and started adding prints to their collections. The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized an exhibit of Evans's photographs of vernacular and Victorian architecture in 1934, and gave his work another show in 1938. The Baltimore Museum of Art mounted an exhibit of Steichen's work in 1938. Adams curated the Pageant of Photography exhibition at San Francisco's 1939 Golden Gate Exposition. In 1940, Adams helped Beaumont Newhall create the Museum of Modern Art's Photography Department.

As World War II erupted, photographers mustered. Lange documented the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast. The U.S. Navy commissioned Steichen to organize photography of the war at sea. New picture magazines covered it all.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Memory: America from the Great Depression to World War II, Black-and-White Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935–1945. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html

Anderson, James C., ed. Roy Stryker: The Humane Propagandist. 1977.

Baldwin, Sidney. Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration. 1968.

Curtis, James. Mind's Eye, Mind's Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered. 1989.

Edey, Maitland. Great Photographic Essays from LIFE. 1978.

Evans, Walker, et al. The Years of Bitterness and Pride: Farm Security Administration, FSA Photographs, 1935–1943. 1975.

Fleischhauer, Carl, and Beverly W. Brannan, eds. Documenting America, 1935–1943. 1988.

Hurley, F. Jack. Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties. 1973.

O'Neal, Hank. A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and its People, 1935–1943. 1976.

Rothstein, Arthur; Roy Emerson Stryker; and John Vachon. Just before the War: Urban America from 1935 to 1941 as Seen by Photographers of the Farm Security Administration. 1968.

Steichen, Edward, ed. The Bitter Years, 1935–1941: Rural America as Seen by the Photographers of the Farm Security Administration. 1962.

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. 1973.

Stryker, Roy Emerson, and Nancy Wood. In This Proud Land: America 1935–1943, as Seen in the FSA Photographs. 1973.