"Truth Value" and Documentary Photography: Reading and Re-reading the FSA
Lisa Van Arragon, Professor of Art
Minds in the Making

Editor's Note: This address was delivered at Calvin College in February 2006. It was sponsored by the Center Art Gallery in conjunction with the exhibition "Picturing Faith: Religious America in Government Photography, 1935-43."

Jack Delano, Men outside church before service
Image: Jack Delano, Men outside church before service

The emphasis of this essay will not be the specific content of the Center Art Gallery exhibition featuring images of religious life made by the Farm Security Administration photographers during the 1930s and 1940s.

Professor Colleen McDannell spoke about the exhibition more directly-its content, its organization, and its background-in her presentation at Calvin College [in March 2006]. I will address some of the critical issues raised by documentary photography: first, the historical context for some of these questions, particularly in relationship to documentary during the 1930s and 1940s; second, the problems or tensions in the assumptions around documentary during this period (first and second points are the "reading"); and finally the implications of such issues (the "re-reading") for the continuing value of documentary for producers and viewers.

First, W.J.T. Mitchell observes, "it is getting increasingly hard to find anyone who will defend the view (variously labeled 'positivist,' 'naturalistic,' or 'superstitious and naïve') that photographs have a special causal and structural relationship with the reality that they represent."1 The self-conscious consideration of "documentary truth" or the "truth value" of the photograph has certainly been one of the dominant themes throughout much of the critical and historical study of photography since the late 1970s. The photograph is viewed as "a construction as much as a reflection of reality."2

Hubert Damisch observes that the appearance of reality, derived from the objective process of photography, makes the photograph a paradox.

The photographic image does not belong to the natural world. It is a product of human labor, a cultural object whose being-in the phenomenological sense of the term-cannot be dissociated precisely from its historical meaning and from the necessarily datable project in which it originates.3

What might have been perceived as empirical evidence in the photograph is coded within a social system of meaning. Allan Sekula has argued for the necessity of understanding photographs as participating in a discourse, as part of an exchange of information shaped by the context of the social setting. The necessity of recognizing this discourse enters in, he points out, where

the most generalized terms of the photographic discourse constitute a denial of the rhetorical function and a validation of the truth value of the myriad propositions made within the system. As we have seen, and shall see again, the most general terms of the discourse are a kind of disclaimer, an assertion of neutrality; in short, the overall function of photographic discourse is to render itself transparent. But however the discourse may deny and obscure its own terms, it cannot escape them. 4

The implication of neutrality or even universality of meaning is most connected to the assumption of the "truth value" embedded in the dominant discourse of social reform with which documentary was associated. That is, the political message of documentary was dependent on its realism. The subjective presence of the photographer, manifested in the manipulation of form, was thus downplayed in favor of an emphasis on the role of the photographer as witness; as Sekula argues, the means of representation are made "transparent" so that the content of the photograph will take precedence, contributing to the often overlooked generalization he describes above.

John Tagg argues that this recognition brings to light the complexity of the realist appearance of documentary as a formal concern.

We must see that here, as generally, realism is defined at the level of signification, as the outcome of an elaborate constitutive process. We cannot quantify the realism of a representation simply through a comparison of the representation with a reality somehow known prior to its realization. The reality of the realist representation does not correspond in any direct or simple way to anything present to us 'before' representation. It is, rather the product of a complex process involving the motivated and selective employment of determinate means of representation.5

Tagg's argument suggests the degree to which realist imagery is as much a matter of interpretation as abstract imagery, that is, that realism can be an artistic form that carried a different cultural currency in the 1930s and 1940s from abstract high art imagery. Sekula furthermore points out that understanding a photographic discourse is based on understanding photographic signs as they are structured within the social system; the relationship between photography and high art is connected to the play of signs within the historical moment.6 In this sense the concept of the naturalized system of the photograph relates to the multiple agendas and expectations at work in documentary images and critical discussions of documentary during the period of the 1930s and 40s.

The photograph is viewed as 'a construction as much as a reflection of reality.'

The concept of the photograph's value as evidentiary was remarked on from its inception; in many ways, from at least the 19th century on, the photograph functioned as document-that is, a record, proof. The confirmation of the truth value of the photograph came in the use of photography in the early 20th century in social reform. The FSA is one instance of such a use of photography (only one of many, in the United States alone). Thus "documentary" was not new to the period of the 1930s.

Yet if documentary photography was not new to the 1930s, it may be argued that a certain ethos around documentary rose to prominence during the decade of the Great Depression. There were a number of factors contributing to the prevalence of documentary as a mode and as an "approach" or attitude during the period, including the circumstances of the Depression itself.7 The seriousness of the social crises of the 1930s affected both the production and consumption of documentary. The interest in conveying human experience rose to a new level as the 1930s progressed because the American experience represented in the 1930s was noticeably different from the America that interested artists, writers and scholars during the previous decade. "It was an unimagined America of almost incredible poverty that moved to the front of public consciousness in the thirties." 8

Another factor in the prevalence of documentary during the 1930s was the changing definition of culture at the time, from a sense of culture as the highest achievements of a society to the notion of culture as a common set of experiences, values, and practices.9 The connection between the idea of culture and the documentary movement, located in the interest in common experiences, was intensified in America in the 1930s in the concern for the nature of American culture, an interest in the patterns of American life. It was crucial to this interest that American cultural practices were changing due to the influence of new technologies that gathered and conveyed more information more efficiently.10

The new mass media technologies, radio, film, and photography, were part of the culture as a shared experience, of the 1930s as much as they helped to shape the communication of ideas during the period. Documentary photography was thus one form among many that was a means by which American society was represented to itself.11 New mass media forms, a changing concept of culture in America, and a concern for the representation of actual experience were all factors that contributed to the prevalence of documentary forms during the 1930s. The appeal of the documentary approach is clear in light of the convergence of these developments at the economic and social crisis of the Great Depression. Warren I. Susman describes how the idea of culture and the circulation of the idea of culture was a tool to shape ideals and to respond to the failures of urban-industrial civilization, in the process of searching for the real America. "The whole idea of the documentary-not with words alone but with sight and sound-makes it possible to see, know, and feel the details of life, its styles in different places, to feel oneself part of some other's experience."12

It is in this social context that Roy Emerson Stryker was hired to direct the Historical Section, the photography division, of the Farm Security Administration. He describes his vision of the project as a "pictorial encyclopedia of American agriculture," reflecting his sense of the comprehensive, informative potential of documentary.13 Stryker relates the contribution of the FSA file to public education, suggesting that "it helped connect one generation's image of itself with the reality of its own time in history."14 It is evident in Stryker's statements that the value of the project however also lay in the emotional and ideological content symbolized by the images. By viewing evidence of hardship in the rural South, Americans would become more aware of, and thereby more sympathetic to and supportive of, government programming for the poor and destitute in the rural South. Stryker identified with this quality in the photographs himself, saying of Russell Lee's photographs, "I always felt that Russell was saying, 'Now here is a fellow who is having a hard time but with a little help he's going to be all right.' And that's what gave me courage."15 The connection between the recognition of suffering and yet the optimism in the ability of the human spirit to overcome was an abstract symbolism that tied the facts of the photographs into a larger dramatic narrative.16

The broader public discussion of the FSA photographs also made this connection between factual content and emotional impact. In April 1938 a selection of FSA photographs was featured in the First International Photographic Exposition at the Grand Central Palace in New York, curated by Willard Morgan. Edward Steichen covered the exhibition in a feature in the 1939 issue of U.S. Camera Annual. Steichen directly connects the term "documentary" with the intense emotional plea of the photographs. Referring to the images as "the most remarkable human documents that were ever rendered in pictures," Steichen calls viewers to pay attention to the stories of the experiences of the subjects.

"Now step up folks, and look this way!" Have a look into the faces of the men and the women in these pages. Listen to the story they tell and they will leave with you a feeling of a living experience you won't forget; and the babies here, and the children; weird, hungry, dirty, lovable, heart-breaking images; and then there are the fierce stories of strong, gaunt men and women in time of flood and drought. If you are the kind of rugged individualist who likes to say "Am I my brother's keeper?" don't look at these pictures-they may change your mind.17

Stryker, and Steichen cast documentary photography both as a neutral witness to reality and a storyteller highlighting human experience and appealing to the viewers' emotions. The images articulate the ideas of documentary they and others voiced.

Migrant Mother
Dorothy Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936 *

One of the most widely reproduced images of the FSA file, the image that opens the current exhibition, is Migrant Mother, 1936, by Dorothea Lange. Because it is similar in subject and intention to many FSA images, it serves as an illustration of the documentary rhetoric of the 1930s if not constructed then at least made famous in the United States by the FSA. Stryker was evidently aware of the creation of a visual rhetoric when in a 1942 article in The Complete Photographer he states "The documentary photographer does not take snapshots.... He speaks a language."18 The FSA file constructed a new vocabulary in photography, both within pictures themselves and in the thinking about how documentary practice was defined.

One of the components typical of FSA imagery visible in Migrant Mother is the focus on an individual. The individual woman becomes a representative type; typically within this approach, subjects are known to viewers as one of a cast of victims of society, as "migrant farmers, sharecroppers, hoboes, unemployed men, desperate mothers, ragged children," who became symbolic of the problems of the period, unemployment, homelessness, and poverty.19 The image of the woman was an ideal, the "perfect victim" sought by FSA photographers. 20 The photograph is framed to eliminate other information, except the children clinging to their mother, reinforcing the family's isolation, her desperation, and her individual strength.

The clarity of the image, the proximity of the photographer to the subject, and the direct viewpoint are additional elements of the FSA vocabulary providing information that reinforces the concept of the symbolic victim. Clarity, proximity, and viewpoint reveal the ragged, dirty clothing, broken fingernails, unkempt hair, and lines of worry all conveying the economic and emotional strain of poverty, the struggles described by Stryker and Steichen. The degree of detail captured by the camera is part of its power, Alan Trachtenberg points out, because it enables an image like Migrant Mother to be both a universal symbol and to capture a specific experience; the suffering of the subject is as real as the viewer's own experience because of its "particularity."21

Often an FSA photograph will contain enough of the surrounding environment to contextualize the subject, creating a comparison or contrast that highlights details reinforcing the symbolic ideal. However, in some cases, as in this one, the proximity of the photographer and the elimination of the surrounding environment simplify the image to one, monumental individual. This monumentality, another common FSA strategy, emphasizes the heroism of the struggling victim, the narrative running throughout the FSA file, what Stryker would refer to as "dignity versus despair."22

The close focus draws in another aspect of creating a sense of monumentality, the emphasis on the faces of the subjects. Stryker spoke directly to this theme in describing the FSA file in general.

But the faces to me were the most significant part of the file. When a man is down and they have taken from him his job and his land and his home-everything he spent his life working for-he's going to have the expression of tragedy permanently on his face. But I have always believed that the American people have the ability to endure. And that is in those faces, too.23
Migrant Mother's Tent
Dorothy Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936 *

The six frames Lange shot of Thompson suggest that many details may have drawn her to the subject, but clearly the quality Stryker refers to above also struck Lange in this case. Lange approached the subject first from a greater distance, then moving gradually closer to the woman while asking her about her experiences. The image that became famous is the one that focuses most on Thompson's face where we read "the expression of tragedy."24 The look was one sought after by 1930s photographers because it so immediately came to represent at a glance how the scale of the Depression affected individuals. Margaret Bourke-White, describing her work with Erskine Caldwell on Have You Seen their Faces , referred to the search for "faces that would express what we wanted to tell."25 The expression seen on Thompson's face was " the look: mournful, plaintive, nakedly near tears."26 Yet her unwavering gaze into the distance, still carries the sense of endurance Stryker refers to above. In an interview in the 1970s about the FSA file, Stryker singles out the photograph of Thompson as exemplary of the file. "She has all of the suffering of mankind in her but all of the perseverance too. A restraint and a strange courage. You can see anything you want to in her. She is immortal."27

Stryker's statement relates to another element of the FSA rhetoric, the focus on the subject, rather than the presence of the photographer. The neutrality of photography is implied through various strategies, including capturing the subject as she looked away from the camera, eliminating any acknowledgement of the presence of the photographer.


Dorothy Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936 *

The directness or straight perspective also did not call attention to the medium of photography or the formal elements of the image.28 Steichen mentions the directness of FSA images in the 1939 article as a way to distinguish "human documents" from art photography.29 The appearance of objectivity was essential-the authenticity suggested by the appearance of the documentary image made the images effective as evidence.30 They could only be useful within this frame of reference if they emphasized content over form, or even sacrificed form for the sake of content. Lange brings us immediately to the experience of Thompson, without interrupting our view of the subject with an awareness of her own formal mediation.

Stryker compared the FSA project to social science. "Ansel Adams, in fact, once told me, "'What you've got are not photographers. They're a bunch of sociologists with cameras.'"31 The neutrality and progressive nature of the social sciences implied by the assumption of the objective image fit the socio-political context in which the image served. This idea was further carried out by his suggestion that the sociological element of the photographs was that they would help people to "really see." 32

'What you've got are not photographers. They're a bunch of sociologists with cameras.'

There are a number of levels on which the goals of the FSA file systematized viewing, but among the most influential is the degree to which it shaped "a view of photography itself, particularly as a medium of cognition and social knowledge." 33 Although the FSA photographers and Roy Stryker cannot necessarily be credited with creating such an expectation of documentary, the FSA project certainly asserted and popularized it within the American cultural scene of the 1930s.

This leads us to our second point, the critical questions around documentary practice. The problem is not necessarily in the FSA images themselves, but in how the images have come to function, the subsequent assumptions of and influence of FSA photography on the understanding of documentary after the Depression era. This is one argument put forward by Martha Rosler, in the essay "In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)."

Rosler in particular addresses the legacy of victim photography, as she refers to it, in documentary practice, that is that the assumption of documentary photography is that the viewers are witnesses to social truths, that are in light of some of the other critical commentaries on photography addressed at the beginning, ideas masked as truths that reiterate class or other differences. The nature of the photograph as a cultural construction is significant because is a fact not addressed within the definition of documentary authored by Stryker, Steichen, and others tied to the FSA project during the 1930s and 40s. However, Rosler warns her readers against merely decrying the FSA project; the issue for her is current viewership and production practices, including a shallow revisiting of FSA subjects, a point we will return to shortly.

One of the most pressing issues raised is this issue of the legacy of social reform movements on documentary practice, tying documentary to the depiction of the suffering/experiences of others (people other than the viewers, that is). A number of scholars have used this position as the basis for an analysis of documentary that identifies the problematic association of documentary in the representation of the underprivileged.

Another issue in 1930s documentary raised by recent studies returns to the recognition of the realist quality of documentary not as natural but as a deliberately constructed aesthetic. Tagg suggests the issue of what was communicated in documentary is not the extent to which the content of the images was 'true,' "but, rather, of a struggle around the status of truth and the economic and political role which it plays."34 In other words, the issue raised by FSA photography is how the documentary mode constructed the idea of truth in the interplay between realism and the context of social systems organized around the regulation and dissemination of information. These recent studies of 1930s and other documentary bring to light the ambiguity of realism as a style, and the necessity of recognizing its 'truthful" appearance not as natural, but as a complicated ideological site.

David Levi Strauss warns us that taking someone else's picture leads to "a minefield of real political problems."35 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, in her prosecution of photography for its ability to mask ideology through the appearance of objectivity, points out that documentary photography as a mode has been, and continues to be, problematic from a critical standpoint for its ability "to naturalize domination."36

In the essay "Who is Speaking Thus?" Solomon-Godeau critiques the work of turn-of-the-century photographer, Jacob Riis, an obvious historical precursor to documentarians of the 1930s and 1940s for his "reformist intent."37 Riis has been best known for the 1890 publication, How the Other Half Lives, about the problems of tenement housing in New York and slum neighborhoods. While Riis did much to raise awareness of the problems of inner city housing and poverty, the analysis of his images has led to criticism of the relationship between his strategies and a troubling ideology, the conviction of "the threat posed by large numbers of poor, unassimilated recent immigrants, the specter of social unrest, the use of photography as a part of the larger enterprise of surveillance, containment, and social control, and the imperatives of 'Americanization.'"38

Sally Stein discusses the implicit meaning of Riis' photography through an analysis of the images in relationship to his text.39 She shows that Riis' work met and assuaged the fears of the middle class of the poor encroaching on the boundary between them. Maren Stange argues a similar point, that the sensational nature of the photographs, their emotional appeal, was a way for Riis to set up a dichotomy of upper and lower social classes in the American city, meeting the need to keep the poor at a safe distance for the comfort and affirmation of the upper classes. By analyzing his writings and images, she observes that Riis placed himself in a position of authority in relationship to the subjects of his writings and photography.40

Solomon-Godeau also calls attention to the relationship of difference and power conveyed by such images. The Riis photographs suggest the absence of an interaction between photographer and subjects because the subjects were not looking back at the camera. This compositional element communicates the degree of control exercised by the photographer over the subject. Solomon-Godeau pushes viewers to question this aspect of documentary.

We must ask whether the place of the documentary subject as it is constructed for the more powerful spectator is not always, in some sense, given in advance. We must ask, in other words, whether the documentary act does not involve a double act of subjugation: first in the social world that has produced its victims; and second, in the regime of the image produced within and for the same system that engenders the conditions it then re-presents.41

The documentary photograph thus reiterates the hierarchies and power relations of the ideological system in which it exists. This is no small part due to the fact that the discourse of documentary in which social reform photographers or documentary photographers were involved placed great emphasis on the usefulness and the "truth value" of photography, the concept of the camera as a weapon for social change. This was a concept carried through in the belief held decades later in Depression-era America in the ability of photographic images to bring about social improvement. The work of the FSA participated in the discourse of documentary photography as a tool, and thus, they, along with other photographers of this period, inherited the legacy of Riis not only in their political goals for photography in relationship to social change, but also in the problematic assumption of uneven power relations at work in the control exerted by the producer of the image over the subject.42

Rosler makes similar observations about the legacy of social reform photography for documentary practice. Documentary subjects are victims of the camera, shown as passive; she indicts mainstream documentary, not only the consumption of FSA imagery, but also contemporary documentary (see images by Sebastio Salgado, for example) in which the construction of victims for the consumption of the ascendant-class viewer is made legitimate, even ritualistic, holding up suffering in glossy magazines, books, art galleries, and museums. "Documentary is a little like horror movies," she suggests, "putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.) One may even, as a private person, support causes." She continues, "documentary, as we know it, carries (old) information about a group of powerless people to another group addressed as socially powerful."

(The emphasis of the images is on the position of the viewer as powerful, and the subjects as powerless victims, people who require the charity of the viewers because they are perceived to be incapable of helping themselves.) The issue has been further problematized, Rosler charges, when the focus is on the photographer and the back stories of the photograph.

Rosler reflects on a strange phenomenon in news articles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, follow up stories on the famous subjects of iconic documentary photographs: the twins in Diane Arbus image, the subjects of James Agee and Walker Evans' book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Florence Thompson, the real live subject of Lange's photograph (Thompson apparently told a United Press reporter that she has seen her photograph everywhere, but "what good is it doing me?"-in fact the image is one of the most reproduced photographs in the world). The phenomenon causes her to think of a paradigm for how documentary works. There are two moments for a documentary image, she suggests.

The first moment is the "immediate," moment, the instrumental moment, where an image functions as evidence of a specific historical circumstance or event. This is the moment in which the photographer, including Lange, is presumably most committed-from her comments, about her desire to help people like Thompson, we can interpret that this is the case.

The second moment is the "aesthetic-historical" moment-a moment that is less defined, in which the political argument of the first moment gives way to an emphasis on the "aesthetic "rightness" or well-formedness (not necessarily formal) of the image."

The second moment rejects historical specificity, while making reference to an historical occurrence in the past. This is dangerous because it makes reference to history, but does not engage the specific historical moment. It doesn't consider the interaction of political and formal meaning, "but a hazier, more reified relation," in which the image loses its ideologically specific content.

Rosler warns against the second moment--the concern is that such a response is shaped by the tendency to ignore that all responses to images are "inevitably rooted in social knowledge," as this knowledge is shaped by assumptions and experiences, and a "social understanding of cultural products." Her concern can be a model for us in that she engages the ongoing tendency in the Western art historical tradition to remove the image from its specific context, and elevate it; the purpose of art within the Western tradition has been to enact an imitation, and idealization of nature. So a woman becomes an eternal icon; again the problem is not in this in and of itself, necessarily-what is significant in this transformative tendency in Depression-era photography is that it has encouraged our distanced appreciation of the image, rather than an engaged encounter that changes us. The danger is that looking at the photograph gives us the impression of our engagement with the subject, but in actuality we are engaging the image as a strictly aesthetic object, as a cultural product, an act we can easily walk away from.

To question this construct, we must question the authoritative voice framing our understanding of documentary-whether it is the realist vocabulary of the image, the captions, the mass media context that presumes an objective frame, etc. Rosler questions whether we will see in contemporary photographic practice a genuine documentary approach, that is, she questions the possibility of a truly radical documentary practice. Our third, and concluding concern today, is, where do these questions regarding the FSA, and documentary practice in the 1930s and 40s, leave us now, as viewers and/or producers?

A European contemporary of the FSA, Walter Benjamin, addressed the photograph as a social construction more directly than Stryker, Steichen, and others in the American documentary scene. In a 1934 lecture, "The Author as Producer," Benjamin continues arguments raised in other famous essays, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and A Short History of Photography, among others, for the emancipatory potential in the mass reproduction of images. The connection he makes between emancipation and modern technologies is tied to the necessary relationship between form and content; the political message is tied to form or quality, rather than the reified relationship Rosler observes. "I should like to demonstrate to you that the tendency of a work of literature can be politically correct only if it is also correct in the literary sense."43 The real question for Benjamin is how works of art operate within the relations of cultural production of their time. For works of art to be progressive, he argues, they must transform the means of production, rather than simply using the existing means. He argues for a solution to Rosler's dilemma (more than forty years before she makes it) in the conscious interaction between political content and artistic form.

The connection to 1930s documentary is not simply whether or not photographic images should be subjectively manipulated, but in recognition of the use of the photographic image within a particular discourse, towards a particular end-that is, a political aesthetic more deliberate than the realist form vocabulary of 1930s documentary.

It appears that Benjamin is critical of the objectivity of 1930s literature and photography because the semblance of neutrality detracts from its ability to bring about political change. He levels a scathing critique at the German movement Die Neue Sachlichkeit for its aestheticization of struggle through its realist form vocabulary, in particular a book by Albert Renger-Patszch, Die Welt Ist Schon (The World is Beautiful). He argues that a visually neutral depiction of human struggle enables the comfort of the audience rather than pushing it to action.44 In describing the reportage photography made popular by Die Neue Sachlichkeit, he makes a statement he could still be making:

What do we see? It has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish-heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say 'How beautiful'."45

The solution, according to Benjamin, is to jar viewers, to surprise them out of their familiarity in order to provoke some action; he suggests several strategies, including the use of montage, captions, and the encouragement of viewers to become photographers themselves, all strategies that would turn the formal quality of the photograph from the object of contemplation to something of revolutionary use value.

In demonstrating the historical relativity of documentary, Solomon-Godeau charges historians with a task she could also give to us, as viewers or producers of images, to bring out "these coded and buried meanings, to bring to light those rhetorical and formal strategies that determined the work's production, meaning, reception and use."46 What can be gained from rereading documentary, an exploration of the rhetorical and formal strategies of documentary photographs within their historical context, returning to them their historical specificity, is not only a better understanding of those specific instances, but also a stronger sense of the value of documentary practice as a place where aesthetic and political ideals meet. A recognition, and engaged consideration of the interaction of content and form, the ideology of the aesthetic, could potentially emerge. This is necessarily an unresolved, ongoing process, a fact that can make looking at or working in documentary confusing, ambiguous, at the very least, challenging.

Yet David Levi Strauss proposes that the lack of resolution or tension in documentary practice and theory can also be productive, demanding the active participation and critical response of viewers and photographers in offering many different interpretive choices, but not the choice to not transform or to not change.47 This active engagement avoids walking away unchanged. It is in this light that viewing the work of the FSA photographers enables an exploration of social and aesthetic responsibility still relevant in the early twenty-first century.

* All images used are in the public domain, as released by the Library of Congress.

1. W.J.T. Mitchell, "The Photographic Essay: Four Case Studies," in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, 281-322 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 282. The statement introduces a discussion of the relationship between pictures and language, addressing the shape of the discourse around photographic meaning since Thinking Photography, edited by Victor Burgin, and other texts that have confronted the valuative assumptions of photography.

2. Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 10 (emphasis is the author's).

3. Hubert Damisch, "Five Notes for a Phenomenology Of the Photographic Image," in Classic Essays on Photography, 288.

4. Allan Sekula, "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning," in Thinking Photography, ed Victor Burgin, 84-109 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 87.

5. John Tagg, "The Currency of the Photograph," in Thinking Photography , 111-112.

6. Sekula, "On the Invention of Photographic Meaning," 87-88.

7. Stott, Documentary Expression, 67. Arthur Rothstein observes that the use of photography to persuade and inform audiences about society can be traced to the beginning of photography, but "it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s that the documentary photograph demonstrated its power to inform and influence a nation." Arthur Rothstein, Documentary Photography (Boston: Focal Press, 1986), 33.

8. Stott, Documentary Expression, 52.

9. Warren I. Susman, Culture As History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), 153. According to Susman, the idea of culture was "anything but new in the 1930s" yet there was an increasing self-consciousness or deliberate consideration of the term and its implications in American society and among scholars at this time.

10. Ibid., 158. The establishment of the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1935 by George Gallup was one development reflecting the rising interest in understanding American life; as polling became common practice, the American public regularly received apparently empirical evidence of what they thought about the main issues and topics of the day. That their attitudes and beliefs could be directly represented to them meant that it was easier to find what shared values and ideas joined Americans together.

11. Lawrence Levine, "The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s," in Documenting America, 1935-1943, ed. Carl Fleischauer and Beverly Brannan, 15-42 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, in association with the Library of Congress, 1988), 25.

12. Susman, Culture as History, 159.

13. Roy Emerson Stryker, "The FSA Collection of Photographs," in In This Proud Land: America 1935-1943 As seen in the FSA Photographs (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 7. The success of the FSA project can be traced to many factors, not least of which is the skill of the photographers Stryker hired. The degree of Stryker's own awareness of the influence of the mass media and particularly photography cannot be overlooked however. Stryker began to use photographs in connection with his work under Rexford Tugwell in graduate school, and furthered his own use of photography as co-editor of Tugwell's 1925 publication American Economic Life. Nancy Wood, "Portrait of Stryker," in In This Proud Land, 11. Stryker also observes that by 1936, photography was "fast being discovered as a serious tool of communications, a new way for a thoughtful, creative person to make a statement" and that everyone on the FSA project was aware that they "were an important part of a movement" (Stryker, "The FSA Collection of Photographs," 7).

14. Stryker, "The FSA Collection," 9.

15. Nancy Wood, "Portrait of Stryker," (includes an interview with Roy Stryker), 14.

16. The relationship between the specific and the abstract in FSA photography is one of the main themes in Levine's essay "The Historian and the Icon" (see note 9), 15-42.

17. Edward Steichen, "The FSA Photographers," U.S. Camera Annual (1939): 44. The feature was accompanied by fourteen photographs, and by comments made by viewers who saw the pictures at the Grand Central Palace.

18. Roy Stryker, The Complete Photographer, no. 21 (April 10, 1942), quoted in Grace M. Mayer The Bitter Years, ed. Edward Steichen (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1962), iv. An exhibition catalog. Some scholars have discussed FSA agendas or the FSA file in terms of its authorship not by individual photographers, but of the influence of Stryker. These include Maren Stange, "Symbols of Ideal Life": Tugwell, Stryker, and the FSA Photography Project," Chap. 3 in Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 89-131; Lawrence Levine, "The Historian and the Icon," and Alan Trachtenberg, "From Image to Story: Reading the File," in Documenting America, 1935-1943, 43-73. Given the details of Stryker's shooting scripts, his authority in choosing photographs, and destroying negatives, (an estimated 100,000 of 270,000 negatives were killed, according to Wood, by having holes punched through them, "A Portrait of Stryker," 17) it is well-established that Stryker had as much to do with creating this "language" as the documentary photographers he supported.

19. Levine, "The Historian and the Icon," 25-26.

20. Martha Rosler, "In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography)," in Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989) 303-340, critiques the use of a people as icons of victimization in documentary practice.

21. Trachtenberg, "From Image to Story," 68.

22. Wood, "Portrait of Stryker," 14.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 19, referring to Lange's account of the photograph. Lawrence Levine gives an analysis of the six images in the series in "The Historian and the Icon," suggests that the remaining five images are rarely seen because they complicate the ideal represented in the sixth image. The remaining images depict a multiplicity of experiences, and other family members, including smiling children, and a wistful teenager. As important as the sixth image was in carrying out the FSA program, he observes, "Life and human beings, however, are rarely that one-dimensional." 20.

25. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York, 1963), 137, quoted in Stott, Documentary Expression, 59.

26. Stott, Documentary Expression, 60.

27. Nancy Wood, "Portrait of Stryker," (includes an interview with Roy Stryker), 19. Wood recounts a conversation between herself and Stryker that occurred in 1972 as they were looking at Lange's photograph.

28. Trachtenberg and Sekula have both addressed Evans' awareness of the formal aspects of the medium. Alan Trachtenberg, "Walker Evans' America: A Documentary Invention," in Observations, 56-66. Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (Winter 1986): 3-64. Evans' own writing also makes his consciousness of the medium apparent. See Walker Evans, "The Reappearance of Photography," in Classic Essays on Photography , ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete's Island Books, 1980), 185-188. That other members were conscious of and sensitive to the workings of the mass media is apparent as well. Other studies of individual FSA photographers, including Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman and Jenna Webster, Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); and Karen Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) demonstrate the degree to which both Shahn and Lange were aware of formal issues and the mass media functions of documentary. In fact, that both Shahn and Lange were Photo League members is significant here. The point here is that as a collection, the FSA file was not organized in order to call attention to its formal means but to its content directly.

29. Steichen, "The FSA Photographers," 44. "But the "Art for art's sake" boys in the trade were upset, for these documents told stories and told them with such simple and blunt directness that they made many a citizen wince, and the question of what stop was used, what lens was used, what film was used, what exposure was made, became so completely overshadowed by the story, that even photographers forgot to ask."

30. Tucker, "Photographic Facts and Thirties America," 41.

31. Stryker, "The FSA Collection," 8.

32. Ibid.

33. Trachtenberg, "From Image to Story," 45.

34. Tagg, "The Currency of the Photograph," 129.

35. David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes, Essays on Photography and Politics, (New York: Aperture, 2003), 8. In spite of the risk of failure, Levi-Strauss defends the value of documentary practice, including its aesthetic underpinnings.

36. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, introduction to Photography at the Dock, xxxiv. This indictment is part of a larger investigation on her part of the social functions of photography and a search for the potential renewal of photographic practices.

37. Solomon-Godeau, "Who is Speaking Thus?" in Photography at the Dock, 173. Riis is tied to the Photo League also for his representation of the poorest immigrant neighborhoods of New York City.

38. Ibid., 175.

39. Sally Stein "Making connections with the Camera: Photography and Social Mobility in the Career of Jacob Riis," Afterimage 10, no. 10 (May 1983): 14.

40. Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life, 16-17. One rhetorical strategy, shared with other reporters and writers at the time, was to use the language of tourism in presenting information visually and verbally to middle class audiences, representing the poorer neighborhoods of the city as a distant country and thereby placing an emphasis on the distinction between the inhabitants of that region and the audience. Riis also narrativized the photographs, creating himself as a character, the reporter, within the narrative. "In its dramatic account of the instance of picture taking, it constructs a virtually separate, fictional character-the reporter/photographer 'Riis'-who is endowed in the story not only with industry, curiosity and moral righteousness, but also with humane concern and sympathy, qualities which are then inscribed in the photograph he presumably made and which we identify in ourselves insofar as we identify with him" (ibid., 44). Both Stange and Stein have pointed out the personal motivations for Riis himself; the representation of poor immigrants was a means to distance himself from their experiences of poverty, unemployment, and criminal behavior. Sam Bass Warner Jr., introduction to How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, by Jacob Riis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), ix-xi. Riis immigrated to the United States from Denmark in 1870 and did not find a settled place of residence and employment until 1874. During those years he was unemployed, jobless, drifting around the Eastern United States, was jailed, took odd jobs, "was a talker and a hustler," until he finally entered the newspaper business in 1873 (ibid., xi).

41. Solomon-Godeau, "Who is Speaking Thus?", 176 (emphasis the author's).

42. This aspect of FSA photography, raised by Solomon-Godeau and Tagg, is further complicated by the fact that FSA photographs were directed primarily by Roy Stryker, who exerted tremendous control over both the subject to be photographed, and how the subject would be represented. Tagg, in fact, describes FSA photographers as "co-authors" with Stryker, suggesting that the photographers for the Historical Section of the FSA carried out Stryker's goal to make a broad survey, "a pictorial encyclopedia of American agriculture." Stryker issued shooting scripts, saw contact sheets first, categorized, filed, chose photographs, and destroyed negatives of images rejected.; also raised in Maren Stange, "The Record Itself: Farm Security Administration Photography and the Transformation of Rural Life," in Official Images, 1-5. Stange outlines one of the famous examples of Stryker's shooting scripts, the instruction in the early 1940s for photographers to bring back "pictures of men, women and children who appear as if they really believed in the U.S. . . . shipyards, steel mills, aircraft plants, oil refineries, and always the happy American worker" (ibid., 5).

43. Walter Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," in Thinking Photography, 16.

44. Ibid., 21. The author points out that "political commitment, however revolutionary it may seem, functions in a counter-revolutionary way so long as the writer experiences his solidarity with the proletariat only in the mind and not as a producer."

45. Ibid., 24. His reference here is to the book by Albert Renger-Patzsch, The World is Beautiful ; which according to Benjamin, exemplifies the peak of New Objectivity photography in which the photographer turns poverty "into an object of enjoyment."

46. Solomon-Godeau, "Who Is Speaking Thus?", 182.

47. Strauss, "The Documentary Debate: Aesthetic or Anaesthetic?", in Between the Eyes, 9.

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