Documentary Photography: The Farm Security Administration

Jack Delano c. May 1941

Why the FSA project had significant impact on the society?

Farm Security Administration was a project ceated in the Department of Agriculture in 1937. It was born out of frustration of the New Deal agriculture policy to provide help for the nation’s poorest farmers, at the time of the great depression. It was created in the United States of America providing a variety of support programs for the poor, rural farmers. The agency initially was known as the Resettlement Administration in 1935, headed by Rexford Tugwell. Rexford Tugwell was a U.S. economist, working for the economics faculty of Columbia University before becoming a member of the Brain Trust that advised Frankin D. Roosevelt.

The agency initially was known as the Resettlement Administration because of its primary function of moving farm families off of small, unproductive, unprofitable farms and resetting them in communities of similar farm families working large tracts of government-owned land, however the resettlement mission was abandoned in the late 1930s as a result of political opposition.

One of the lasting achievements by the Farm Security Administration was its image making. In its attempts to convince the public of the need for the agency’s mission, Rexfod Tugwell appointed a former student with the assignment of photographing the devastated land and people that were suffering due to the The Great Depression; in other words, gather photographs of the people who they were attempting to help out, in order to raise awareness. The assignment’s crew ended up taking roughly 270, 000 pictures, with some members gaining reputations as leading creators of documentary photography, namely: Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn.

The Office of War Information Collection was created in 1942 and served as a propaganda agency during World War II. It had two primary units of photography: one of which was headed by Roy Emerson Stryker and the other, the News Bureau. Though they were both used to document America’s mobilisation during the early years of World War II concentrating on topics such as aircraft factories and women in the work force. Roy Emerson Strykers section was one that had been transferred from the Farm Security Administration in late 1942, where he had already accomplished a world famous collection of documentary photographs.

The images retained an ability to remind us all of the hardships of rural America during the 1930’s. The color photographs of the Farm Security Administration and its predecessor Office of War Information Collection include scenes of rural and small-town life, migrant labor, and the effects of the Great Depression. A significant number of the color photographs concern the mobilization effort for World War II and portray aircraft manufacturing, military training, and the nation's railroads. The 1,600 color photographs produced by the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information Collection photographers are less well known and far less extensive than the 164,000 black-and-white photographs in the collection.

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