13. FSA

Farm Security Administration
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fabout.html

The Farm Security Administration or the FSA more recognisably known as, was a project set-up by President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1935 and 1944 as an extensive pictorial record of American life. The project initially documented cash loans made to individual farmers by the ResettlementAdministration and the construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the midwestern and western states. The images show Americans at home, at work, and at play, with an emphasis on rural and small-town life and the adverse effects of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and increasing farm mechanisation.

Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, John Vachon, and Carl Mydans

In total the collection consists of about 164,000 black and white film negative and transparencies, 1,610 colour transparencies and around 107,000 black and white photographic prints. This huge collection was transferred to the Library of Congress in 1944.

"Before beginning their assignments, photographers read relevant reports, local newspapers, and books in order to become familiar with their subject. A basic shooting script or outline was often prepared. Photographers were encouraged to record anything that might shed additional light on the topic that they were photographing, and they received training in making personal contacts and interviewing people."

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange is without a doubt one of my favourite FSA photographers. Being, probably the most recognised female photographer of her time, and definitely the most successful woman photographer of the FSA, Dorothea Lange made photographic history with her photograph 'Migrant Mother', an image which captured exactly what the FSA were trying to document. Personally I see the 'Migrant Mother' as being fairly over reproduced, it's Lange's other work which I find the most effective. 

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap03.html

Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895 and studied photography in New York City before the First World War. In 1919, she moved to San Francisco, where she earned her living as a portrait photographer for more than a decade. During the Depression's early years Lange's interest in social issues grew and she began to photograph the city's dispossessed. A 1934 exhibition of these photographs introduced her to Paul Taylor, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, and in February 1935 the couple together documented migrant farm workers in Nipomo and the Imperial Valley for the California State Emergency Relief Administration.

"She would walk through the field and talk to people, asking simple questions--what are you picking? . . . How long have you been here? When do you eat lunch? . . . I'd like to photograph you, she'd say, and by now it would be "Sure, why not," and they would pose a little, but she would sort of ignore it, walk around until they forgot us and were back at work."

The most poignant and moving photographs from Lange's trip convey a mood rather than describing circumstances or activities: the man hunkered at the edge of the field, the mother and child in the tent opening, and the trio of men, one of whom casts a defiant glance at the photographers. The photographs are character studies that render the textures of skin and clothing with an artist's eye and depict posture, gesture, and gaze with an ethnologist's. But their subjects are anonymous and the pictures become genre studies: "the pea picker" or the "jobless man on relief."

Lange's work is hard hitting in it's own way. As stated in the extract above, Lange's work didn't capture the effect of the depression but more the emotion behind it, the emotion of the people effected by it. I think this could be the reason why I see such an attraction in her images, they are simple, yet effective, they do not throw the emotion in  your face, they allow you to think about it. 

http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/11/depression-era-photography-of-dorothea.html