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"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.

Dorothea Lange: The Photographer As Agricultural Sociologist By Linda Gordon To a startling degree, popular understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s derives from visual images, and among them, Dorothea Lange's are the most influential. Although many do not know her name, her photographs live in the subconscious of virtually anyone in the United States who has any concept of that economic disaster. Her pictures exerted great force in their own time, helping shape 1930s and 1940s Popular Front representational and artistic sensibility, because the Farm Security Administration (FSA), her employer, distributed the photographs aggressively through the mass media. If you watch the film The Grapes of Wrath with a collection of her photographs next to you, you will see the influence.1 Lange's commitment to making her photography speak to matters of injustice was hardly unique-thousands of artists, writers, dancers, and actors were trying to connect with the vibrant grass-roots social movements of the time. They formed a cultural wing of the Popular Front, a politics of liberal-Left unity in support of the New Deal.

THEORY - "Walker Evans and American Life" Scavenging the Landscape: Walker Evans and American life Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Melissa Rachleff The Great American Depression, spanning the 1930s, inscribed into the culture a psychic crisis. Faith in industrial ingenuity, heralded as "progressive," came unhinged. By 1933, four years after the stock market crash, one quarter of the work force was unemployed.(1) Into this dilemma came a multitude of photographic projects, the most famous of which were sponsored by the federal government in the form of agencies that provided relief to farmers, the unemployed and others. The most completely realized project was the documentation of conditions faced by displaced farmers, recorded by the Historic Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA), later the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The socially-oriented photographic book made its appearance, as did the photographic magazine, best exemplified by Life in 1936. Many of the best known American photographers came to prominence during the Depression, including Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Margaret Bourke-White. Of all the photographers from that era, one represented the quintessential photographic style of the Depression while remaining an elusive figure in photographic history: Walker Evans (1903-1975).

THEORY - "Interview with Walker Evans" Interview with Walker Evans Conducted by Paul Cummings In Connecticut October 13, 1971 In New York City December 23, 1971 The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Walker Evans conducted by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The interview took place at the home of Walker Evans in Connecticut on October 13, 1971 and in his apartment in New York City on December 23, 1971.

In 1994 The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the personal archive of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975). The Walker Evans Archive contains the artist's life's work-forty thousand negatives and transparencies dating from the late 1920s to the early 1970s-as well as Evans's personal and professional correspondence, papers, diaries, family photo albums, and his collection of books, picture postcards, clippings, roadside signs, and works by other artists.

The woman who became the face of the Great Depression 03.12.2008 | Author: Miguel Garcia-Guzman | Posted in Photography Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange This is quite interesting, one of the the girls in the picture of Dorothea Lange, who was 4 years old when the image was taken, remembers her mother and the great depression … full article with videos here. I always wonder how people that are portrayed in epic pictures like Migrant Mother felt about it. If you like this image as much as I do, you can get a full file with a high resolution scan here, and print it at home -as I did.