Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Photography and the Great Depression. Skip to content. Government Agencies and Photography The government photography project went through three different names and phases, although it was headed by the same man for most of its existence: Roy Stryker.
Resettlement Administration: The Resettlement Administration was the first agency that photographs were incorporated in, documenting cash loans given to settle the Western parts of the United States. About the Collection The core of the FSA-OWI collection contains , black and white negatives, , photographic prints, and 1, color transparencies.
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The impetus for this research stems from a photograph by Dorothea Lange of a Mexican-American mother and child which is strikingly similar to her iconic "Migrant Mother. These two images serve as an entry point through which to consider the entire archive in terms of those images of rural mothers and motherhood that were popularly circulated and those images that were left unseen, unprinted, or unmade.
I ask how popular readings of FSA photographs as objective or "true" impacted the material which circulated and that which were excluded from the dominant frame.
Using written materials between the photographic unit director, field photographers, and media in conjunction with analysis of circulated photographs of mothers, I argue that the FSA photographs served as popular representations of those who could be imagined as possibly "deserving poor," "client family," "rehabilitatable mother," and "US citizen. Using FSA photographs of mothers which were not circulated and contain subjects identified as "Mexican," I analyze images of Mexican mothers in relation to dominant racial constructions and trends in the circulated FSA photographs.
I argue that representations of Mexican mothers reflected and reinforced the gendered racialization of Mexicans in the US at the time. The target was undoubtedly a white readership likely to buy or come across the book. The contemporary reading thus suggested the exposure of an unmediated truth and access to the reality of black life.
It was discovered through the series the photographer had taken that he had moved the ox skull from its original spot to another location, a mere ten feet away, but whose cracked earth environment suggested a more severe drought and desolation.
The deliberate choice of a partial truth that seems to be suggested by some of the readers and commentators may not be a flaw of Twelve Million Black Voices but its very essence. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it ; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears. Wright, , Wright did not yield :. I fully understand the value of what you are driving at, but, frankly, the narrative as it now stands simply will not support a more general or hopeful conclusion.
The Negro who flees the South is really a refugee ; he is so pinched and straitened in his environment that his leaving is more an avoidance than an embrace. Natanson reminds that the contemporary representation of the African American community more than often indulged in stereotyped images. The book contains eight pictures of African American congregations at prayer, or reading or singing, a rare sight in segregated America and one that captures African American life well.
Richard Wright himself, born and raised in Mississippi, left for Chicago by way of Memphis in and was a product of the Great Migration. In the s another million followed Grossman, , New York but also Chicago and its meat packing industry were destinations of choice, with fifty to seventy-five thousand black southerners relocating to Chicago between and Grossman, , 4.
In that sense, cotton fields and urban slums are two symbolically adequate faces of s African American truth offered in Twelve Million Black Voices. The push to better account for African American agency has given credence to community-studies and opened the scope of the Civil Rights Movement to the grassroots protests of the Second World War, to the reforms and liberal consciousness of the New Deal Era Stikoff, and even to the community building of the Great Migration Hornsby, , , We are winning our heritage, though the toll in suffering is great!
But this paper is more interested in the larger reading offered by the addition and weaving of a narrative into the sequence of pictures. Russell Lee, Mother and Son , Chicago. Marion Wolcott Post, Maid, Georgi a. In that sense, Twelve Million Black Voices has a specific place and purpose in Great Depression photo books insofar as it reaches far beyond the immediacy of the crisis.
What I wanted to do was make an outline for a series of historical novels telescoping Negro history in terms of the urbanization of a feudal folk. My aim was to try to show in a foreshortened form that the development of Negro life in America parallels the development of all people everywhere. Kinnamon, , We black men and women in America today, as we look back upon scenes of rapine, sacrifice, and death, seem to be children of a devilish aberration, descendants of an interval of nightmare in history, fledglings of a period of amnesia on the part of men who once dreamed a great dream and forgot.
Alabama tenant farmer near Anniston. Dorothea Lange. Yet the FSA archive displays the whole series taken in by Dorothea Lange and leaves no doubt as to the fact that the tenant family was a white family. Photo 12 provides but one example from the archive ; several other photographs portray the whole family at work in the fields and more than undoubtedly evidence that they were white. It seems to me that photography only becomes documentary when it is documented […] Documentary seems to me a matter of intent, not only on the part of the photographer but of the viewer as well.
It is as much a matter of how the picture is used as how it is taken. Newhall, , Our commentary of Photo 6 has already suggested that photo and text collaborate to signify a new meaning, as does the African American tradition, in a context of oppression and danger, to express a self-determined meaning that might not be accepted and tolerated in a oppressive context.
Those who have did offer interesting hints in terms of reading paradigms such as Jack B. Moore and his suggestion that Twelve Million Black Voices presents similarities not just with other photo books of the period but with film documentaries as well: the visual imagery combined with the impression of a speaking voice does remind of film techniques. In the end, while both documentary photography techniques and black tropes have been under consideration, they have rarely been reconciled.
Their encounter, however, is allowed by the signifyin g approach here borrowed from African American scholar Henry Louis Gates. In the same way as W. Three hundred years are a long time for millions of folk like us to be held in such subjection, so long a time that perhaps scores of years will have to pass before we shall be able to express what this slavery has done to us, for our personalities are still numb from its long shocks.
Dorothea Lange, Cotton hoers going to work, Mississipp i. The folk culture that lies at the heart of the narrative is one of revolt and agency, Wright also makes clear:.
We stole words from the grudging lips of the Lords of the Lands, who did not want us to know too many of them or their meaning. And we charged this meager horde of stolen sounds with all the emotions and longings we had ; we proceeded to build our language in inflections of voice, through tonal variety, by hurried speech, in honeyed drawls, by rolling our eyes, by assigning to common, simple words new meanings, meanings which enabled us to speak of revolt in the actual presence of the Lords of the Lands without their being aware!
In that perspective of a folk culture both revealed and enacted in Twelve Million Black Voices , one is able to seize the way Wright may be signifyin g on the pictures displayed to support his thesis that African American history must be included within the larger frame of American History. For years we watch the timid faces of poor white peasants-Turks, Czechs, Croats, Finns, and Greeks-pass through this curtain of smoke and emerge with the sensitive features of modern men.
But our faces do not change […] Of a morning, years later, we pick up [the newspaper] and see that some former neighbors of ours, a Mr. Klein or Murphy or Potaci or Pierre or Cromwell or Stepanovich and their children—kids we once played with upon the slag piles—are now living in the suburban areas, having swum upstream through the American waters of opportunity into the professional classes.
The slums are not a first landing step as they may have been for 19 th Century immigrants or a temporary fallout of a Depression era, they are the dwellings of Black Americans without any hope of an upcoming improvement. The pictures alone could not suffice to illustrate that the black experience is both the same as that of other Americans and strikingly different, both part of and on the margin of the American story.
The effectiveness of Twelve Million Black Voices as a powerful gesture of empowerment and activism is reckoned by Ralph Ellison :.
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