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Documenting America, 1935-1943
Between 1935 and 1943, a group of photographers under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker set out to photograph the United States for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. Photographs taken by this celebrated group, whose ranks included Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks, Russell Lee and Walker Evans, have since become icons of the 1930s and 1940s. In recent years, however, their work has been reproduced with little discussion of the particular circumstances surrounding its creation.
Documenting America takes a fresh look at these remarkable photographs. The book opens with two incisive essays by Lawrence Levine and Alan Trachtenberg that examine issues central to photography and American culture. While Levine explains how the pictures portray the complexity of life in the period, balancing scenes of Depression hard times with images of the pleasures of life, Trachtenberg analyzes the way in which viewers read photographs and the role of the government picture file that stands between the creation of the photographs and their use. Both essayists raise important questions about Stryker's grand ambition of a photographic record of America, about the "ways of seeing" that have grown up around the most famous of these photographs, and about the whole enterprise of documentary photography and the conventions of realism.
The images themselves are presented in series selected from groups of pictures created by single photographers. A documentary photographer often makes dozens of exposures to portray different elements of the subject, experiment with camera angles, and cover the stages of an event or steps of a process. By studying these pictures in series, we come closer to the photographer working in the field. We see a tenant farming community in Gee's Bend, Georgia, the activities of the Salvation Army in San Francisco, and the hubbub and commotion that filled Chicago's Union Railway Station in 1943. Texts accompanying each of the book's fifteen series describe the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of the pictures and discuss the relation between government policy and the subjects of the photographs. The nearly three hundred images included vividly portray America in the last bitter years of the Great Depression and the first years of the Second World War.
Documenting America takes a fresh look at these remarkable photographs. The book opens with two incisive essays by Lawrence Levine and Alan Trachtenberg that examine issues central to photography and American culture. While Levine explains how the pictures portray the complexity of life in the period, balancing scenes of Depression hard times with images of the pleasures of life, Trachtenberg analyzes the way in which viewers read photographs and the role of the government picture file that stands between the creation of the photographs and their use. Both essayists raise important questions about Stryker's grand ambition of a photographic record of America, about the "ways of seeing" that have grown up around the most famous of these photographs, and about the whole enterprise of documentary photography and the conventions of realism.
The images themselves are presented in series selected from groups of pictures created by single photographers. A documentary photographer often makes dozens of exposures to portray different elements of the subject, experiment with camera angles, and cover the stages of an event or steps of a process. By studying these pictures in series, we come closer to the photographer working in the field. We see a tenant farming community in Gee's Bend, Georgia, the activities of the Salvation Army in San Francisco, and the hubbub and commotion that filled Chicago's Union Railway Station in 1943. Texts accompanying each of the book's fifteen series describe the circumstances that gave rise to the creation of the pictures and discuss the relation between government policy and the subjects of the photographs. The nearly three hundred images included vividly portray America in the last bitter years of the Great Depression and the first years of the Second World War.
- GenresHistory
300 pages, Hardcover
First published October 27, 1988
15 people want to read
About the author
Lawrence W. Levine
21 books18 followersLawrence William Levine was a celebrated American historian. He was born in Manhattan and died in Berkeley, California.
A model of the engaged scholar throughout his life, Levine lived both his scholarship and his politics. From the very outset, he immersed himself in the political life of Berkeley – in, for example, a sleep-in in the rotunda of the state capitol in Sacramento to press for fair housing legislation, and the sit-ins in Berkeley organized by CORE to force stores to hire black people.
He participated in the march from Selma to Montgomery, expressing his solidarity with the civil rights movement. During the Free Speech upheaval at Berkeley, he came to the defense of students protesting a ban on political activity on campus in support of the civil rights movement.
He received numerous awards and accolades over the course of his career, most of which was spent in the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Among the honors bestowed upon him were a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1983, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985, election as President of the Organization of American Historians in 1992, recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1994, the 2005 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Historical Association, and the posthumous designation of the Lawrence W. Levine Award, which is given annually by the OAH to the author of the best book in American cultural history.
His books include:
• Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan, the Last Decade, 1915-1925. Oxford University Press, 1965.
• Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Highbrow/Lowbrow. Harvard University Press, 1990.
• The Unpredictable Past. Oxford University Press, 1993.
• The Opening of the American Mind. Beacon Press, 1997.
• [with Cornelia R. Levine] The people and the President: America's Conversation with FDR. Beacon Press, 2002.
A model of the engaged scholar throughout his life, Levine lived both his scholarship and his politics. From the very outset, he immersed himself in the political life of Berkeley – in, for example, a sleep-in in the rotunda of the state capitol in Sacramento to press for fair housing legislation, and the sit-ins in Berkeley organized by CORE to force stores to hire black people.
He participated in the march from Selma to Montgomery, expressing his solidarity with the civil rights movement. During the Free Speech upheaval at Berkeley, he came to the defense of students protesting a ban on political activity on campus in support of the civil rights movement.
He received numerous awards and accolades over the course of his career, most of which was spent in the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Among the honors bestowed upon him were a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1983, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985, election as President of the Organization of American Historians in 1992, recognition as a Guggenheim Fellow in 1994, the 2005 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Historical Association, and the posthumous designation of the Lawrence W. Levine Award, which is given annually by the OAH to the author of the best book in American cultural history.
His books include:
• Defender of the Faith: William Jennings Bryan, the Last Decade, 1915-1925. Oxford University Press, 1965.
• Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Highbrow/Lowbrow. Harvard University Press, 1990.
• The Unpredictable Past. Oxford University Press, 1993.
• The Opening of the American Mind. Beacon Press, 1997.
• [with Cornelia R. Levine] The people and the President: America's Conversation with FDR. Beacon Press, 2002.
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