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Home for Working & Destitute lads.

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SYMBOLS·OF IDEAL·LIF-,
DOeUMIENIT,ARY PHDT'013RAP'HY liN AMIERIICA 11 B 9 '0 1 H ,51 0
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I I

Mare n Sta nge on Lewis Hine: Hine hrnllseU d,ecpmy av..~are of photographs as r,epn~5entations" proposed 'that a photo.gl~al·hHls, ollen more ef-, fecfrv'f: t", " Ul._'_~, "~-I;1JaV"' _, -n~ --'ecause "'j,n t.ue' Jciture, the nonessen tia~, nd !Connict~l1-!!ter'ests hi\re been elil!!inated~'~C1 Nevert~Ies.s , as, a l Hint! was also aw,are, th~ add,ed re,ajs.m LJat ,en_ ,ane the medium, derives fmwt ':cephPtQgraphfs sta.tu~as,~ln-')ex-- 'l~at is...,as ,3 symbol fulfiHing Us re"reSen'lfildvefunction t4'by vir'Lue' of a ,character which H could not hav jf Its obJect didn,iQ't e~Xi$tl' to. quote a standard semiotic definition." Art historian Rosalind Krauss, elaborating on the definition, described the photograph as. an index or' trace" "a signifying mark that bears a" connection to the thing it represents bv having been caused, physically, by itsreferent."
I' U
-

Photography Krauss writes,

I

M'AKI

The Farm Security Administration Document

Franklin D. Roosevelt initiates the R.A. (Resettlem ent Ad min istration) and puts Rexford Tugwell in charge. R.A. nam e chan ged to F.S.A. in 1937 and Tugwell hires Roy Stryker to oversee photo docu mentation to prom ote F.D.R.ls farm policies of ru ral relief and land ad ministration as carried out by the F.S.A.

F.S.A. Photographers
Stryker oversees many socially-concerned photog raphers: Walker Evans, Arth ur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano, Joh n Vacho n, Marion Post Wolcott, John Collier. In 1938 Edwi n Rosskam hired to solely desig n exh ibits and su pervise the use of FSA photos in books and magazines. By 1940 over 1400 images per month.

The photographers did not own the pictures they made; these went into a,central file over which Stryker had complete authority, He had, the option to snip '~p- or even destro -y im"'a~ he deem ed Politic -'W'_,' inappro ~ priate ress ses ... ,llly·' _-: ,.... ~_... and of 270.,000 negatives made for 'dle file, Stryker punched holies in about 100.000., He;was also in a position to control the captionsthat accompanied any photographs he released for publication or exhibition and thereby ensure that viewers would be directed toward desired interpretations of the pictures,
Ill., '~r=_"_"I .~.,_. .. , ,_", _.~ .' .... ,..
11,., '~. ,-,,' '~~ __ '_".:_ .. ,,,,,, __ '._ ." _:_IIj.,·'':';'1

as David Peeler has observ,ed" the phot()~apbers tended to concentrar®e on women an "shildren tbe innocent victimlS of 'dle dep,ression" knowing: that they

as

would :mOlg:treadily ,arouse ~b.e sy~pathmes of the m:iddle class,

Arthur Rothstein beclouded landscape: Inthe

wrote about his widely reproduced

photograph

The Dust Storm (1936), ofa fanner and his sons trudging through a dust-

beginning: it was a record, after which it became a news

picture, then it became a feature photograph,. eventually an historicalphotograph, and now it's considered a work of art in most museums. It has a life of its own.

,{jOMt>

\_

\.

st by the fire-esc al?e rungs overwrite the langl!,~ge of . ~. dat _. d t h e SlU._ aOolen,,' ~)prOClaIms th wor_ atte h center_ (J tohail: s~,n;c (( 01 osea, ol,e declares _the gd4 cast across t -esign QY-t~e sladQWs- Tro,ID.Jhe -slat~2f the The
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i

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fire escap~e.If the ((colored )),..balcony is open temporally, these diagon.!1 bars sugest, it is enc:mosed spatiaUy~ itsrestriotive railings amplified in number and s l~lbo[~cei~ht i:o___!- e _-ars ~ viewing cage; -~ndlfHie~l_a Icony IS open 'weekends, it is closed during tie w,ee 1- t e--ecephvee iI)Ses_afte-r Sunday ~

ora

---

-.

_.

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--

not.wi.thstandin",g). The...shadows pro;tWse a structure of intermit~~cy: not only the opening and closing of the~balcony but also the blinking of the ._, organs of perception, human and mechanical,
~~-

Stryker Statement
From 1935 - 1943 some 270,000 photos were shot under the auspices of RA & FSA. Of th is work Roy said:
III think the work we did can be appreciated only when the co Ilecti on is co nsi de red as a whole. The total vo Iume has a rich ness and d ist inctio n that sim ply can not be drawn from ind iv id ua I pi ctu res them selves. Most, t here' s rural Am erica in it. lt's the farms and the little towns and the highways between,"

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"When Dorothea took that picture, that

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the ulti..

mate. She never surpassed it. To me, it was the picture of Parm Security..

So many times I've asked myself what is she thinking? She has all of the suffering of mankind in her bur all of the perseverance too. . . . You can see anything you want to in her. She is ilnnlortal,n
.

__

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To see Iife; to see the world, to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon .,.. . to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls. . . Things dangerous to come ito: the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed. Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the win and the new expectancy

of half mankind.
To seerand to show, is the mission now undertaken by LIFE.

---

\Va~ei!" v.ans, " harecropper'swcrk shoes, (~r-geGudgds) E l..rt IJ:; Xow Prai$e Famous )/en (1000 edition)

'Beauty'
e

from Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939)

It is my belief that such hous~s as these a.~,ro~im_aJe-, ,r , at times:y c· .artce~ achie~ve; an extraoidinar' 'beauf~ In parf_, ~e_c~use t'!_IS~IS _oTl0an 'y neglected or eyen-~-mis:re-resenred in favor of -their sortcOnlID ..-8_- she}iers·· -a "'.::.in part-'be,cause- elI' ~esthetic success tOI-m,e even more important dian their -fnnctionai failn-r,e; arid finally o~t th . " .... .me uncontrollable ,eHort to be faithful to my personal-predilections, I have ueJe-cted_1 liOIJ in favor of esthetics, I win try after a little to rectify this' {not by -'enla- ;,but at present, a few more remarks on tbe'beauty' itself, and on the moral problems involved in evaluating it. The houses are built in the 'stinginess,' carelessness, and traditions of an unpersonal agency; they are of the order of 'company' houses, They are furnished, decorated and Used in the starved needs, traditions and naiveties of profQundly simple individuals, Thus there are conveyed here, two kinds of classicism, essentially different yet related and [181]

asseems-

of

i I.

John Szarkowski: Evansls photos give us straight, Puritan ical stare; he spurned artifice. Evans: "You do nit to uch a th ing. You manipu late it if yo u like when you fram e a pictu re, one foot 0 ne way or one foot another. But you are not sticking anyth ing ln." Recent scho larsh ip co mpari ng Ag eels descri ptions with Evansls photos shows he DID move objects around to make the sharecropper's home cleaner and more aesthetically pleasing in its sim plicity. Mrs. Floyd Burroug hs: "Oh I do hate th is house so bad! Seems like they ain't nothing in th e who Ie world I can do to make it pretty."

Hermann Zschiegner

+walker evans »sherrie ,levine

On July 24th 2:008 J dida Coogle image search. using +walkue:vdns +sherrie levin.e: as my search parameter. This book is a. collection ofal1 twenty-six images of Allie Mae Burroughs, the most famous of the Evans photos of the 8uuoughs family that I could find on that day;
They are positioned to match the original print with any whkespace around (he image representing£he cropped area of the reproduced picture.

file size, pixel asp{)C[rarlo and URL of all Images are includedas a frame of reference. I t is only in reading the file names that we can Identify if the reproduced image is a Levi ne or an Evans.

New York~ July 2008

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-

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.

Edwin Hoemle argues in 1930 in Der Arbeiter Fotograf:

If the bourgeoisie depicts proletarians and their world of suffering, it is only to

provide a contrast, a: dark background to set off the glories of bourgeois 'culture'c thurnanity', 'arts and science' and so forth, so that sensitive folk can enjoy a feeling: of sympathy and 'compassion' or else take pride in the consciousness of their own superioriry. OUf photographers must tear down this facade. We must proclaim proletarian reality in its disgusting ugliness, with the indictment of society and its demand for revenge. We will have no veils, no retouching, no aestheticism; we must present things as they are, in a hard merciless light. 22

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Worker's Illustrated News (1929)

In Britain, worker's photog raphy began with a pu bl ication, WIN, modeled 0 n Germany's AIZ.
WIN fed into the Workerls Camera Club formed

in the early 1930s; in 1934 this club merged with th e FiIm and Photo League (Lon don, 1933); the outcom e was Britai n's Wo rker's FiIm and Photo League. Next image records an excerpt from th is grou p's fi rst Manifesto.

Workers·' FHm and Photo League think; the time has. come for workers ro produce films and photos of rheir own .. Films and photos showing their own lives, their own problems, their own organized efforts to solve these problems: .....The League' will produce its own fihns giving, a true picture o,f life today, recording the industrial and living conditions of the British workers.l4

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Film and Photo Leaque con't

1936 ~1951 -~League sponsors photo documentary projects like UTh,e Harlem Document" I( 193,8-40); "This is the Photo Leaque" 1(19 48). embers M included: Sid Grossman, Aaron S~sk~nd, erome J Llebllnq, Lou Stournen, Max Yvano, Lewis Hlne, W. Eug,eneSmith, even Richard Avedon by 1948. Dec. 1947 -~ U.S. Attorney General lists it as,subversive orqanlzatlon under Communist influence. 19 51 ~~ group is disbandcd due to blacklistinq, etc. of the photographers who would continue on in the group.
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Anew surprise in 1: 949 would make such aesthetic distinctions, for a time, seem trivial. On April 26 at conspiracy trial of twelve CommunistParty leaders at Foley Square tDenniset. al. v. the United States) produced, asits starwitness, Ang'ela Calo~iris. In her testimony, she named Grossman as the person who ha(riiitl',oduced her to the Communist Party and named the Photo League as a Communist front organization. 74
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We Js_no,'vS(rand~s aesthetic and politiLal purposes. He told (he Secretariat of Ed ucadon that he '\voullidfolIo,"\' Robert FlaherTY in mak~n,g documentary stories about hurnan stru,- cille, althou~·h no\v not against natural but ratner social and economic forces, The drama would engage tl e ' fishermen farmers, and miners ~ma:klng it easy for them "to find in the films some reflection of their own lives, and above all their own problems)" '~struggles and aspirations." Like Flahert_' and consistent 'INith his photogTa~ic 'vork~ Strand would apl?,roach bis su~ H: __ -, IV"" luman bci!!&: not as a superior exam pilleof the white race who found them 'interesting, pICturesque and aQ.!te.~"7
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"Wi!r.a~;,~ ;"'1, sdlnUi of fJmi'~,. Wq,Gij'OO: "1i'fIU fllt' of If 9i'~f '~i% iIIh. ,t'lI"tr.:rQr;dinG'1'}' ,II')I'C',.o!o;rcal 'Oi:~iI'IlIil:li,I:'-NQlIGy ,NC'WI'h!:!lI. df!l9 A 'Cul;lG!tor af ~hD!tQ<~nlphy. Muk:l!!D of ModCiffi Art
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