In 1935 the United States government turned to photographers for help in fighting the Depression.  Among the many agencies which FDR brought into being by executive order was the Resettlement Administration, charged with the problem of bringing financial aid to the thousands of rural workers driven from their farms by the Dust Bowl of the central states or by competition with mechanized agricultural practices.

The Resettlement Agency was headed by Rexford G. Tugwell, Undersecretary of Agriculture and former professor of economics at Columbia University.  Tugwell appointed his former student and colleague Roy E. Stryker as Chief of the Historical Section.  Stryker was to direct a vast photographic project, documenting not only the agency's activities, but American rural life.  In 1937 the agency became part of the Department of Agriculture, under the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

The Farm Security Administration, organized in 1937, was inspired by a sense of idealism as well as urgency.  In his special message to Congress urging it to establish the agency, Roosevelt warned, "The American dream of the family- size farm, owned by the family that operates it, has become more and more remote.  The agricultural ladder, on which an energetic young man might ascend from hired man to tenant to independent owner, is no longer serving its purpose."

For many Americans one of the most disturbing aspects of the farm crisis, which started in the 1920s and continued into the 1930s, was that all over the country poor farmers, drought victims, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers, in addition to living in terrible poverty, were losing their independence.  Many were also second-class citizens, because they could not vote--either because they were African- American or because they could not afford the poll tax.
By late 1930s, becoming clear that mechanization of agriculture meant that it would be impossible to keep many poor farmers on the land.  Government policies were actually displacing sharecroppers:  FSA gave loans and payments to landlords who used the money to mechanize their farms and replace the tenants with tractors.

By 1939, FSA photographers were still interested in providing a visual account of the farm problem--but they had added another aim:  that of making a photographic record of rural America--to show how America's farmers live.  (less negative images)
Also, they had begun working on important social issues not directly related to rural poverty:  substandard schools, industries and their effect on social and natural environment, ghetto housing in cities like Chicago.

With the beginning of WWII, interests representing large commercial farmers began to attack New Deal agencies like the FSA as "non-essential" to rearmament or the "war effort."   By the fall of 1940, Stryker was asking for a very different kind of picture of American life.  He wanted propaganda pictures, images showing that America was strong, healthy, and prosperous--and implying that all this strength could be transformed into military might. Neither the photographers nor Stryker seemed to be happy providing propaganda pictures.  Stryker won a final bureaucratic struggle to save the FSA prints and negatives by placing them under the control of the Library of Congress. Then he resigned from the government in September 1943 and began working for Standard Oil.

Among the photographers who worked for Stryker:  Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee.  (For pictures by the FSA photographers themselves, see PORTRAIT SAMPLER OF FSA PHOTOGRAPHERS.)

The scope of the documentation and its general aim were controlled and guided by Stryker, who briefed the photographers on the sociological and economic backgrounds of their assignments, and gave them encouragement and support while in the field. When Stryker began to recruit his photographers in 1935 he believed "it might be appropriate to gather together a collection of photographs of all aspects of American rural life, with an emphasis on what had gone wrong: deforestation, soil erosion, migrant fruit pickers, and hungry children."
Artist Ben Shahn helped Stryker understand that it was not enough to photograph factual "conditions" clearly and carefully:  the photographer also had to try to show the effects they had upon human beings.  Looking at a picture of eroded soil, Shahn explained, "You're not going to move anybody with this picture of eroded soil--but the effect that this eroded soil has on a kid who looks starved, this is going to move people."

FSA photographers' mandate:  illustrate the farm crisis.

Not a photographer himself, Stryker left all questions of equipment, technique, and style of visualization to the individual photographers.  Yet, Stryker provided suggestions, outlines of what kinds of pictures he wanted.  He also exerted considerable control over the agency's picture file-- which would come to total 80,000 negatives.  Photographers were to submit their negatives to Stryker (not their property).  Stryker took possession of the work of his photographers by process of selection and by insistence on detailed explanatory captions. (1) Lots of pictures were not placed in the file.  FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein: Stryker was not opposed to killing bad negatives with a hole punch. (2) Stryker reserved the right to edit the file.  Stryker insisted that before a print could be placed in the file, it had to bear a detailed caption.  Images could not stand alone. [Earlier, while at  Columbia, Rex Tugwell, who became head of the New Deal agency which hired Stryker, wrote a textbook on American economics.  Got Stryker to find illustrations for it.  Among other photographs Stryker selected were some of Lewis Hine's Men at Work pictures.  Changed Hine's original intent with his captions:  eg. Hine's famous image of an electrician "feeling the pulse" of a large turbine was intended by Hine as a statement about man's interaction with machines. Stryker used the picture to illustrate the confrontation between management and unions.]
Stryker gave his photographers a shooting script.  Suggested what sorts of things they were to cover for each assignment.

Nevertheless, the FSA photographers were probably more influenced by each other than by Stryker himself.  Lange, Evans, and Shahn (and others) had individual styles but also functioned as a group and interacted with one another.  When they were in Washington, they saw each others' prints and learned techniques and approaches.  Within a relatively short time, the FSA photographers created a documentary tradition of their own.

Characteristics of FSA photography

(1) Social equality: FSA photographers almost invariably photographed their subjects in a dignified and respectful way. For decades prosperous Americans believed that the economic system dispensed a kind of justice as well as goods and services.  Hence, it was easy for them to blame the poor for being poor. In FSA photographs, camera angles, distances relatively normal.  The way that the people look at the camera implies a casual social equality.  They avoided photographing people who looked noticeably strange or grotesque.

(2) Personal worth.  The poor were portrayed not as victims but as people actively trying to  improve their lives.  FSA photographers sometimes selected situations that would show rural Americans trying to improve their own, or their children's lives.  (rural schools-- contradict the negative, middle-class stereotypes that rural African-americans, whites, Hispanics are poor because they are "ignorant."  It is America in general, and Southern states in particular, that have failed to provide black people with schools.)

(3) Social criticism:  FSA photographs have a "bitter edge." Expressed grim realities of Depression through every detail. One photographer shot a picture of a 1940 shantytown on the edge of a city dump in Dubuque, Iowa--and picked a tar paper shack whose owner had decorated it with a sign advertising a housing development:  NEW AMERICAN HOMES OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Ben Shahn went to Morgantown WV during a strike and photographed a deputy guarding not a factory nor a mine but a grocery store.
Many of these FSA images not specifically related to the Depression.  As they traveled around the country taking pictures showing "what had gone wrong" with rural America, the FSA photographers noticed and photographed other things that were still going wrong:  ugliness, blighted environments, fraud, inequality, and repression.  They were becoming social critics, and using their photographs to express their viewpoints.

(4) Celebration of traditional, non-commercial American life. FSA photographs were not all criticisms of American life.  FSA photographers celebrated American ways of living that were different from the bland, homogenized American Way celebrated on billboards.  FSA photographers clearly had an appreciation of a vernacular, indigenous American culture, outside the mainstream of urban and industrial life. The "positive" pictures in Stryker's file include images of regional cultures or individual, almost eccentric behavior. They celebrate work, not consumption.  They often emphasized the preindustrial, or "pioneer" qualities of life that still existed in many parts of the United States in the late 1930s. FSA photographers seem to have been particularly drawn to people who still produced homemade, handmade things.
Provided a contrast to the American middle-class culture of the 1930s:  characterized by the ownership of automobiles and radios, subscriptions to Reader's Digest, Time, and the Saturday Evening Post, and enthusiasm for Amos n Andy and baseball.  This "American Way" dominated the mass media and advertising.  But this consumerist life-style was only one life style led by Americans in the 1930s, as FSA photographs show.