This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Contemporary art/southeast. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1977-1980 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 1980)
1936. a Ijbran Count). Ala.." hr Walker Evans. Tlie country was in danger. The economic system was in a state of collapse. Farmers that had built up a crop surplus to meet the demands of World War 1 found themselves in a buyer’s market after the war. Warehouses were full of unusable cotton in the South. Cotton that had sold for 37 cents per pound in 1920 sold for 12 cents in 1929 and 6.5 cents in 1932. Mountains of rotting wheat in the West dropped from $2.94 per bushel to 30 cents during the same period. Wisconsin dairy farmers hijacked milk trucks to dump milk on the ground and Iowa farmers stopped forced sale of their homes and lands with threats, guns and lynchings. Drought and high winds forced countless farmers from their West ern “Dust Bowl” homes, to seek scarce work as migrant farmers in California. 1 New government agencies sprang up overnight as newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched programs to solve the pressing problems. Among the new faces was a tiny group of photo graphers in an agency that eventually would be called the Farm Security Administration. They were not ordinary photographers but “doc umentary photographers,” a term that did not exist until they burst upon the scene. It was a time “when telling pictures of poverty-stricken farmers awakened Americans to the need for social reform.” Documen tary photography is “a depiction of the real world by a photographer whose intent is to communicate something of importance—to make a comment— There was little doubt the route he would end up taking, however. Tugwcll had written in his book: The farm is an area of vicious, ill-tempered soil with a not very good home, inadequate bams, makeshift machinery, happenstance stock, tired overworked men and women—and all the pests and bucolic plagues that nature has evolved.. .aplace where ugly, brooding monotony, that haunts by day and night, unseats the mind. Among the staff photographers was Walker Evans whose simple still lifes evoked strong emotional responses. The pictures included spoons hanging on a weatherbeaten wall and store windows and dresser lops. One day a women walked into the FSA office and asked Stryker for a copy of a photograph Evans had taken of a cemetery with row homes and steel mills in the background. When asked what she wanted it for, she said she wanted to send it to her brother, a steel executive. ‘7 want to write on it, 'Your cemeteries, your streets, your buildings, your steel mills. But our souls, God damn you,she said* Evans eventually took a leave of absence to team up with James Agee to produce Let Us Now Praise Famom Men. It was here that Evans captured the images of Hale County, Ala., sharecroppers, includ ing the Bud Fields family. that will be understood by the viewer,” according to the editors of the Time-Life book, Documentary Photography. 1 But call it by any other name, it is propaganda that the New Dealers were seeking when the photography unit was created in 1935. FDR, the master politician, recognized the power of publicity. “You can right a lot of wrongs with pitiless publicity," he said. 3 New Dealers needed “pitiless publicity.” Earlier programs had run afoul of organized agribusiness interests. So when “Brain Trust” advisor Rcxford G. Tugwell came up with an ambitious new plan to relocate farmers to richer land, he knew he would need public support. He launched the program with a publicity blitz and set up five public relations units, including a photography and historic unit. He hired Roy E. Stryker, a former student and fellow teacher at Columbia, to head the photography unit. Stryker had helped pick out illustrations for Tugwell’s book, American Economic Life. His instructions from Tugwell for the new job were sim ple: “Show the city people what it’s like to live on a farm.” 4 Stryker told his new staff to “look for the signifi cant detail, the kinds of things a scholar a hundred years from now is going to wonder about.” 3 But he found himself running to Grace Falke, Tugwell’s secretary and later the presidential advisor’s wife, saying: “Now I want you to explain to me what I am doing.” 6 Congress print.
