New Deal Photography USA 1935 1943 — Peter Walther

Through these travels and the photographs I got to love the United States more than I could have in any other way Jack Delano Amid the ravages of the Great Depression the United States Farm Security Administration FSA was first founded in 1935 to address the country s rural poverty Its efforts focused on improving the lives of sharecroppers tenants and very poor landowning farmers with resettlement and collectivization programs as well as modernized farming methods In a parallel documentation program the FSA hired a number of photographers and writers to record the lives of the rural poor and introduce America to Americans This book records the full reach of the FSA program from 1935 to 1943 honoring its vigor and commitment across subjects states and stylistic preferences The photographs are arranged into four broad regional sections but otherwise allowed to speak for themselves to provide individual impressions as much as they cumulatively build an indelible survey of a nation The images are both color and black and white and span the complete spetrum of American rural life They show us convicts cotton workers kids and relocated workers on the road We see subjects victim to the elements of nature as much as to the vagaries of the global economic market We find the work of such perceptive sensitive photographers as Marion Post Wolcott Jack Delano Russell Lee Walker Evans Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange and read their own testimonies to the FSA project and their encounters with their subjects including Lange s worn weather beaten and iconic Migrant Mother What unites all of the pictures is a commitment to the individuality and dignity of each subject as much as to the witness they bear to this particular period of the American past The subjects are entrenched in the hardships of their historical lot as much as they are caught in universal cycles of growing playing eating aging and dying Yet they face the viewer with what is utterly their own a unique irreplaceable often unforgettable presence