Exercise: Making Sense of Documentary Photography.
All photographs carry a message but not all photographs are truthful. The photographer may have an agenda not shared with the subject. The publisher of the photograph may have an agenda not shared with the photographer. The viewer may read into the photograph something not intended by any of them. Another layer added to the normal triangle of subject-photographer-viewer.
The Farm Security Administration set out, according to Rexford Tugwell, a friend and adviser to President Roosevelt, to “put out positive propaganda” about the Resettlement Administration that ran alongside Roosevelts’ New Deal. As part of this program Roy Emerson Stryker was employed to hire photographers to record the need for, and successes, of both the FSA and the RA.
From the outset the intention was to produce images that would support the work of the two Government agencies and ensure future funding. How could this regime produce neutral images when the scheme was designed as a propaganda venture? The photographers were already skilled in their different fields and were be well versed in the skills required to obtain a successful picture. Stryker said of himself, “Perhaps my greatest asset was my lack of photographic knowledge. I didn't subscribe to anybody's particular school of photographic thought. I had what was then a strange notion--that pictures are pictures regardless of how they are taken”. It would seem, therefor, that Stryker was happy as long as the image supported the need for ‘positive images’, and since President Roosevelt himself backed the project through his friend Tugwell all was well.
The only people who were not party to this were the subjects in the photographs; the very people most heavily effected by the failures of society. Whether this led to their being exploited is a question too big for this Exercise. Their images were certainly used by the FSA to obtain additional funding, but in turn the funding was being used to improve the lot of those being photographed.
The subjects in the photographs were certainly manipulated by the photographers to obtain stronger images, but who would have been interested in weak images that held no message?
Reference:
Introduction to Age of Lost Innocence. [Online] Available from:
[Accessed: 08th. August 2015].
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