“A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph per se. It’s a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode.” ⁱ

— Dorothea Lange

Documentary photography is the area of photography in which images are intended to be used as historical documents. Rather than serving solely as a work of art or a source of aesthetic interest, documentary photography is often used to effect political and social change due in large part to its ability to capture the true nature of an individual, location or situation.

The term documentary was coined in the late 1920s by the British filmmaker John Grierson and stands for the truthful depiction of reality while at the same time imbuing facts with feeling. It is “an approach that makes use of the artistic faculties to give ‘vivification to facts,’” as Walt Whitman defined the place of poetry in the world. ⁱⁱ

Through these images and their publication in mass media, the public gathers information about cultural, political and environmental situations. The history of documentary photography presents us with the most accurate records that we have of past events, and the documentary photograph has been used to record everything from cataclysmic world-scale events down to the minutiae of people’s everyday lives.

Documentary photography in America began with war reportage in the 1850s. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century documentary photography focused on industrial and urban settings, and often photographers used their craft as a tool for social reform. It is no surprise, then, that documentary photography exploded into the American consciousness during the 1930s, when photographers were recording the pervasive poverty throughout the country. In the 1930s, the photographic essay was born as the concept of a story told through a series of photographs. It is this ability to work in series that separates documentary photography from photojournalism, often coupled with a moral stance on the part of the photographer, who hopes to impart to the viewer a greater understanding of how his or her subjects live. The photo essay is often more powerful in conveying a story than is a single image. Many of the photographs in Bearing Witness were originally published or exhibited as part of photo essays.

Like many governmental agencies, the FSA set up a publicity department to help explain to the public and Congress what its programs were trying to accomplish and the problems it was trying to solve. However, the FSA went far beyond almost any other agency before (or since) in documenting its era, implementing the most ambitious photographic project of that period—and one of the most ambitious of all time.

The FSA built a remarkable collection of more than 164,000 photographs of America during the 1930s. As a voluminous number of photos began to come back from the field, the FSA worked to get them published. Newspapers across the nation ran series of photographs from the FSA along with stories that talked about the causes of dust storms and the plight of migrant farm workers. Influential magazines of the time, including Life, Look and Survey Graphic, published the photographs. Galleries and organizations, such as New York’s Photo League, mounted shows of FSA work. As a result, the American public responded positively to government programs, and city dwellers got a first-hand account of what it was like to live on the farm.

“The artist has always been considered an individualist. Yet this does not mean that he can exist in a condition of economic and social isolation. Art starves and dies under economic distress as surely as does industry or agriculture…. Like all other professional and skilled workers, the artist wants a job to do. He is highly trained to do that job, but unless he has a public which is sympathetic to his work, he cannot make his contribution to American culture…. Therefore, within the past few years, the United States government has assumed the responsibility of conserving our art heritage by establishing various art projects. The government assumed this responsibility because it believes that the artist is a very useful and necessary member of society.” ⁱⁱⁱ

— Holger Cahill
Director, Federal Art Project

“The Federal Art Project has brought the artist closer to the interests of a public which needs him, and which is now learning to understand him. And it has made the artist more responsive to the inspiration of the country, and through this the artist is bringing every aspect of American life to the currency of art.” ^iv

— Holger Cahill
Director, Federal Art Project

Launched on May 6, 1935, the Works Progress Administration became the federal government’s largest undertaking to provide employment for the jobless. Under the direction of a former social worker, Harry Hopkins, the WPA would eventually employ roughly one-third of the 10,000,000 unemployed in the U.S., paying them about $50 per month.

Whereas previous programs (the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civil Works Administration) had focused more on either providing direct relief or blue-collar employment in construction, the WPA broadly expanded the definition of “worker” to include white-collar jobs—such as office workers, librarians, social scientists, nurses and doctors, teachers and professors—as well as blue-collar jobs. The WPA also recognized “cultural workers,” including writers, actors, musicians and visual artists. When federal support of artists was questioned, Hopkins countered, “Hell! They’ve got to eat just like other people.” ^v

Within the WPA was established the Federal Project Number One (called Federal One), composed of five national divisions, including the Historical Records Survey, the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project and the Federal Art Project. The project would provide employment for nearly 40,000 artists and other cultural workers within one year of its inception.

Many WPA artists would go on to receive worldwide recognition and acclaim, including such writers as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, along with artists including Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans.

Holger Cahill oversaw the Federal Art Project. Artists working under the FAP created more than 2,500 murals in hospitals, schools and other public buildings; 108,000 easel paintings; 18,000 sculptures; and countless thousands of silk-screen prints, posters and other graphic works. The FAP also opened and maintained one hundred arts centers in 22 states, with galleries, classrooms and community workshops that served an estimated eight million people.

“It was our job to document the problems of the Depression so that we could justify the New Deal legislation that was designed to alleviate them.” ^vi

— Arthur Rothstein
FSA Photographer

“The Resettlement Administration…was the companion piece to the WPA. We operated in the rural areas. What we had in mind was largely the rehabilitation of the poor farmers, but we had a great many jobs to do which were of the relief sort, because we not only had the emergency of the Depression, but we had, while this was going on, two very serious years of drought, which created what was then called the Dust Bowl, and blew away a lot of soil in the West which had come into use unwisely during the war, and left the people really stranded, and they began to drift away.

“The drought in ’34 started all this, but the drought in ’36 completed it. This was so extensive, that the people simply couldn’t all leave. It would have taken all the people in Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, part of Nebraska and Colorado. We had millions of them, of course, on relief, on account of the drought, and this was quite aside from our problem of rehabilitation, and resettlement.

“Because this was so dramatic, and because it meant misery and tragedy for so many families, and because we hoped it would never happen again, at least, not in the same way, we thought not only that we ought to have a record of it, for future generations—that is the historical part—but also to show people who weren’t involved in it, how extremely serious it was.” ^vii

— Rexford Tugwell
Undersecretary of Agriculture

In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an Executive Order consolidating several earlier New Deal farm programs into the Resettlement Administration (RA). Under the direction of Rexford G. Tugwell, a former professor of economics at Columbia University, presidential campaign advisor and Roosevelt’s Undersecretary of Agriculture, the RA was tasked with the following functions and duties:

(a) To administer approved projects involving resettlement of destitute or low-income families from rural and urban areas, including the establishment, maintenance and operation, in such connection, of communities in rural and suburban areas.

(b) To initiate and administer a program of approved projects with respect to soil erosion, stream pollution, seacoast erosion, reforestation, forestation and flood control.

(c) To make loans as authorized under the said Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, to finance, in whole or in part, the purchase of farmlands and necessary equipment by farmers, farm tenants, croppers or farm laborers. ^viii

With the onset of the “Dust Bowl,” the RA also set out to build camps with clean living accommodations for migrant workers in the Southwest. In 1937, Congress passed the Farm Security Act to provide loans to farmers to help them transition from being tenants of government-owned lands to owning those parcels themselves. The Resettlement Administration was renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

To maintain support for the FSA during these years, documenting and making Congress and the public aware of its work and its achievements was of great importance to Tugwell.

In 1935, Tugwell appointed Roy Stryker, a former student and colleague at Columbia University, to head the Historical Section of the (then) RA’s Information Division and assigned him the job of overseeing the documenting of the land and people that the RA and the FSA were trying to help.

The FSA was tasked with documenting the impact of loans made to farmers and investments in government-planned suburban communities, as well as how the agency improved the lives of sharecroppers in the South and migratory agricultural workers in the Midwestern and Western states.

The FSA’s vast pictorial undertaking, as Stryker later recalled, endeavored to introduce “Americans to America,” with a specific audience in mind: the American middle class. These individuals lived in areas far from the locales depicted in the photographs and comprised the vast majority of the readers of the newspapers and magazines in which the FSA pictures were reproduced. ^ix

Regarding the FSA photographers, Tugwell noted, “These people who had all these skills in order to do this, were mostly unemployed themselves and they were delighted to get the opportunity to work…. It wasn’t any soft job for them, either. They had very small allowances and quite small pay, and yet they did this enormous, wonderful job—record making. I know we were all very proud of them later.” ^x

“To do this kind of job the photographer has to be more than an artist—more than an adequate mechanic. He must be something of a sociologist, something of an economist; he must be a good deal of a wrangler, equally at home with a hostess or a farmer’s wife; he must have a healthy nose for news coupled with thorough skepticism of biased information; and more than anything else, he must have a basic understanding for the meaning of his story.” ^xi

— from a Farm Security Administration Job Description

Roy Stryker would ultimately find these traits and more in the group of photographers hired for the FSA’s photography project. Collectively, these photographers captured almost a quarter-million images and printed nearly 80,000 photographs of life in Depression-era America between 1935 and 1943. It is believed to be the largest documentary photography project in history.

Though their backgrounds and experiences were diverse, Stryker recognized that, in addition to “curiosity…a desire to know…and the eye to see the significance around them,” they shared “above all else…passionate love of people, and respect for people.” ^xii

“Photography has taken a new and important place in modern life in the role of disseminating information. Evidence of this new position can be found in such magazines as “Life” and “Look”; in the improved photo sections of some of our best newspapers; in picture books for youth and for adults; in profusely illustrated reports and monographs. The photograph is no longer merely an illustration. Groups of photographs properly selected, edited, and captioned, are giving a new turn to modern journalism.” ^xiii

— Farm Security Administration

Stryker and the FSA recognized the relative “newness” of photography and the increasingly significant role it was playing in society.

“The Farm Security Administration has recognized this new trend in photography. It has accepted the camera as an essential aid in presenting the problems with which it has to work; and to convey to interested persons the progress made in dealing with these problems. In short, it has accepted the camera as a first-class reporting
mechanism.” ^xiv

— Farm Security Administration

The Historical Section of the Information Division was headquartered in Washington, D.C. The office distributed photographic equipment and film; drew up budgets, allocated travel funds and hired staff; developed, printed and numbered most negatives; reviewed developed film; edited photographers’ captions; and maintained an archive of negatives, prints and captions. Photographers did not have to worry about budgets. Although they were required to adhere to the content outlined in their assignments, they were free to shoot many rolls of film, often exploring the same subject in detail from several angles.

The main office also distributed images to newspapers, magazines and book publishers and supplied photographs to exhibitions. FSA photographers were given specific subjects and/or geographic areas to cover, and their field assignments often lasted several months. Stryker would provide the photographers with relevant reports, local newspapers and books in order to help them prepare for each assignment. He would also craft shooting scripts that outlined the ideal subject matter to be captured.

“This is a people’s war, and the people are entitled to know as much as possible about it.” ^xv

— Elmer Davis
Director of the Office of War Information

“Ideally people should wake up to find a visual message everywhere like news snow—every man, woman and child should be reached and moved by the message.” ^xvi

— Spokesperson
Office of War Information

Six months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Office of War Information (OWI) “in recognition of the right of the American people and of all other peoples opposing the Axis aggressors to be truthfully informed about the common war effort.” ^xvii

The OWI, with more than 10,000 employees, supported America’s mobilization for the war effort in films, texts, photographs, radio programs and posters. Within the OWI was established the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) to network with Hollywood filmmakers, along with the Voice of America (VOA) radio network, which broadcast to the world in 24 languages, and the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs (OIC), with 76 branches worldwide. Also created under the OWI was the Farm Security Administration’s photographic unit, whose photographers, including Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano and Marion Post Wolcott, were tasked with the new documentary mission.

Another famed photographer enlisted by the government during World War II was Edward Steichen. During World War I, Steichen had served as an aerial photographer in the U.S. Navy. At the outbreak of World War II, Steichen accepted a commission by the Navy to organize and command a team of photographers for the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, which documented aircraft carriers and naval officers in action. The naval officer responsible for the unit’s establishment believed that superior photographic work placed in the press and in other marketing material, such as posters and flyers, would help the Navy to achieve its annual recruitment goal of 30,000 pilots.

By directing the visual presentation of the war, the OWI could focus public attention on particular themes: military industrialization and the armed forces; civilian training for war; and the expanding role of women in the workforce. Home front duties often were compared to a soldier’s to ensure a connection between the war effort at home and the fighting on the front lines.

Collectively, thousands of documentary photographs captured at home and abroad were commissioned by the federal government to support understanding of and engender support for America’s war effort.

Most historians agree that, though the New Deal programs helped alleviate some of the problems during the Great Depression, they did not end the economic downturn. In 1939, one in five Americans remained out of work.

Ultimately, it was the onset of World War II that led to a reinvigorated economy—fed by the need for the United States to invest heavily in military industrialization and deploy a fighting force of twelve million Americans.