| This institution was formed in 1935 as the Rural Resettlement Administration with the purpose of documenting the situation of the agricultural sector of the great reforms of the New Deal promised by Franklin D. Roosevelt as a response to that part of the country - the agricultural mid-western and southern states - hit by the combined blight of draught and economic recession.
In 1937 the agency began to play an integral part of the Department of Agriculture under the name of the Farm Security Administration.
Rexford G.Tugwell, under secretary of Agriculture, called upon his ex-student Roy E. Stryker, a sociologist at Columbia University, to run it, charging him with the duty of organising a large photographic report that didn't only document the activities of the organisation but that also supplied exhaustive pictures of rural American life. Active until 1943, the FSA availed itself in the course of the years of the work of about 30 photographers who produced more than 270,000 negatives, now preserved in the Washington Library of Congress.
The first photographer to be hired to busy himself with the organisation of the laboratory was Arthur Rothstein, followed soon after by Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Paul Carter, all in the year 1935. They were successively joined by other talented photographers such as Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, Marion P. Wolcot (from 1938), Jack Delano, Edwin Rosskam, John Vachon (from 1940), John Collier, Gordon Parks (from 1941), Marjorie Collins, Peter Horne, Russel Lee, Todd Webb, Theodore Jung and many many others.
Despite the forceful personality of the individual authors, the pictures, now part of the fund deposited in the Library of Congress, reveal an astonishing unity despite understandable highs and lows, since each photographer was contributing towards a common task, actively participating and helping the others to meet the required objectives.
Stryker, who wasn't a photographer, succeeded continually in establishing and controlling both the general range and scope of the documentation, highlighting to the photographers the social and economic background of their mission, stimulating their imagination and arousing their curiosity but at the same time leaving free the individual camera-men to resolve their own problems where choice of subject, technique and style were concerned. To use his own words:
"Documentary is an approach, not a technic; an adfirmation, not a negation ... The documentary attitude is not a denial of the plastic elements which must remain essential criteria in any work. It merely gives these elements limitation and direction. Thus composition becomes emphasis, and line sharpness, focus, filtering, mood - all those components included in the dreamy vagueness 'quality' - are made to serve an end: to speak as eloquently as possible, of the thing to be said in the language of pictures." Rexford G. Tugwell referring to these images, more than once said "... that the photographs may be considered art is complimentary, but that is incidental to their purpose."
(© 1997 M.Berlincioni)
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