The FSA project

1935 - 1938 saw the height of the Great Depression and the beginning of the resettlement administration government agency, which became known as the FSA. A small influential element of the FSA was the photographers, hired to illustrate the problems and the progress of the improvement of the living condition following this government initiative. The Great Depression became an area for artists to work in as the possibility of finding commercial work was practically non existent. Photographers who worked for the FSA:

Walker Evans

Dorothea Lange

Jack Delano

Gordon Parkes

Roy Stryker

Evans, through his work for the FSA, produced a book called 'American Photographs', a book of photographs that looked like documents, like fine art which was controversial at that time. The photo's highlighted the effects of the depression reflecting an era in American history.

Evans also produced a book called 'Sharecroppers' in with the writer James Agee in 1936, the book featuring photographs taken by Evans of the sharecroppers and their every day life and conditions where they lived and worked in Alabama, Mississippi. The farmers were hardest hit by the depression and Evan's work gave uncomfortable viewing, it wasn't intended to be social propaganda but ended up being used that way.

Annie May Burroughs - Walker Evans

Getty Museum film of Walker Evans talking about his FSA work:

Walker Evans taking about his work

Between 1937 and 1943 thousands of photographs were taken, which are now stored in the Library of Congress. The photo's are a record poverty and despair from all areas that were photographed, with wages low and living accommodation abysmal especially in the deep south where the situation had become so bad that there was no hope for the future, this desperation is capture in these images.

The FSA built clean camps for migrants to go to and re-start their lives, where close communities were created in self run democracies calling their environment the 'poor mans paradise'.

The FSA project saw the social documentary genre, with its enquiring insight, recording for posterity and mission to elicit change, begin to cross over into photojournalism or editorial photography. The paid commissioned photographer began to emerge, as apposed to the independent and individually motivated social documentarist. The emerging genre photographer may have had an altruistic motivation but needed to pay to make it happen.