Although the story behind the FSA photographers has often been told, too few Americans are aware of it. Tonight it receives a slick and unsatisfying treatment in "Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI Photographers" on Channel 2.
One of Franklin D. Roosevelt's more controversial New Deal programs, the Resettlement Administration was part of the Agriculture Department. It promoted on a small scale the relocation of tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and other rural poor. To calm conservatives, the administration's name soon became the more anodyne "farm security." In a further courting of public opinion, photographers were hired and sent out to record the conditions the FSA was seeking to remedy. Later their brief was expanded to photographing all of contemporary American society. The result was a visual archive of staggering depth and emotional richness.
"There's never really been anything else like it," the historian F. Jack Hurley says in the documentary. "And I think there never will be anything else like it." He's one of several talking heads who appear. Others include Parks, who died in 2006; Shahn's widow, Bernarda; and the photographer William Christenberry, a friend of Evans's. The narrator is Julian Bond.
Hurley's surely right. There's the sheer magnitude of what the FSA photographers accomplished. You can see it for yourself at the Library of Congress website. There's also the incongruity of the fact that the man behind it wasn't a photographer or curator but a onetime Columbia University economist. In fact, Roy Stryker's indifference to aesthetic concerns drove Evans, the FSA's star, to resign. Yet it also meant he was willing to take chances on little-known or untried photographers - chances that paid off many times over. Publicity (for the FSA) was what Stryker was after, not art. The miracle is that he got both.
