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1. The Photograph as Artifact
A Paradigm of Resilience:
The Pros and Cons of Using
the FSA Photographic
Collection in Public History
Interpretations of the
Great Depression
Meighen Katz
Abstract: Taken by a host of talented photographers, the Farm Security Administration
photographs have become the defining visual imagery of the Great Depression. Familiar,
beautifully composed, and free from reproduction copyright, these photographs have
become an essential tool for interpreting a number of facets of the 1930s, especially that
of poverty. As useful as the images are, the nature of their creation and the embedded
messages regarding hardship mean that they are not as universal as is sometimes pre-
sumed. This article examines how the images facilitate interpretation of Great Depression
history, particularly that which pertains to the experience of poverty, and the repercus-
sions and limitations of their use.
Key words: Great Depression, exhibition, photography, poverty, resilience
The Public Historian, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 8–25 (November 2014).
ISSN: 0272-3433, electronic ISSN 1533-8576.
 2014 by The Regents of the University of California and the
National Council on Public History. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site:
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/tph.2014.36.4.8.
8

2. A curator at the National Museum of American History
(NMAH) described the New Deal-era photographs produced by the Farm
Security Administration (FSA) as ‘‘the most eloquent document of poverty
ever done.’’1
His colleague observed that these images have a power that, at
times, remains unmatched by artifacts. The artifact, he argued, however
authentic, cannot equal the image in conveying the human impact of the
crisis of the Great Depression.2
An Australian curator of that country’s expe-
rience of the Depression lamented a lack of similarly iconic Australian images
from the 1930s with which he might visually anchor an exhibition.3
That these
curators would put so much stock in photographic images of the Great
Depression is not surprising. Morris Dickstein argues that not only are the
photographs the ‘‘best-remembered art of the Depression . . . but also the way
we are likely to remember the Depression itself, the very look and feel of the
period.’’4
Indeed, it was the FSA images that first sparked my own interest in
public history interpretations of 1930s poverty. Certainly these images pro-
vide a way to interpret the Great Depression that is effective and engaging.
However, when considered critically, these photographic images present mu-
seums with something of a double-edged sword; they portray the human face
of the crisis of the Great Depression, but simultaneously, they run the risk of
perpetuating a number of myths about Depression-era poverty and the char-
acteristics and response of those who suffered. This article considers the
positive uses of the FSA photographs by curators to explore the visual lan-
guage of the 1930s and as a means to respectfully interpret the experiences of
those in low social-economic strata. It argues, however, that given that this
collection was created to serve the needs of a specific New Deal agency
mandate, the primacy of its use in modern interpretations of the Great
Depression runs the risk of privileging resilience as the expected response
to poverty.
Background to the Photographs
Warren I. Susman described the 1930s in the United States as an ‘‘era of
sound and sight.’’5
Various technological improvements in the interwar years
brought a host of new media to Americans, often national in scope. Examples
include national radio broadcasts, Hollywood movies during a boom period
for the industry, and, through improved photographic reproduction, a variety
of illustrated magazines covering everything from starlets to sociology. When
1. Author-conducted Interview, September 7, 2007, Washington, DC.
2. Author-conducted Interview, August 31, 2007, Washington, DC.
3. Author-conducted Interview, October 18, 2007, Sydney, Australia.
4. Morris Dickstein, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company: 2009), 95.
5. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the
Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), 158.
A PARADIGM OF RESILIENCE & 9

3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the Presidency in 1932, his admin-
istration incorporated media into their interaction with the American public.
Most famous were Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, but they were far from the only
method employed. Photographs gained a preeminent role and many New
Deal agencies, including the US Department of Agriculture, the Civilian
Conservation Corps, and the National Youth Administration, made use of
photographers to document and promote their activities. The Works Progress
Administration also supported a number of established photographers under
the Federal Arts Project.6
The most famous and prolific of the New Deal photographic units was
a subsection of the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administra-
tion. Though the photographs are often collectively known as the FSA col-
lection, the Historical Section (as the photographers were known) was actually
part of three agencies. The bulk of the most famous images was taken under
the auspices of the Resettlement Administration (RA) between 1935 and
Dorothea Lange, Camp of single men by the roadside. They have come in to work in the pea fields.
Nipomo, California (1935). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. FSA-OWI
Collection, LC-USF34- 003806-ZE [P&P])
6. Merry A. Foresta, ‘‘Art and Document: Photography of the Works Progress Administra-
tion’s Federal Art Project,’’ in Official Images: New Deal Photography, eds. Pete Daniel et al.,
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987).
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4. 1937. In 1937, after the departure of its agency head, Rexford Tugwell, the
RA became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). At the outbreak of
American combat participation in WWII, the Historical Section photogra-
phers were absorbed into the Office of War Information (OWI) where they
remained until the section was disbanded in 1945. The collection of images
produced throughout this period was extensive and the Historical Section’s
file in the Library of Congress includes 175,000 separate black and white
negatives, as well as roughly 1,600 color images.7
The initial home for the Historical Section, the Resettlement Administra-
tion, was established in 1935 as an antidote to rural poverty and charged with
continuing programs begun under Federal Emergency Recovery Act
(FERA). These included the resettlement of small farmers onto more arable
land and the creation of subsistence homesteads. It also conducted some
experimentation into planned suburban communities, such as the town of
Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. The RA was a controver-
sial agency; Rexford Tugwell, a member of Roosevelt’s ‘‘Brains Trust,’’ was
considered by some critics to be a radical and the perceived Marxist overtones
of a number of his plans alarmed the conservative Congress.8
Part of the
photographers’ brief, therefore, was to illustrate both the need for, and the
achievements of, the Resettlement Administration to its Congressional mas-
ters, and to the public in general.9
In order to achieve this goal Tugwell
appointed his former student, Roy Stryker, as head of the Historical Section.10
Stryker then assembled a talented group of photographers. Some of those, such
as Arthur Rothstein, he trained. Others, including Walker Evans, Dorothea
Lange, and Jack Delano, were already artists in their own right.
The public encountered the images taken by Stryker’s team in a number of
ways, both through publication and exhibition. The photographs appeared as
illustrations on official government publications, but they also appeared in the
commercial and academic press, particularly Survey Graphic, an illustrated
journal of progressive social reform.11
Life, far and away the most popular of
the pictorial magazines, usually eschewed the Historical Section in favor of
in-house photographers. However, the RA/FSA images were regularly used to
illustrate articles in Life’s rival Look, which had a circulation peak of two
7. Library of Congress, ‘‘Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-
and-White Negatives,’’ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/.
8. Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 32,112.
9. Samantha Baskind, ‘‘The ‘True’ Story: Life Magazine, Horace Bristol, and John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath,’’ Steinbeck Studies 15, no. 2 (2004): 58; Irving Bernstein, A History of the
American Worker 1933-1941: A Caring Society: The New Deal, The Worker and The Great
Depression (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985), 258.
10. Bernstein, A Caring Society, 258.
11. Raeburn does caution that FSA photographs were less well known in the 1930s than they
are in modern times and that the Historical Section received less press attention than the cultural
agencies such as the WPA-funded art photographers. John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution:
A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 144.
A PARADIGM OF RESILIENCE & 11

5. million in 1937 and an average of one and a half million.12
FSA images also
appeared in US Camera, including the prestigious 1939 annual in which the
FSA was given a special section, championed by celebrity photographer
Edward Steichen, and captioned with audience responses from the 1938 First
International Photographic Exposition at New York’s Grand Central Palace.13
As the International Photographic Exposition exemplifies, Americans in
the 1930s also saw the images through the same medium as modern audi-
ences, that of exhibition. Although the Museum of Modern Art tended to
overlook the FSA photographers, other than Walker Evans, within its New
York gallery, it did include them in touring shows, and other exhibitors
included them in significant numbers.14
Throughout 1936, RA photographs
appeared in exhibitions at fairs, expositions, citizens’ and educators’ meetings,
and at the Democratic National Convention.15
The Grand Central Palace
show in 1938 included eighty-one FSA images, and from that show, fifty were
used in a MOMA touring exhibition, Documents of America: The Rural
Scene.16
In 1941 mural-shows using FSA photography were put up in the
New York Museum of Science and Technology at Rockefeller Center, and in
Grand Central Station.17
Beyond selling the agency, the photographers also had to sell the agency’s
key clients, the rural poor. The Great Depression has, at times, been viewed
as a watershed moment in American attitudes to poverty encompassing a shift
toward a position that was more sympathetic and less judgmental. This tran-
sition is attributed to a range of factors including the broader demographic of
those in need, and to the policies regarding the distribution of relief enacted
by Roosevelt’s Federal Relief Administrator, Harry Hopkins. Along these
lines, Robert S. McElvaine suggests that Americans in the 1930s were, as
a society, more compassionate to those in need than their predecessors (and
some of their descendants).18
A public history example of the watershed con-
cept is to be found in the 1930s section of the Michigan Historical Museum.
The exhibition highlights that after the onset of the Depression, ‘‘white-collar’’
workers were to be found in the unemployment lines. The hardship faced
by these educated, skilled, and formerly successful workers could be held
in counterpoint to stereotypes of those without work as ‘‘ne’er-do-wells.’’19
12. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, 185, 191.
13. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 102-103; Alan Trachtenberg, ‘‘From Image to Story:
Reading the File,’’ in Documenting America, 1935-1943, eds. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W.
Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press in association with the Library of Congress,
1988), 46.
14. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 104-105.
15. P. Dixon, Photographers of the Farm Security Administration: An Annotated Bibliog-
raphy, 1930-1980 (New York: Garland, 1983), 247-49
16. Dixon, Photographers of the Farm Security Administration 233; Trachtenberg, ‘‘From
Image to Story,’’ 46.
17. Dixon, Photographers of the Farm Security Administration, 234.
18. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929-1941, rev. ed. (New York:
Three Rivers Press, 1993), 337-340, 342.
19. Michigan Historical Museum, ‘‘The Great Depression,’’ exhibition panel 3.6.2 ML3.
12 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

6. Meanwhile, as several historians discuss, Hopkins sought to change the
approach of professional social workers, arguing that the poor were no more
predisposed to amoral behavior than any other segment of the American
population. Hopkins instructed those disseminating government relief to cease
interrogating a recipient’s moral character before providing payment, a marked
adjustment in attitude and approach.20
That said, whether these adjustments
are indicative of a transformation or merely represent a temporary modifica-
tion is subject to debate. Memories are short and public opinion is fickle. James
T. Patterson observes that by the late 1930s, opinion polls were beginning to
resurrect the old stereotypes by distinguishing between the genuinely unem-
ployed and those ‘‘loafing’’ on relief.21
Meanwhile, on the west coast, there is
evidence that throughout this period the ‘‘Okies,’’ the ‘‘Dust Bowl’’ migrants,
were stereotyped and discriminated against specifically because of their pov-
erty.22
In considering the legacy of the Roosevelt years, Anthony Badger
argues that far from eliminating a distinction between the deserving and unde-
serving poor, the dual systems of Social Security and welfare further enshrined
it.23
Given these potentially inimical attitudes, the relief agencies sought to
personify aid recipients as commendable even as they sought assistance. Peo-
ple who were suffering from the effects of financial crisis, but met it with an
attitude of resilience, resistance, and seeming reluctance to accept hand-outs,
made sympathetic examples for the public. Those who had given up under the
weight of despair, who were no longer capable of helping themselves, might be
conceived of as weak and, therefore, were not as easily subjected to scrutiny.
In addition, in serving clients from Midwestern and Southern origins, the
RA had to counteract what Kevin Starr has called the ‘‘Tobacco Road canard,’’
referencing Erskine Caldwell’s popular 1932 novel.24
Tobacco Road drew
a caricature of the Southern rural poor as morally degenerate, cruel, stupid,
physically deformed, and living in filth. Such stereotypes were reinforced by
the collaboration between Caldwell and photographer Margaret Bourke-
White in You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). Though Caldwell and Bourke-
White’s series of portraits of Southern poverty has subsequently been
denounced as voyeuristic, exploitive, and condescending, at the time of pub-
lication it sold well.25
In order to counteract these popularly held negative
20. T.H. Watkins, The Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression (New
York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), 171-72; Anthony Badger, The New Deal: The Depression
Years 1933-1940 (London: Macmillan, 1989), 200.
21. James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty 1900-1994, third edition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 46.
22. Ibid.
23. Badger, The New Deal, 243.
24. Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 241.
25. Paula Rabinowitz, ‘‘Margaret Bourke-White’s Red Coat; or Slumming it in the Thirties,’’
in Looking For America: The Visual Production of A Nation and People, ed. Ardis Cameron
(Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 162-63; William Stott, Documentary Expression and
Thirties America rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 222-224; Finnegan,
Picturing Poverty, 55-56.
A PARADIGM OF RESILIENCE & 13

7. perceptions, the photographers of the Historical Section attempted to re-
frame the agency’s target clients as ‘‘salt of the earth’’ American stock, des-
cended from the pioneers.
Dorothea Lange was particularly skilled in this process of creating sympa-
thetic aid recipients and her previous experience as portrait photographer
informed her composition.26
Both James Curtis and Alan Trachtenberg have
argued that to fully recognize the language of Lange’s photography, images
such as Migrant Mother should be viewed as a series, of which the most
famous picture is the last.27
When the sequence of images that Lange took
of Thompson family in Nipomo, California is viewed together in chronological
order, a specifically constructed imagery is revealed. There is the Madonna-
like image of a displaced woman and her children, designed to appeal to the
moral consciousness of middle-class America.28
An older child, whose age
might suggest an early advent into sexual behavior by her mother, and piles of
dirty laundry are both framed out across the series, lest they draw censure
from the intended audience.29
In considering the evolution of these shots,
Trachtenberg compares Lange to a film director reframing the narrative as
much as the image through a process of inclusion and exclusion.30
Lange’s
aim was not to take a beautiful picture; that she did so is a reflection of her
talent not her intent. Her purpose lay in convincing her audience that those
aided by the FSA were not degenerates who had created their own misfor-
tune. Rather, they were people with whom that audience could identify, and
of whom they would approve. The photograph, therefore, is a constructed
document of communication, indicative of both the mores and idiom of
a particular cross section of America in the 1930s.
When the image is considered as part of a series, it becomes apparent that
the photographs reflect the social class of the photographer even more than
that of the subject. Yet, this should not be seen simply as calculated manip-
ulation. Lange embraced the attitudes she was trying to awaken in her audi-
ence. In discussing those she photographed Lange stated, empathetically:
Their roots were all torn out. The only background they had was a background
of utter poverty. It’s very hard to photograph a proud man against a background
like that, because it doesn’t show what he’s proud about. I had to get my camera
to register the things about those people that were more important than how
poor they were—their pride, their strength, their spirit.31
26. James C. Curtis, ‘‘Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great
Depression,’’ Winterthur Portfolio 21, no.1 (Spring 1986): 3, 5,14.
27. Curtis, ‘‘Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression’’;
Trachtenberg, ‘‘From Image to Story,’’ 68-70.
28. Curtis, ‘‘Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother and the Culture of the Great Depression,’’ 3,
9, 13.
29. Curtis, ‘‘Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother and the Culture of the Great Depression,’’ 9, 13.
30. Trachtenberg, ‘‘From Image to Story,’’ 68.
31. Dorothea Lange, as quoted in Mark Durden, Dorothea Lange 55 (London: Phaidon,
2001), 60.
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8. It was a perspective shared by many (though not all) of her contemporaries
at the Historical Section. Lawrence W. Levine has identified that as a result of
these goals, within the FSA photographs ‘‘the image of victim was never
sufficient; it had to be accompanied by the symbols of dignity, inner strength
and self-reliance.’’32
Tractenburg makes a similar observation in arguing that
that the mandate of the FSA necessitated juxtaposing any rendition of ‘‘hard-
ship [with] the hardiness and heroism, of the times.’’33
This presence of
resilience as a recurring theme in the photography creates what Kevin Starr
calls the ‘‘redemptive image.’’34
Although the purpose of the redemptive
image within the context of the RA/FSA’s larger social welfare goals is clear,
Three of the lesser-known images from the Migrant Mother series alongside the most famous
photo of the series. Dorothea Lange, Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry
children. Mother aged thirty-two. Father is native Californian. Nipomo, California (1936).
(Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-
009058C, LC-USF34- 009098, LC-USF34- 009097-C, LC-USF34- 009093-C)
32. Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural His-
tory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 283.
33. Trachtenberg, ‘‘From Image to Story,’’ 49.
34. Starr, Endangered Dreams, 252.
A PARADIGM OF RESILIENCE & 15

9. the images have outlasted their initial purpose. Therefore it is worth consid-
ering what the ongoing effects of this compositional strategy may be. As will
be discussed within subsequent sections of this article, when viewed outside
of the agency’s mandate, the narrative privileged by this approach can be
equally liberating or limiting for those making use of the images.
The Advantages of Using the Photographs in Museums
Depression-era photography has become a regular, almost expected, fea-
ture in museum interpretation of the American experience of the 1930s. For
example, when the National Museum of American History closed for major
renovation between 2006-2008, a ‘‘Treasures’’ exhibition from its collections
was staged in a gallery at the National Air and Space Museum. The case on the
1930s had three objects: Roosevelt’s radio microphone, a shell used as alter-
native currency, and print of Migrant Mother. The images have become
a synecdoche, a small part of the American experience of the Depression that
is called upon to represent the diverse narratives of the entire decade. In
some instances, this is a successful strategy, but there are implications for the
FSA Collection’s use in this manner. This section looks at two positive aspects
of the incorporation of the FSA photographs into museums: an opportunity
to explore of the visual language of the 1930s, and a means to discuss poverty.
A subsequent section will then discuss one of the major challenges.
In material culture terms, one of the beneficial and more interesting as-
pects of these photographs is the parallel interpretive role that they have
played in both modern and historical eras. Certainly they are often one of
the first points of reference on the Great Depression for twenty-first century
Americans; the iconic images from Lange, Evans, and Rothstein have a near
ubiquitous presence in high school textbooks and in documentaries on the
period.35
Simultaneously, these images are a point of synthesis between con-
temporary American populations and those in the 1930s. For in many cases, it
is through the same images, such Migrant Mother, that middle-class Amer-
icans in 1936, and in 2014, first encounter the human impact of the crisis.
The ability of the FSA Collection to maintain a consistent set of embedded
ideas across multiple eras distinguishes it from the bulk of visual culture.
Much of art changes its meaning over time: the way a modern audience
understands and thus views a sixteenth-century painting differs from that of
the audience for whom it was originally rendered. In contrast, although the
photographs of the Great Depression may expand their meaning, their initial
purpose, allowing Americans a visual means to understand the effect of the
economic crisis of the 1930s on other Americans, remains intact. Due to this
consistency of purpose, the image can also transcend the three-dimensional
object. Most objects in a museum have ceded their primary function; a car in
35. Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, 67.
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10. a museum does not transport anyone across distances. However, these photo-
graphs do; they maintain their power to illuminate the experience of Depres-
sion poverty for those who are not experiencing it directly. Because the
intellectual content remains relatively accessible, in an exhibition they there-
fore become an effective conduit for discussions on constructed visual lan-
guage, on concepts of audience, and on communication strategies of the
1930s.
The exhibition This Great Nation Will Endure at the FDR Library was
particularly effective in exploring communication strategies of the FSA photo-
graphs. The exhibition was curated by Herman Eberhardt and shown at the
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum from September 12,
2004 to July 17, 2005, before going on tour. One section of the exhibition
presented iconic images in series, just as Curtis and Trachtenberg recom-
mend, successfully illuminating the narratives that become apparent through
such a viewing. Another section considered the controversy that surrounded
a photograph of cow skull by Arthur Rothstein. In 1936, it emerged that while
in the Dakotas, Rothstein had found a bleached cow skull that he then sub-
sequently photographed in several settings, against several landscapes, both
arid and grassy. The Resettlement Agency’s critics seized upon the fact that
Rothstein had clearly moved the skull, citing his actions as evidence that the
RA was exaggerating the extent of the crisis on the Great Plains.36
Critical
examination of the controversy leads to broader discussion of the nature of
documentary photography and how it differs from photojournalism and ex-
pectations of an unmediated image. By exploring the controversy and its
surrounding discourses, the museum invites its audience into the professional
and intellectual debates that take place amongst curators and historians, but
does so while still providing essential guidance and context. In arguing for
greater shared authority between institution and audience, the museological
literature can, at times, propose strategies that leave no room for the voice of
expertise from museum professionals.37
There is much to be said for engaging
in dialogue with audience members rather than simply instructing them.
However, in trying to refrain from didacticism, exhibitions run the risk of
inviting visitors into a conversation without making available the tools that
allow participation in an informed manner.38
In contrast, through the use of
the images from the FSA collection, This Great Nation Will Endure gives
audiences both expert information and the opportunity for an open debate.
The FSA photographs, when considered as much for their production
as their content, become the tools through which curators can approach
a number of discussions on media. They provide a framework for discussing
36. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 168-69; Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties
America, 61, 269.
37. Meighen S. Katz, ‘‘History Under Construction: Curators and the Experience of Creating
Accessible Public History’’ (MA thesis, Monash University, 2005), 140-142.
38. Steven Lubar, ‘‘In the Footsteps of Perry: The Smithsonian Goes to Japan,’’ The Public
Historian 17, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 46.
A PARADIGM OF RESILIENCE & 17

11. the media of the 1930s, the growth of pictorial magazines, and the political,
some might say propagandized, employment of images at the time. Pete
Daniel and Sally Stein, curators of Official Images, an exhibition on the
photography of other New Deal agencies at NMAH, speculate as to the desire
for photographs on the part of Depression-era Americans, proposing that, in
the absence of material goods, the images mimicked solid objects. They
suggest that there was some comfort to be found in the ‘‘matter-of-fact’’
presentation of the crisis through photographs.39
Thus the images, when
contextualized in this way, are useful in creating a more complete understand-
ing of American society and its various responses to the crisis. Finally there
are the photographers themselves. The FSA photographers have never been
an anonymous group; they were well known at the time and continue to have
varying degrees of audience familiarity and fame. Many were later inter-
viewed or wrote themselves about their experiences with the agency. As such
the FSA photographs provide museums rich resources for discussions on the
nature and creation of visual communication that transcend the restrictions of
any single decade.
The most significant benefit to museums from the FSA photographs, how-
ever, is in the interpretation of one the most of difficult of exhibition topics:
poverty. The public interpretation of the lowest socio-economic strata is
a complex undertaking at the best of times. In Preston Sturges’s self-
reflexive film about the Great Depression, Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Sullivan’s
butler informs him that ‘‘the poor understand poverty, and only the most
morbid amongst the rich will find it entertaining.’’40
The butler is cautioning
his employer against a proposed film, but it is a warning that museums would
Norman Rothstein, The bleached skull of a steer on the dry sun-baked earth of the South Dakota
Badlands (1936). (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection,
LC-USF34- 004507-E [P&P]). Overgrazed land. Pennington County, South Dakota (1936).
(Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-
004376-D [P&P]).
39. Pete Daniel and Sally Stein, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Daniel, Official Images, viii.
40. Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, Paramount Pictures, 1941).
18 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

12. do well to heed. There exists a risk that the depiction of poverty within
exhibitions can become the presentation of the ‘‘other’’; a sideshow paradigm
whereby the underprivileged are positioned as distinct and foreign from their
own society. One NMAH curator drew parallels between the challenges in
exhibiting poverty and exhibiting the Holocaust. Both suffer from the threat
of becoming examples of dark tourism in which some visitors are motivated
more by ghoulish fascination with the horror and suffering than by a desire for
understanding.41
In this light, reconstructions of Hoovervilles run the risk of
becoming latter-day anthropological fascinations, echoing the encampments
of Inuit or Native Americans featured in the halls of major American mu-
seums well into the 1980s.42
Although museums can be agents of inclusion
and acceptance, the most effective methods for achieving this role remain the
subject of discussion.43
Even the best-crafted exhibition must still contend
with the preconceptions of its audience with regards to difference. The FSA
photographs offer an alternative vision to that of the fetishized ‘‘other.’’ As
Lange stated, they attempt to recognize and even foreground a sense of
human pride. They also, in many cases, depict their subjects as retaining not
just pride, but also beauty; a practice more often reserved for the portraits of
the wealthy than those enduring deprivation.
The sheer beauty of many of these images is worth some further consid-
eration. Levine wisely urges caution in mixing aesthetics and history, asserting
that the designation of what is, and is not, art can cloud the issue of what is,
and is not, useful material culture for historical interpretation.44
Nevertheless,
the discourse surrounding Lange’s Migrant Mother seems, at times, to over-
look the obvious. The photograph tends to be framed in terms of bureaucracy,
of motivations, of ethics, of iconography. Although these are all vital discus-
sions and add to levels of knowledge and understanding, in navigating the
debates that swirl around this image, it must also be acknowledged that it is
a startlingly beautiful portrait. Many discussants seem to use this as a starting
point, a given, before launching into other topics, but it is an element of the
photograph’s use to which it is worth returning. As noted by scholars of the
FSA and of 1930s photography, there are a number of reasons why this has
become the quintessential representation of the American Great Depression.
On an emotional level, there is the identification with motherhood and the
echoes of a long-standing tradition of religious iconography. As an historical
artifact, its contemporary use in multiple newspapers and periodicals during
the 1930s distinguishes Migrant Mother from many images that have only
surfaced as authors and curators have gone back into the FSA file looking for
41. Author-conducted Interview, September 8, 2007, Washington, DC.
42. Hope Pantell, ed., The Official Guide to the Smithsonian (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1981), 51, 53.
43. Richard Sandell, Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference (London: Rou-
tledge, 2007), 4-10.
44. Levine, The Unpredictable Past, 295-96.
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13. new readings and interpretations.45
From a practical standpoint, its origins as
an image produced by a federal agency mean that it is free from rights, and
may be easily and cheaply reproduced. All of these are valid arguments, but
the image is also repeatedly reproduced because Migrant Mother is beautiful.
Remarkably the photograph’s beauty has not been significantly dulled by
that reproduction. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is, in the original, striking, due in part
to the use of light, an aspect that is not well conveyed by many reproductions.
But through constant reproduction into advertisements, onto pencil cases and
coffee cups, and deconstructions that include moustaches, cat faces, bubble-
gum, victory signs, and Lego sets, the image has become somewhat banal.
Migrant Mother has been subjected to less irreverence in reproduction; per-
haps we are more reticent to reconfigure the rendition of a real person, espe-
cially a real person in distress. When Migrant Mother is reconstructed, it has
tended to be through modifying the iconography to represent a different racial
group, or a modernization, such as the addition of a Wal-Mart uniform.46
Although there is appropriation in such an act, it is arguably appropriation that
is respectful, borne of acknowledging the image’s power in channeling ideas
about poverty, oppression and resistance. Even without the good-natured van-
dalism inflicted on Mona Lisa, Dorothea Lange’s portrait of Florence Thomp-
son is nevertheless widely reproduced, and yet, it has not become impotent.
Perhaps it is the strength and anxiety that are clearly at war in Thompson’s
expression, perhaps it is the way her children shelter in her, perhaps it is the
pensive hand to the jaw which suggests thoughts unshared. But even with
reprint and reconstruction, familiarity does not breed contempt and the pho-
tograph still cries out for the viewer to stop and look. Even after multiple
viewings there is something in the intersection of Thompson’s misfortune and
Lange’s talent that defies the eye’s ability to skim, and which draws the gaze.
For a museum, such power is essential. Exhibitions toss forward hundreds
of visuals for audiences to absorb, process, and compress into meaning. Such
processes are guided by the curators, aided by text panels and labels, and by
the juxtaposition of objects or images in Sergei Eisenstein-like fashion to
create greater understanding. When all is said and done, though, the curator
is still dependent on the co-operation of the audience. If visitors simply cast
their eyes about and do not engage, meaning will not be shared, knowledge,
understanding, and empathy will not be expanded, and the exhibition will not
succeed. In my curatorial experience, history exhibitions rely on three factors:
the curious, the familiar, and the powerful. To phrase these in the vocabulary
of audience reaction: ‘‘What is that?’’; ‘‘I recognize that’’; and ‘‘Wow, look at
45. The image now known as ‘‘Migrant Mother’’ first appeared in Survey Graphic in Sep-
tember 1936, alongside an article by Lange’s husband Paul Taylor entitled ‘‘From the Ground
Up.’’ It was reprinted in Midweek Pictorial the following month, and then again in the 1936
edition of the US Camera Annual. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, 97-102, 140-42; Levine, The
Unpredictable Past, 284.
46. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs,
Public Culture and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 60-61.
20 & THE PUBLIC HISTORIAN

14. that!’’ Objects and images that encompass these elements stimulate questions,
they reassure audiences that they themselves bring useful information to the
‘‘conversation,’’ and they touch audiences’ emotional receptors. All encourage
audience members to engage with the content of the exhibition and to pick up
the threads that the curators have laid out. An object such as Lange’s Migrant
Mother is both familiar and powerful, and, consequently, draws audiences on
multiple levels of engagement. There is room, therefore, for this icon, even in
exhibitions that set out to reframe and reconsider the narrative of the 1930s.
Visually powerful, familiar yet holding the possibility of deeper discussion
on difficult topics, and free from reproduction rights; for a museum, the FSA
photographs almost seem to be to good to be true. There are, however,
a number of attendant problems with regards to the use of these photographs.
Returning to Dickstein’s assertion, these images have come to define the
entire Depression era, despite being produced in limited locations for specific
purposes. It is this tendency of the images to overwhelm other narratives that
requires greater consideration in their use, particularly in terms of what they
portray with regards to the reaction to poverty.
A Paradigm Of Resilience
In interpreting 1930’s poverty through the FSA collection, museums run
the risk of becoming enmeshed in a paradigm that emphasizes a resilience to
hardship to the exclusion of any other reaction. As has been discussed, this
model was constructed by the Roosevelt administration to justify their pro-
grams and to counter accusations of ‘‘boondoggling’’ and ‘‘shovel-leaning.’’
Arguably though, through the repeated promotion of the Depression’s victims
as resilient, the New Deal did not remove the notion of an undeserving poor;
rather it simply repositioned the point of reference. If indeed the Great
Depression challenged the myth that people were poor because they were
lazy or stupid by illustrating that those who were industrious and intelligent
could also end up with nothing, then it replaced these judgments with new
standards of character. A person might not be able to control the circum-
stances of the onset of their need, but they could still be judged by their
actions and their reactions. Those who were resilient were admirable and
could be regarded as deserving; thus the redemptive images within the FSA
preserved an ongoing visual model of the deserving poor.
As the products of the New Deal programs, such as the FSA photographs,
expanded beyond their specific purposes, they seeped into the national dis-
course and collective memory of the 1930s. Trachtenberg argues that
although identified as FSA photographs and a product of one set of contexts
and narratives, the images have become understood as universal markers
representing a much broader scope than their content or creation.47
These
47. Trachtenberg, ‘‘From Image to Story,’’ 50.
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15. universal markers can propagate the assumption that those in need will dis-
play recognizable resilience. Thus, those who fell outside of this constructed
personification, such as those who were not resilient in the face of disaster, are
little talked about, either in the rhetoric of the 1930s or in the popular
imagination that looks back at that period.
Granted, obtaining a viable counter-narrative for public history interpre-
tation is a challenge. The ongoing, and sometimes expanding, relief rolls in the
1930s, even after the advent of work projects, indicate that there were those
who continued to spin downward despite the efforts of the New Deal.48
But
the medium of exhibition is governed by the availability of material culture
and the majority of available material speaks to the narrative of resilience.
What, after all, is the material culture of vulnerability? Hoovervilles and apple
boxes are not the stuff of preservation and longevity. In researching exhibi-
tions interpreting the Depression era within American museums, one of my
standout findings was the cursory treatment of the Hoover years. In the late
1970s, there were several art exhibitions held to commemorate the fiftieth
anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash. Beyond these, there seemed to be
few exhibitions that considered the first three years of the 1930s with much
more than a fleeting glance.
This discrepancy in coverage between the Hoover and Roosevelt periods is
often less by design than necessity. The sheer volume of artifacts, physical,
written and visual, that were produced by the New Deal programs over-
whelms that of the Hoover administration. Furthermore, the brief of some
exhibitions or heritage sites limits the focus to Roosevelt’s presidency. FDR:
The Intimate Presidency curated by Art Molella (NMAH, 1982), New Deal for
the Arts curated by Bruce Bustard (National Archives and Records Adminis-
tration 1997), and This Great Nation Will Endure are all framed around New
Deal events. House museums interpreting the 1930s, such as the Greenbelt
House Museum, are also constricted by the nature of their sub-genre of
interpretation. Gaynor Kavanagh has argued that house museums face a spe-
cific challenge in interpreting history because they are generally charged with
examining a fixed point rather than a sense of transition.49
The town of
Greenbelt, MD is literally a New Deal construct. It therefore did not exist
during the Hoover presidency. Although The City, a documentary from the
1930s that shows the hardships of slum life, is part of the visitor orientation for
the museum, it remains separate from the immersive New Deal interpretation
of the Greenbelt House itself. Even those heritage sites that have attempted to
cover a spectrum of history through variations room to room—such as the
Lower East Side Tenement Museum—generally use much broader demarca-
tion points than single years. No single exhibition focused on the New Deal has
48. David M. Kennedy, The American People in the Great Depression: Freedom From Fear
Part One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Badger, The New Deal, 66.
49. Gaynor Kavanagh, History Curatorship (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), 55.
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16. been remiss in its chosen interpretive framework. However, the collective
effect is the emergence ofa significant absence within the overall interpretation
of the era. Those who succumb to vulnerability rather than resist it remain
largely invisible, unnamed and silent.
In investigating the interpretation of the Great Depression in museums,
I asked curators how well museums interpreted poverty. Most curators
acknowledged that it was extremely difficult. The interpretation was largely
discussed in general terms but two specific interpretations were repeatedly
highlighted in their answers: the FSA photographs and the interpretation of
tenement life such as Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Both of these
interpretations, however, rest on a paradigm of resilience and both are
focused on a population that was to a greater or lesser degree in motion.
Migrant populations, whether those migrating from another country or
within a single nation, represent a certain tenacity, a willingness to embrace
the novel in the hopes that it will represent an improvement. Again, there is
nothing inherently wrong with celebrating that tenacity and optimism, but
there remains a lack of interpretation of those for whom resilience and
recovery remained elusive. Perhaps it was only the presence of a vehicle that
separated the ‘‘Okies’’ from the residences of the ‘‘Hoovervilles.’’ But that
narrow strip of blacktop that led westward has become a chasm, with the
‘‘Tom Joads’’ becoming icons while the urban homeless increasingly have
disappeared from the narrative. To some extent, their residences, the shan-
tytown abodes, remain fixed in the American imagination, but I could find
little interpretation in the United States to reintroduce this group into the
public history record.
The situation is exacerbated by the rhetoric of the ‘‘greatest generation’’
lionizing the populations of 1930s and 40s as being the Americans who sur-
vived the Depression and went on to defeat Fascism. Further, many of the
exhibitions here discussed were developed at time when the Great Depres-
sion was interpreted, at least in part, as living memory. Participant-based
history making and interpretation always faces the risk of using memory that
has been adapted to become more palatable. A witness willing to provide
a narrative in which they do not respond to the crisis with patriotic resolve
is a rare find at the best of times. Coupled with a dearth of objects associated
with the extreme ends of poverty, the ability of museums to speak to the
experience of Depression-era vulnerability is severely limited. The stories that
do get told, therefore, are the ones that continue to reinforce the resilience
rhetoric, as they are the ones that are available, supplemented by material
such as the FSA collection.
There are some images of pure vulnerability—Lange’s independently pro-
duced photograph, Man Beside Wheelbarrow (1934), is a prime example.
Similarly, parts of the photographic collections from the Federal Art Project,
such as the work of Arnold Eagle, are less likely to fall into the resilience
paradigm because they did not have to promote a particular mandate. They
are not numerous enough, however, to challenge the visual primacy of the
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17. FSA photographs, nor are they all as accessible to museums.50
In addition,
some examples, such as the images from Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You
Have Seen Their Faces and, even to some extent, Walker Evans’s Now Let Us
Praise Famous Men, have come under criticism for the portrayal of their
subjects as freakish, dirty, or degenerate.51
The use of Bourke-White’s or
Evans’s images would potentially expose museums to a similar line of criti-
cism, making them less attractive than those from the FSA files, which are
seen as more respectful.
Much has been written about the fact that the New Deal did not solve the
Depression in economic terms (though it may well have prevented it from
getting worse), but it had a significant positive effect on the psychological
wellbeing of the nation. The lack of a more interrogative public history inter-
pretation of the first third of the decade serves to undermine understanding of
the full impact of what arrived along with Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. For
that impact to truly resonate, audiences must also be given access to the
vulnerability and insecurity that marked the early years of the era, the period
in which the Depression emerged and took hold across America, and the
period of greatest hopelessness.
Conclusion
The use of the FSA images provides museums with a number of advan-
tages, but also some associated problems. The images serve as a point of
connection between modern audiences and those in the 1930s. They have
been used with great success in creating intellectual transparency between
curators and visitors. Most significantly, the FSA photographs can facilitate
discussions of poverty. That said, because of the context in which the photo-
graphs were created, and the way they function as a synecdoche for the
Depression as a whole, they can also have a limiting effect on interpretations
of the American experience of the 1930s. At times they contribute to a para-
digm of resilience, a version of poverty that excludes as people many as it
includes.
The limitations of this paradigm of resilience have implications beyond the
construction of good historical exhibitions. In times of crisis, Americans are
wont to turn to their history for reassurance and guidance. In a presumably
unintentional echo of the obsession with a useable past during the 1930s, the
Depression-era was seen as a source of guidance as the most-recent US
recession lengthened. The New York Times ran articles with advice on fru-
gality from those who had lived through the Great Depression and encour-
aged readers to post videos of further advice and experience on the paper’s
50. Lange’s independent work, for example, is held in institutional collections rather than
a rights-free government archive.
51. Starr, Endangered Dreams, 254.
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18. online website.52
In light of this role assigned to the 1930s, it becomes
increasingly vital to understand the public discourse that surrounds that
decade. Nostalgia aside, however, it appears that the major American press
is reluctant to cover issues of poverty. The Nieman Foundation for Journalism
at Harvard quotes the findings of Mark Jurowitz from the Pew Research
Center that between 2007 and the first half of 2012 major news outlets
allocated less than 1% of their available coverage to stories on poverty.53
Museums and public historians play a significant role in crafting public dis-
course around difficult topics at the best of times. If, such as in the case of
poverty, other genres of production shy away from engaging in that discourse,
the definitive role of museums becomes magnified. Therefore, when includ-
ing the photographs in exhibitions, it is our professional responsibility to be
cognizant of messages that are embedded within the FSA images. By chal-
lenging rather than simply repeating, by interrogating and revealing the fac-
tors that contributed to their creation, and by seeking to indicate those who
remain beyond the frame of these images, we create a more complete and
nuanced public interpretation of the Great Depression era and those who
experienced it.
Meighen Katz is an early-career academic and curator based in Australia. She
received her PhD in 2011 and since then has taught History, Public History, and Urban
Studies at a number of Melbourne’s universities. Currently she is a researcher on a grant-
funded joint project between Museum Victoria and the University of Melbourne.
52. Joyce Walder, ‘‘Making Ends Meet in the Great Depression,’’ The New York Times, April
2, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/garden/02depression.html?ref¼greatdep
ression1930s; The New York Times, ‘‘The New Hard Times,’’ http://www.nytimes.com/pack
ages/html/national/thenewhardtimes/index.html#/trailer.
53. Dan Frookim, ‘‘It Can’t Happen Here,’’ Nieman Reports, Winter 2013, http://www.
nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102832/It-Cant-Happen-Here.aspx.
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