Lorentz documented the effects of federal agricul-
tural policy on farming communities. The FSA’s pur-
view quickly grew to include industrial workers and
minority communities as well. When Congress cut
the FSA budget in the summer of 1942, however,
Stryker, who was intensely protective of his project,
began to arrange for his photographers to do con-
tract work for the Office of the Coordinator of In-
formation and later its successor, the OWI. As
preparation for war began, the FSA photographers
recorded the effects of these preparations on the same
communities it had already been photographing. One
important new assignment, for instance, was the doc-
umenting of the internment of Japanese Americans,
particularly the FSA’s arrangements for the mainte-
nance of properties owned by interned farmers.
Because Stryker was never able to secure civil
service status for the FSA photographers and thus
exempt them from the military draft, some were
either drafted or voluntarily joined the military.
Russell Lee, for example, became a photographer
for the Air Transport Command, and Arthur
Rothstein joined the Signal Corps. Other photo-
graphers moved to the OWI with Stryker and
accepted new assignments that extended their ear-
lier documentary work. Charged with collecting
images of hard working, thriving, minority com-
munities, John Collier Jr. was sent to Rhode Island
to record Portuguese fisherman. On a subsequent
assignment, Collier studied FSA projects in Taos,
New Mexico, where, on the side, he photographed
the local Pueblo Indians. Dorothea Lange was sent
to San Francisco to capture the everyday lives of
Italian Americans and Hispanics during the War.
Collaborating with non-OWI-affiliated Ansel
Adams, Lange sought to expose the discrimination
against women and minorities entering the newly
expanded workforce. Another OWI photographer,
Gordon Parks, was sent to cover the African Amer-
ican pilots of the 332nd Fighter Squadron. Other
photographers who moved from the FSA to the
OWI include Marjory Collins, Jack Delano, Esther
Bubley, and John Vachon.
The documentary photography work that the
OWI initially commissioned quickly stirred ideo-
logically-charged scrutiny. Many photographers
complained of restricted freedom in the field, time-
consuming paperwork, and the misuse of their ma-
terial in government publications. Gordon Parks’s
celebration of African American fighter pilots and
several other OWI projects had alerted Congress to
the power of the OWI to influence public opinion.
On the whole, the increasing tendency of the OWI
to release only positive images of the War and
wartime America worried opponents of Franklin
Roosevelt’s administration. As a result, during the
1943 budget hearings, the House of Representa-
tives voted to dismantle the Domestic Operations
Branch of the OWI. Although the Senate returned
some financial support and limited opportunities
remained for photographers in the Overseas Opera-
tions Branch, Stryker decided to leave the OWI and
permanently preserve the file of photographs he
had worked so hard to build.
Going over the heads of his direct superiors, who
wanted the collection broken up and redistributed,
Stryker arranged with Archibald MacLeish for the
photographs to be stored at the Library of Congress
after the War. The collection was merged with the
OWI’s News Bureau and remained at the disposal
of the OWI for the rest of the War. But Stryker also
arranged for the OWI to continue employing art
historian/archivist Paul Vanderbilt, who Stryker
had hired in 1942 to undertake the daunting task
of re-organizing the file by subject. Vanderbilt pro-
tected the integrity of the file and eventually moved
with the collection to the Library of Congress.
There he continued to oversee the FSA-OWI collec-
tion as head of the Library’s Prints and Photo-
graphs Division.
After Congress enervated the OWI’s Domestic
Operations Branch, the OWI assumed a less direct
role in the production of art and entertainment. The
OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, for instance,
curtailed its active and far-reaching control over
the production of films, limiting itself to evaluating
pre-production scripts for Hollywood. U.S. intelli-
gence agencies (continued after the War by the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency) and the State Department
eventually gave up the direct production of propa-
ganda in favor of funding the display and circula-
tion of American art by private institutions. The
Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA)—
where the administration contained many ex-intelli-
gence officers including Nelson Rockefeller—
assumed the most prominent role. During the
War, MoMA had fulfilled 38 contracts for the
Library of Congress, the Office of the Coordinator
of Inter-American Affairs, and the OWI. After the
War, MoMA collaborated with the CIA to circulate
Abstract Expressionist painting as a symbol of
American creative and individual freedom. Under
the new direction of former head of the U.S. Navy’s
photographic division, Edward Steichen, MoMA’s
Department of Photography assumed a slightly
more overt political role and staged liberal, anti-
communist shows likeKorea: The Impact of War in
Photographs(1951) and the blockbusterFamily of
Man(1955). Yet the FSA-OWI photographers were
only occasionally included in MoMA shows.OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION