America’s isolation in the grip of the Great Depres-
sion was shattered by the attack on Pearl Harbor in
December 1941 by the Japanese, and entry into
World War II drew attention away from domestic
programs, the FSA project among them. In June
1942, the FSA was subsumed into a new depart-
ment, the Office of War Information (OWI), as
part of the Office of Emergency Management and
was dissolved altogether a year later. Although
unhappy at the OWI and facing not only the loss
of his job but the loss of the FSA legacy, Stryker
worked furiously to compile, catalogue, and pro-
tect the 270,000 negatives made by the FSA photo-
graphers, placing them in the Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.
Stryker moved next to the corporate world,
taking a position in 1943 with Standard Oil of
New Jersey (SONJ) in their public relations de-
partment. Here, he directed a large-scale docu-
mentary project not unlike the FSA. He hired
some of the former FSA documentarians, as well
as such upcoming young photographers as Elliott
Erwitt and Gordon Parks. Again a significant body
of work was amassed, although at the service of the
corporate ideals of SONJ, at that time facing a great
deal of bad press, including accusations of possible
wartime collusion with the Germans. The SONJ
photographs managed to express New Deal princi-
ples of equal opportunity, economic security, and
the greater good while making the argument that it
would be the free enterprise system and SONJ in
particular that would create this utopia. Ultimately
hiring a full-time staff of 12 and building an archive
of some 70,000 photographs, Stryker left this posi-
tion in 1950.
Stryker next was appointed director of the Pitts-
burgh Photographic Library at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1950. This organiza-
tion was created by a group of civic and business
leaders to document and archive the hoped-for
rebirth of the dirty, industrial city into a modern
urban center; Stryker seemed the only man for the
job. Although he left the project in 1952, he created
a collection of over 12,000 negatives. The project
continued for several years, and Stryker was
involved in negotiating the transfer of the then
roughly 18,000 photographs to a proper repository.
In 1960, the collection was transferred to the Car-
negie Library.
In the late 1950s, Stryker consulted for various
firms and businesses interested in photography, the
most prominent being the Jones & Laughlin Steel
company. Out of this association came the book
These Are Our People(1956) celebrating the United
Steel Workers of America, another pictorial history
using images as a form of educational and the
aesthetic of ‘‘worker’’ realism as an expression of
social values. The negatives, prints, and transpar-
encies from the Standard Oil project and all of the
original negatives and transparencies from the
Jones & Laughlin Steel project are held in the
Roy E. Stryker Collections of the University of
Louisville, Kentucky, Photographic Archives. Sty-
ker conducted several seminars on photojournal-
ism at the University of Missouri, Columbia,
before retiring to Colorado in the 1960s, where he
died in 1975.
DanielleK. Schwartz
Seealso:Delano, Jack; Documentary Photography;
Erwitt, Elliott; Ethics and Photography; Evans,
Walker; Farm Security Administration; History of
Photography: Interwar Years; Industrial Photogra-
phy; Lange, Dorothea; Library of Congress; Office of
War Information; Rothstein, Arthur; Shahn, BenBiography
Born in Roy Emerson Stryker 5 November 1893 in Great
Bend, Kansas. Died in Grand Junction, Colorado, 27
September 1975. Attended Colorado School of Mines
1912–1913, 1920–1921; worked in ranching and mining
in Colorado, 1913–1919; served in U.S. army, 1918–- Married Alice Frasier, 1921. Received B.A. in Eco-
nomics from Columbia University; 1924. Appointed
Assistant in the Department of Economics; edited first
illustrated version ofAmerican Economic Life, 1924;
Instructor of Economics at Columbia University, 1929–
1935; began working for the Historical Section of the
Agricultural Adjustment Administration in Washington
D.C., and established Photographic Unit in 1935 until
1941, when it was subsumed into the Office of War Infor-
mation. Worked for Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)
1943–1950; Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation Picture
Library, 1952–1958. Edited book and a photographic
Roy Stryker, Elderly Couple Naps on Grass.
[#CORBIS]STRYKER, ROY