posters, and in articles and exhibitions. They were
also used as evidence in governmental hearings
about child labor.
Berenice Abbott’s (1898–1991) book,Changing
New York(1939), is a landmark of artistic urban
and architectural documentation. The images she
made to illustrate scientific laws are also important.
Abbott took great pains to see that the contents of
Euge`ne Atget’s (1857–1927) studio were preserved.
Not a photographer himself, Roy Stryker (1893–
1976) was nevertheless the guiding sensibility
behind the Farm Security Administration (FSA),
which sponsored a massive documentary project
during the Depression. An economics professor,
he directed such photographers as Russell Lee
(1903–1986), Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), Ben
Shahn (1898–1969), Jack Delano (1914–1997),
Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), Walker Evans
(1903–1975), and others. He gave them assignments
and suggested shooting scenarios, research, and
travel plans. Stryker was also responsible for dis-
seminating and promoting their imagery as they
related to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal pro-
grams (of which the FSA itself was one). Stryker’s
insistence on capturing the deleterious effects of the
Depression in human terms runs throughout the
FSA body of pictures. The pioneering female doc-
umentarian, Marion Post Wolcott (1910–1990) por-
trayed rural areas in a sentimental vein in her work
for the FSA.Migrant Mother(1936), by Dorothea
Lange, an image of a worried mother surrounded
by her children, has become an icon of the Great
Depression in America. Lange’s feeling for the
speech of her subjects is seen in the captions of her
book collaboration with Paul S. Taylor,An Amer-
ican Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion(1939).
Walker Evans is regarded as the most purely
artistic of the Depression-era photographers. He
may be said to have been a romantic documentar-
ian; his works speak both to the living conditions of
his sitters and to picture making itself. His apprecia-
tion for writers and literature can be seen in his book
projects, which includeLet Us Now Praise Famous
Men(with James Agee, 1941). His solo exhibition at
the MoMA,American Photographs(1938), was a
landmark. In the same vein, the laconic, Cold
War-era photographs of Robert Frank’s (b. 1924)
The Americans(France, 1958; U.S., 1959) influenced
an entire generation of photographers. Another pio-
neering figure who had been mentored by art editor
Alexey Brodovitch, Frank made images for pictorial
magazines and documented his travels. The Gug-
genheim Fellowship he won in 1955, the first given
to a European-born photographer, enabled him to
make the images forThe Americans.
In 1952, Roy DeCarava (b. 1919) became the first
African-American artist to receive a Guggenheim
Fellowship. He contributed the pictures for a colla-
boration with the writer Langston Hughes, The
Sweet Flypaper of Life(1955), a unique book docu-
menting everyday life in Harlem. DeCarava ran a
gallery devoted to artistic photography, A Photogra-
pher’s Gallery in New York City, one of the first
artists’ cooperatives and the first to have an African-
American proprietor. In the early 1960s, DeCarava
ran the Kamoinge Workshop for young black photo-
graphers, also the first of its kind. The African-
American Gordon Parks (b. 1912) is a pioneering
documentarian best remembered for his images of
the Black experience. A late participant in the FSA,
Parks made photographs for the Standard Oil Com-
pany before becoming aLifephotographer in 1948.
His images and essays devoted to urban African
Americans are celebrated, and he has been the sub-
ject of many exhibitions.
Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) was a pioneer of the
documentary style that came to be known as ‘‘Social
Landscape.’’ Influenced by Walker Evans’sAmerican
Photographsand by Robert Frank’sThe Americans,
Winogrand’s most innovative work shows awkward
societal relationships enacted in public spaces. Slightly
later, Robert Adams (b. 1937) and Lewis Baltz (b.
1945) became exemplars of ‘‘New Topographics’’
photography. They made straightforward, ostensibly
banal images of suburban sprawl in the west and/or
images of man-made structures in an almost clinical
manner. Other photographers sometimes linked to
this style include Hilla (b. 1934) and Bernd Becher
(b. 1934), and Joe Deal (b. 1947). Bill Owens (b. 1938)
has also devoted his career to images of suburbia.
Also of significant influence to later generations
of photographers in both their choice of subject
matter (subcultures or neglected populations) and
gritty, seemingly candid style were Americans
Danny Lyon (b. 1942), Bruce Davison, and Larry
Clark. Lyon made powerful series of society’s out-
laws—bikers, prisoners, and political radicals.
Davidson (b. 1933) also produced personally in-
flected photo-essays about urban populations. His
East 100th Street(1966–1968) is a representative
example. Larry Clark (b. 1943) embodied the photo-
grapher who lived the life of his subjects. HisTulsa
(1971) frankly documented the culture of violence
and drugs of the city’s underworld. Figures that
followed in this documentary genre include Mary
Ellen Mark (b. 1940), who became intimate with
her subjects’ lives and was sponsored by not-for-
profit groups to publish her images of homeless
children and prostitutes. Nan Goldin (b. 1953)
applied the snapshot aesthetic to the colorful char-HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY PIONEERS