pictorial archive that documents rural and small-
town American life in the 1930s. They were widely
disseminated both at the time of their making and
throughout the twentieth century, and they are
canonical in the history of American photography
in scope, influence, and visual strength as a unified
portrait of an economically depressed America.
Stryker gathered a small but dynamic team of
skilled, socially engaged photographers, including
Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans,
Jack Delano, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott,
and Dorothea Lange. He sent them across the Uni-
ted States to photograph small-town and rural life
with understanding and intelligence, avoiding hold-
ing their subjects up to ridicule or violating their
dignity as human beings. To help achieve this,
Stryker provided detailed shooting scripts that
gave the photographers the economic, social,
and historical background of the subjects and
regions. Using newly available portable photo-
graphic equipment, including small cameras and
flash bulbs, the photographers embarked on a
mission to show the real America. They were also
expected to answer abstract questions pictorially,
such as ‘‘What keeps the town going?’’ or ‘‘What
do people across class lines do in the evenings?’’
These broad questions were not easily visualized;
rather, they represented overarching concepts that
could be illustrated by creating the notion of parallel
lives within a geographical region, showing the
humanity that the poor, though they lacked the
economic or cultural freedom, shared with those
better off. The informed position of the photogra-
phers made them at times seem more like historians
or journalists than artists. Stryker, while appreciat-
ing their artistry (for the project he had chosen for
the most part proven photographers whom he per-
sonally admired), was dedicated to using photo-
graphs intelligently. To further his aims, he
stipulated that the images—distributed for free in
government publications, the national press, travel-
ing exhibitions, and the increasingly popular picture
magazines such as Life (founded 1936) or Look
(founded 1937)—were always accompanied by
descriptive text, which further grounded the subject
of the image in social and cultural reality. The
photographs were intended to be educational rather
than sensational, bringing the desperate circum-
stances of America’s destitute to national attention
rather than to further exploit their misery by redu-
cing them to mere tabloid fodder. Although the
mission was ostensibly to ‘‘show America to Amer-
icans,’’ Styrker also hoped to create empathy for the
plight of the poor throughout the country. It was an
overt goal to show them as worthy of the benefits of
middle-class society that New Deal welfare pro-
grams would bestow upon the rural and urban
poor, including Blacks, migrant farmers, single
mothers, and others who had been written off as
alien by the mainstream mass media and unworthy
of government assistance. Some have criticized this
tactic as an inappropriate use of creative photogra-
phy for governmental propagandistic purposes, yet
the FSA photographs were instrumental in turning
public sentiment favorably toward the New Deal’s
relief programs.
Styrker drew his photographic philosophy from
the progressive tradition of turn-of-the-century
crusaders Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, who did
not identify themselves as photographers and
instead used the power of the medium to achieve
their social aims: in Riis’s case the plight of immi-
grants; and Hine’s, child labor. Yet because Stry-
ker’s photographers were independent, creative
individuals with varying aesthetic aims and pho-
tographic styles, Stryker’s methods have recently
come under scrutiny. Some theorists have gone so
far as to argue against realism in photography by
revealing the detailed construction of these ‘‘realis-
tic’’ images through shooting scripts, photogra-
pher’s experiences, and Stryker’s editing and
handling of the actual images. They have sought
to reveal the ideological underpinnings of publicity
photography, which had begun to emerge in the
1930s. Although within the body of FSA work,
individual photographs did bring their own aes-
thetic interests into their works—Walker Evan’s
penchant for photographing posters and pho-
tographs to represent people rather than pho-
tographing people directly is often cited—Stryker
was without a doubt the force that created the
vision of America seen through the FSA pho-
tographs. A good example is Dorothea Lange’s
iconic imageMigrant Mother, Nipomo, California
(1936). This image was not only selected from a
group of images that showed the children in very
different relationships to their mother; it was
cropped to focus on the intended ‘‘message’’ of
motherly compassion despite the obvious hard-
ships faced. This message was further reinforced
by suppressing personal information about the
woman, ensuring the proper reading of the image.
Stryker, known for his brash personality that
sometimes erupted into disputes with his photogra-
phers, himself did not waver from his ideals, and he
was open about the project’s commitment to the
ideological mission of the New Deal.
As the 1930s drew to a close and the national
attention turned to a looming war in Europe, the
FSA’s documentation seemed less imperative.STRYKER, ROY