verse narrative. Stryker gave each photographer a
specific assignment. Carl Mydans photographed
Cincinnati slums; Theor Jung, the rural hill people
in Jackson and Ross counties; John Vachon doc-
umented Cincinnati urban and suburban street life;
Arthur Rothstein, the changing seasons; Ben
Shahn, the harvest in central Ohio; Russell Lee,
construction views of Greenhills, a planned com-
munity; and Marion Post Wolcott, farms surround-
ing Dayton. Although sent to document the rural
problems, what these images confirmed was that
people living in Ohio industrial towns—were harder
hit by the Great Depression than its rural people.
The pictures of tired and strained faces underscore
the resigned yet shared suffering.
Pete Wettach in Iowa was a hobby photogra-
pher who also just happened to work for the FSA.
From the Great Depression through World War II
and into the post-war years, Arthur Melville
‘‘Pete’’ Wettach recorded the everyday lives of
Midwestern farmers and their families, document-
ing the profession of farming during a period of
great change. Born on the east coast, Wettach was
always fascinated with rural life. In 1919, he was
drawn to Iowa as a student of agriculture at Iowa
State University in Ames. Wettach married his
college sweetheart, the daughter of a farmer, and
after a period of teaching vocational agriculture,
tried his hand at farming but failed. By mid-1935
Wettach took a position with the Resettlement Ad-
ministration soon to be renamed the Farm Securi-
ties Administration. During the 1930s and 1940s he
worked as a county supervisor for the FSA at-
tempting to help struggling farm families. He also
happened to be a self-taught photographer.
Using a Graflex 5 7camerathatproduced
large-format negatives and images with great detail
and quality, Wettach’s pictures examine subjects he
knew well: friends, neighbors, family members, and
clients. His images document farming in Iowa,
showing how diversified Midwestern farms once
were and how it was a very social and community-
oriented way of life—every member of the family
participated in the work. Initially, he photographed
the southeast corner of Iowa but eventually included
the whole state and other Midwestern states.
Wettach’s images reveal how people helped each
other—for example, after the Rural Electrification
Act was passed in 1936, the all-volunteer cooperative
enabled rural communities to have electricity. Wet-
tach showed how the shift to electric power trans-
formed farm life.
Many of his photographs underscore the comple-
mentary partnership and responsibility of women
and men for existence. He shows women participa-
tion in soapmaking, grape harvest, canning, making
clothes, and collecting rainwater as well as feeding
the workers. The subject of the harvest and activ-
ities surrounding the harvest emphasize how it was
a group effort (and how new agricultural techno-
logy changed this process).
By 1949, Wettach was established as a freelance
photographer producing stock photographs for
agricultural magazines such asWallace’s Farmer,
Farm Journal, and theCountry Gentlemanto name
a few, and general-interest publicationsLookand
U.S. News & World Reportamong others. His
works invoke the idea of community and the
importance of place and how these influence our
values and the way we see ourselves.1940s onward
Founded in Chicago in 1937 under the direction of
La ́szlo ́ Moholy-Nagy, the New Bauhaus and its
later incarnations as the School of Design in Chi-
cago (1939–1944) and ultimately as the Institute of
Design (1944–present; in 1949 it joined the Illinois
Institute of Design) offered the most important
photography program in the United States and dis-
tinguished Chicago as the place for education for
the modern artist-photographer from 1937 through
the 1960s. From its beginnings in the former man-
sion of Marshall Field on Chicago’s South Side,
Moholy promoted teaching based upon objective,
abstract seeing and technical experimentation.
A former instructor at the German Bauhaus in
Dessau where his principle responsibilities had
been to integrate disciplines in his Foundations
Program, Moholy-Nagy intended to operate the
Chicago design school in much the same pattern.
The first-year program for all students consisted of
the obligatory Foundation Course, design work-
shops investigating the properties of various mate-
rials. Photography was envisioned as one of six
specialized workshops. The students were expected
to learn to work in as many mediums as possible.
Moholy-Nagy nurtured an environment of colla-
boration rather than competition.
Initially, photography was not offered as a sepa-
rate discipline but as part of an integrated design
program. Moholy-Nagy had intended for Georgy
Kepes to teach the first photography class but as
Kepes had not arrived in Chicago when the seme-
ster opened, Moholy-Nagy hired Henry Holmes
Smith, a practicing commercial photographer to
take over. The first day, Smith had the students
make an assemblage of objects available in the stu-
dio and the instructor took a picture of their work.
The exercise was one of the preparatory steps forUNITED STATES: THE MIDWEST, PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE