The United States Farm Security Administration-Office Of War Information Archive: A Latent Nexus Of Truth About The New Deal Era

Since the conclusion of World War II, the ethos of the Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) and the achievements of the New Deal era have been celebrated by official rhetoric.

The United States Farm Security Administration-Office Of War Information Archive: A Latent Nexus Of Truth About The New Deal Era

Since the conclusion of World War II, the ethos of the Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) and the achievements of the New Deal era have been celebrated by official rhetoric.

Mulheres e enquadramentos de suas formas de vida nas fotografias do Farm Security Administration e do Bolsa-Família

A pesquisa analisa comparativamente dois conjuntos de imagens: fotografias jornalísticas que retratam mulheres beneficiadas pelo Bolsa-Família, publicadas entre 2003 e 2015, em jornais e revistas de ampla circulação nacional; e imagens oficiais do Farm Security Administration, retiradas de coletâneas e do site photogrammar.yale.edu. Busca-se construir uma abordagem teórico metodológica que suscite um olhar atento aos pequenos detalhes, questionando julgamentos e assertivas morais preexistentes. Para tanto, nos apoiamos sobretudo nas reflexões teóricas de Jacques Rancière e Didi-Huberman, que buscam caracterizar o trabalho das imagens como montagens intervalares capazes de tornar perceptíveis as hierarquias e assimetrias que os discursos dominantes se esforçam em apagar. Objetiva-se questionar as formas de legibilidade e inteligibilidade frequentemente associadas às imagens de sujeitos em situação de vulnerabilidade, em prol de apropriações que nos tornem sensíveis às governamentalidades que distribuem desigualmente os espaços, as falas, os tempos e as exposições e aparições da alteridade.

Photo-Narratives and the Poor White Self since the FSA

After briefly outlining the work of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers and writers during the Great Depression, the chapter turns to rephotography projects, namely that of Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, to explore the FSA’s legacy. The chapter interrogates the relationship and tension between aesthetics and activism as it examines several contemporary photo-narratives focused on Appalachia. In addition to critically discussing the work of Appalshop, it questions the representation of the poor in photo-narratives by, amongst others, Shelby Lee Adams, Tim Barnwell and Susan Lipper. The chapter focuses on questions of counter-visuality as it presents contemporary life-writing by writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Robinette Moss and Janisse Ray, as a vehicle for producing counter-visual legacies.

Distant viewing: analyzing large visual corpora

In this article we establish a methodological and theoretical framework for the study of large collections of visual materials. Our framework, distant viewing, is distinguished from other approaches by making explicit the interpretive nature of extracting semantic metadata from images. In other words, one must ‘view’ visual materials before studying them. We illustrate the need for the interpretive process of viewing by simultaneously drawing on theories of visual semiotics, photography, and computer vision. Two illustrative applications of the distant viewing framework to our own research are draw upon to explicate the potential and breadth of the approach. A study of television series shows how facial detection is used to compare the role of actors within the narrative arcs across two competing series. An analysis of the Farm Security Administration–Office of War Information corpus of documentary photography is used to establish how photographic style compared and differed amongst those photographers involved with the collection. We then aim to show how our framework engages with current methodological and theoretical conversations occurring within the digital humanities.

“The Feller Sez”

Fred Ross trained a dizzying array of community organizers. His organizing strategies proved most influential in the Mexican-American community in California. Ross led voting drives in Los Angeles before travelling north to San Jose where he recruited Cesar Chavez to join the Community Service Organization (CSO) and began to instruct Chavez in techniques of community organizing. This article focuses on the development of Ross’s organizing techniques while working with dust bowl migrants in camps for migratory farmworkers funded by the Farm Security Administration. The New Deal, for Ross, provided an opportunity for community mobilization as he combined economic and cultural populism into a critique of California’s “factory farm” agricultural system.

What a Place This South Is

This chapter examines Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano’s images of Greene County, Georgia during the New Deal. It highlights his collaboration with sociologist Arthur Raper who was conducting his own fieldwork in Greene County for the FSA. With Raper’s assistance, Delano created an extraordinary photographic record, making Greene the most photographed county in the most documented region during the New Deal. Nevertheless, Delano emphasized certain images of Greene County that link his work to the region’s broader documentary tradition. His photographs both exposed the poverty and environmental exploitation that were products of the region’s cotton economy and romanticized the county’s seemingly premodern folk and agrarian roots, which neutralized his work’s reformist agenda. This chapter also uncovers the resistance Raper and Delano faced to their documentary work in Greene County. Some whites feared Raper’s work with New Deal agencies might undermine white supremacy while the county’s rural black people occasionally expressed resentment at the intrusion of a government photographer, even one motivated by New Deal liberalism. These suspicions and acts of resistance led Raper and Delano to create a sanitized images of Greene County in Tenants of the Almighty, a documentary book that represented the culmination of their collaboration.

Removal and Displacement

This chapter examines how Japanese Americans’ involvement in natural resource industries (farming and fisheries) shaped the campaign for their removal from the Pacific Coast in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Their intimate knowledge of these lands and waters grounded arguments to both expel and keep them. This chapter also explores Farm Security Administration (FSA) efforts to keep Japanese American land in production. Fearing a decline in crop output at a time when certain foodstuffs were in high demand, FSA officials sought substitute operators to cultivate farms in Japanese Americans’ absence. These negotiations often led to significant economic losses for detainees.