America 1935–1943

The Farm Security Administration collection of photographs of America between 1935 and 1943 remains one of the classic landmarks in the history of photography. The collection was made during Roosevelt’s New Deal government when the Re-Settlement Administration was set up to assist distressed poor farmers and dispossessed sharecroppers to build camps for migrant farm workers, to initiate re-afforestation, irrigation and other land renewals programmes, and in so doing to alleviate the hardships, previously unacknowledged, of the rural poor both black and white.

Roy Stryker was the man in charge of a small band of photographers who went out and lived among these people, documenting their lives. The photographers included Walker Evans, one of the most important American artists of this century, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn and John Vachon and others. Whilst there are common threads through all their work – irony, a deeply felt humanism and a passion for life – the unique creative character of each individual is plain: Walker Evans’s powerful recognition of cultural symbol and character, the complex sensibility of Dorothea Lange, the characteristic compositional asymmetry of Ben Shahn … These photographs marked a radical departure in photography from its previous posed solemnity, graphic formality or pictorial artiness. Here the photographers by a kind of inspirational process arising from their imaginative and intellectual involvement in the programme (and the zeal and toughness of their boss, Stryker) succeeded again and again in apprehending the lives, the plight and the milieux of Americans of the late thirties.

Sourced from: Exhibition press release