Social media. Follow us at cspan history. In 1939, Eastman Kodak company gave newly released kodachrome color film to photographers working for the u. S. Government. American history tv visited the library of congress to meet Beverly Brannan to learn about the collection of color images documenting agricultural life and war production during the Great Depression and world war ii. Beverly in the 1930s, the United States experienced an economic depression and an agricultural disaster. The great drought. People were not able to make a living on their farms. They begin moving other places, looking for a new lands to live on. People were in dire straits. One of the worst hit areas in the economy was agriculture. A Program Began under tugwell who was one of the advisers to president Franklin Roosevelt to document the conditions under which people reliving. Were living. This is back when we did not have television. We had radio, but a lot of places did not have electricity. So they could not listen to the radio broadcast to find out what was going on in other parts of the country. They sent off photographers to take pictures of what was happening and put these pictures into newspapers whenever they could and into magazines, trade journals, things like that. It was difficult to get newspapers to accept these photographs, because nobody really wanted to face up to what was happening. But roy stryker, an economist from columbia university, was persistent. He was the head of this project. He went to newspaper offices, contacted newspaper people, magazine people, just really pushed and pushed and pushed to get these pictures published and out to the reading public so they could see what was happening. His projects employed photographers who traveled to the worst hit areas where they were planning to have Government Intervention programs. One of the things they did was to relocate people off of land that was expired, that had been farmed until it was depleted. Another project was to move people from urban locations, from ghettos, into better housing, hoping that they would be healthier and more productive economically. So, photographers went to these various locations to do before and after pictures to show the need for these government projects and the benefits of them once they had been implemented. Most the photographers worked out of the washington, d. C. , office, working directly for roy stryker. But Dorothea Lange was in california. Her husband worked for the same agency that roy stryker did. She and her husband produced reports of what was happening in california. These written reports with photographs were sent to the washington office, made their way to roy strykers office. When he saw these pictures, he took them around to the different offices in the Resettlement Administration and people were astounded. One of the bestknown photographers for the resettlement was ben shawn, who was an already established fine art artist. When he saw them, he said if that is what you want your photographers to produce, i want to come work for you. So he got a detail to go work for roy stryker for a while, but these pictures set the tone for how the agency was going to publicize its mission and migrant mother picture is probably the most famous of the ones that Dorothea Lange produced. She was out in california documenting pea picking in march, 1936. The weather was bad, the crops had frozen. People were not able to pick the damaged goods, so they were living on what little money they had saved. They were living in outdoor camps. She drove by one of these camps and stopped and made some pictures. Got back and her car and was partway home and thought, i did not do what i was supposed to do. I did not get the picture. I did not say what needed to be said. So, she turned around, went back. The story that we got from migrant mothers grandson, migrant mother is the name that that picture thats so famous usually goes by. The story was that his grandmother was camped near the edge of the road. Her husband and older son had gone to find whatever they need to keep the car going. Apparently they had poked a hole in the radiator and needed something to patch it up to make it to the next farm, next place to pick crops. So Florence Thompson was back at the camp with the children, no cell phones. How are they going to find each other when the husband and son came walking up the road . So, she was near the edge of the road which was a very dangerous place to be. These migrant laborers were extremely unpopular in california. It was already a picking arrangement for the crops out there. They did not need these dust bowl okies who were coming in from the drought areas of the United States. The farmers did not want these new people coming in. The townspeople did not want them camped on the side of the road, camped in their towns, give not want to have to pay for their children to go to school. They were extremely unpopular. Police were hired to clear these people out, make the move on to another part of the state or the county. So, by the edge of the road, Florence Thompson was in a vulnerable situation. Thats who Dorothea Lange photographed. She saw this woman with several small children, teenage daughter and some younger children, and began working her way up to her. Apparently, Dorothea Lange was very good at engaging people in conversation and then just sort of disappearing into the atmosphere. She talked about herself as becoming invisible as she worked. She would very slowly talk to people about what was happening, what straits they were in, how they fed themselves, that kind of thing, and then they would sort of forget about her, and she would begin making pictures. That is what she did with Florence Thompson. There is a series of pictures showing the teenage girl out in front of their tent sitting on a chair. The mother on the younger children behind her. Then gradually, she gets closer and closer and makes the famous photograph. She knew the sooner she made it, that that is what she needed to accomplish and went back home. This program that roy stryker headed began as part of the Resettlement Administration, but those words Resettlement Administration did not sit well with the public. Americans have always wanted to have their own property, their own houses, their own piece of ground. And they do not want to be moved. They want to decide what to do for themselves. So, this Resettlement Administration was intended to help people who were in dire straits, but it was politically unpopular. They were accused of being socialist, communist, moving people around. Part of the american dream, so they had to change direction. They had to stop moving people around. They needed to change the name of the organization and they went from resettlement, which implies certain things, to Farm Security administration, which implies the exact opposite. That you are not going to be moved, you will stay in a secure situation. So, it took off in a new direction. There was more documentation of farms. More documentation of the american way of life, of small town america and less emphasis on changing things around. Rex tugwell was sort of a lightning rod. He was a free thinker. He came up with this Resettlement Administration program. Roosevelt couldnt live with the political fallout from it. Took him away from the program and had him go do other things. And thats when it became the Farm Security administration. So, the agenda was slightly different, and different people were put in charge. 1937 or so when they began being the Farm Security administration, they were wellestablished. Newspapers, magazines were glad to have their photographs, because they had seen the quality of the work was becoming an established, reliable picture source. The pictures were free, so they were appealing to newspapers, magazines, book publishers, that kind of thing. And as a wellestablished organization, 1939 when kodak introduced color film, they sent film to roy stryker to have his photographers try out. To do. See what they could do. Kodak was trying to establish a new market, new product, and they wanted people who would know how to use it effectively to try it out and publicize it. The photographers produced over 1600 photographs. You can see when you go online, you can see they were bracketing. They were under exposing some. Overexposing others. Not knowing just where that the light meters to get the best picture, but they got quite a lot of really, really effective pictures. Beautiful pictures. And some sort of duds. Few double exposures, but the film was being developed elsewhere. They could not see the product that they had produced. So, they were just learning how to use it. The kodachrome slides are kept in an offsite storage location that has the right temperature and humidity condition to make them last as long as possible. We use the digital images exclusively at this point. We had them at as High Resolution as technology can produce at this point. We dont bother the originals, because taking them in and out of their needed conditions will make them deteriorate more quickly, and we want these to last in perpetuity. Marion post wolcott was trained as a newspaper photographer assigned to the womens page. She was very confined in what she could make photographs of. She worked with paul strand and ralph steiner, who were art photographers in the late 1930s to she was also selftaught. But they gave her private instruction. They would comment on her work. She even photographed for their film, for frontier film, people of the cumberland. They got to know her and her work fairly well, recommended her to roy stryker who set her to work in the most difficult part of the resettlement fsa territory. The southern United States were the most agricultural, the most conservative, and the most racially troubled. Marion was the ambassador. She went into almost any situation, people like her. She could calm peoples nerves. She could make photographs that did not upset them, that would still meet the agencys agenda for documenting the need for change. So, she traveled for most of her three years for the Farm Security administration, she traveled in the south. She was one of the people who was given the color film. She was one of the first two got the color film. You could see the bracketing in her work. She made photographs of american flags, people celebrating fourth of july, these flag photographs get used heavily. She made photographs of juke joints, which are dance halls. Out in the sticks, usually. Very simple music, no amplification, just people playing as they would in their own homes. But dancing went on there. She made photographs of a lot of plantations, former plantations where there were tenant farmers working for plantation owners. And she could relate well to both of them. Some of her more interesting pictures show little kids out fishing in the bayou. People lounging around waiting for work in florida, picking crops there, having to wait until the crop is ready or if the crop is spoiled, waiting around for the next crop to come to fruition. So her picture show a way of life that sometimes is considered to have vanished, some people will say that if you go to that same location you will see that life is very much the same. When flickr started putting images online, the library was approached to see if there was any way we could use flickr to disseminate our photographs. We thought about it for a while and realized it was a way we could get better information about the pictures. That it was not just a oneway street of the library giving information out, but also a way of capturing what people knew about these places so, we had many of these pictures, we had fairly minimal captions, just the name of a town and when the pictures when online, people would write and say, that is such and such an intersection and the building behind that street sign is such and such a business. My family owned it. Or we went there for dinner every friday night. That kind of thing. We got a lot of information from people. Which we would never have had the time to go out and find for ourselves. So it has been a very good, cooperative arrangement. Marion post wolcott had a larger area to cover than the other photographers in that there were more resettlement projects, there were more Farm Security administration projects. It was a much tenser area that she had to cover. Stryker was pulling her out of one job, sending her off to the other. For the whole time she worked for him, except when she went to eastern kentucky. She broke loose, met people who introduced her to the superintendent of schools who took her up creek beds to show her where the children lived who went to schools in that area. She had entrees to people in small towns. In this town, she is photographing jackie street. They had mule trading day. It was usually the first monday of each month. People would bring in their animals that they wanted to trade, either sell them or trade them for other animals, but they had a very old tradition back to the market days in england, from medieval times. This is one of the few opportunities she took to break loose. She wanted to come back and document more, but the opportunity never arose, so its good she got to do as extensive a coverage as she did. Russell lee was an engineer before he came to the Farm Security administration. He operated the factory. He became an artist. His first wife was an artist and he decided, he thought that would be more interesting way of life than continuing to operate factories. So he went to an art colony with her. They gradually drifted apart. He stayed with his art, but he was not all that good at it. He realized he was a much better photographer than he was an artist. He began making pictures. He approached roy stryker about maybe doing a project of a trial to see how it went. And became the son roy stryker never had. Stryker himself began as an engineering student but gave it up because of poor eyesight, because he could not pay his school fees, and he went off to world war i. Came back a different person with a broader outlook, but he respected the engineering mindset. He saw that in the way russell lee went about making pictures. Russell lee did processes, he did beginning, middle and end. If he got interrupted in that sequence, he made the little detour, showed what had happened, and went back to the process. So in his pictures, you have assigned where he enters town, he makes his pictures in town. If there is a sideshow, if there is Something Interesting that was not in his agenda, he covers it, but when he leaves town, he remembers to take the picture of leaving whatever the town name is. He is very thorough and methodical. In what he does. Russell lees most famous pictures are of pie town, new mexico. He went there because he thought it was an intriguing name. When he got there, he found people who left their farms, not been able to take up other farms. They had usually lost their leases and not been able to maintain payments on their farm when banks went broke because of the Great Depression, and many of them ended up in new mexico in this little squatters community, pie town. They were usually from texas, oklahoma, the southern states. As was russell lee, himself. He felt very very comfortable with them. Collecting their stories, making pictures of their lifestyles. They lived in ways that were very similar to early pioneers in this country. They built houses using materials at hand. Many of them dug holes in the ground and had dugouts. There was very little lumber, so they used that for roofing, but the house itself was mud walls. They lived a very colorful lifestyle. They made their clothes out of seed sacks which were bright colors. They worked the land. They lived a very hand to mouth subsistence existence and it was a lot of appeal in documenting that because, at the time, most people in this country were descended from people who had arrived as farmers and taken up land gradually farther west. So it was a story people could relate to readily. Russell lee from his experience as a painter would get photographs that were just little gems. This particular house, a plain house, but the people who lived there have done what they can to make it beautiful. The textures of the sidewalk. The different brush strokes in the stucco are there to be seen. Plain woodwork, but theyve painted red in places to make it pop out. There are lace curtains at the door, plant in the window. It just is very inviting, and very appealing, and very humble. You can see edge notching at the top of the picture. It is part of the film, part of a sheet of film. And you can read Eastman Kodak across the top. Those words and that edging would not appear in the print, as it was finally made, but its there to show the whole picture is on the screen. John vachon came to the Resettlement Administration as a clerkdelivery boy. He had been in graduate school at catholic university, but got kicked out for bad behavior. He was studying to be a poet, but when he started working with the pictures in the files, putting them back in the file cabinets after people had done research, he began to see there was poetry in visual images. Took up a camera. Some of the photographers would work with him, when they came in from the field and give him a few pointers here or there. But he was largely a self taught photographer. He became quite the lyricist. He made pictures that were just beautiful to look at. He was not very steady. He didnt want to keep track of where he went, what he did. He was known to even go off and leave his rented car and take the train back to washington. So, he was quite difficult for roy stryker to live with, but everybody loved the pictures he produced. He traveled around the united state, wrote wonderful letters back home describing what he had seen, wrote very few o